Surfing history shared

Surfing in 1964. Photo / NZ Herald.

Before bikinis and the Beach Boys, surfing was just for the adventurous. A museum is now tracking its wild past.

It is almost 50 years since the Beach Boys sang about surfing and California girls, and began to take a once-outlawed sport into mainstream culture.

With surfing now a global industry and a hobby for millions, an ambitious plan has been launched to document the first days of the sport.

The Surfing Heritage Foundation, based in the southern Californian town of San Clemente, is seeking to collect an oral history of the sport by talking to its oldest living practitioners. It wants to find people who remember a time when waves were still uncrowded and surfing was seen as the preserve of a few wild men and women.

It will look at the sport before it became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, when it inspired California's beach culture of girls in bikinis and the music scene that went with it.

The foundation is interviewing surfers in their 70s, 80s and 90s. It is also sending out oral history kits to surfing groups across America and the world, asking anyone interested in the sport to join the effort.

"We need to capture these stories while these guys are still here," said Barry Haun, the foundation's curator, as he stood barefoot in a museum that holds a stunning collection of surfboards, some of which are more than a century old.

"When they are gone, these stories will go with them and that would be a huge loss."

Surfing was once a very different sport from its current incarnation, which is dominated by professional athletes on tiny, super-lightweight boards taking part in a never-ending series of competitions. Older surfers remember boards made of heavy wood, weighing as much as 40kg.

They remember the strange looks from people at the beach. They remember the endless summers of chasing waves and enjoying the thrills of a sport that had not yet gone mainstream.

It could be a race against time. The foundation recently interviewed one surfer in his 90s, E. J. Oshier, a few days before he died. Oshier had spoken vividly of surfing in the 1920s and 30s.

"He described a different world," said Haun. "If he got hungry while surfing, he just dived in the ocean to catch abalone and lobster." Others have described a different landscape, recalling surfing spots that have since been lost to coastal development. One old surfer even told of using his mother's ironing board to ride waves. Another described taking an axe to the beach to carve out a board on the spot from some lumber.

Mickey Munoz, 73, has been a surfer for more than six decades. Looking as fit as someone 20 years younger and a celebrated surfing figure, he still rides the waves at every chance. He considers the oral history project as being his chance to pass on his knowledge. "A lot of the history gets lost. But the older you get, the more precious it is," he says.

Munoz remembers many of surfing's early figures in southern California, including Robert Simmons, known as the "father of the modern surfboard", who died while surfing in 1954. "I want to preserve the memories of men like Simmons. They were like gurus to me," Munoz says.

The foundation has already uncovered surprising new details of the sport's early history, when it was starting to grow in California after being introduced from Hawaii early in the 20th century.

Some of the strangest items in the foundation's collection are several ancient surfboards with prominent swastikas on them. Nazi surfers?

In fact, the huge, heavy wooden boards hark back to a time when the swastika was better known as an ancient eastern symbol. They were even marketed under the brand name of Swastika.

But while the sport may have changed beyond all recognition, Munoz says most surfers are still the same kind of people. "We are so lucky to be surfers and they don't change that much. A surfer is a surfer and a wave is still a wave."

- Observer