Sixty years of the city, the surfers and the water, from the 1918 drownings at Ocean Beach to the Black's Beach vote. All records sourced and cited.
On March 30, 1961, the San Diego City Council sent a route slip to the City Attorney. The subject line reads "Hearing, Matter of conditions of Surfing along Sun Gold Point and Windansea Beach areas." The instruction was to prepare an amendment restricting surfing to seven designated areas. For the Tuesday docket, four days out.
The City Attorney's office delivered on April 3. The document still exists, digitized by the city, and it is one of the stranger pieces of paper in San Diego's municipal file, because of what is missing from it.
The text is complete and it is blunt. No person shall ride a surfboard "in any portion of the ocean area within The City of San Diego" unless the Council has designated that stretch a SURFING AREA by resolution and installed signs saying so. Violation was a misdemeanor: up to five hundred dollars, or up to six months in the City Jail, or both. Surfing would have been illegal by default and legal by exception, across a city with seventy miles of coastline.
The ordinance number line is blank. So is the line that reads "Passed and adopted by The Council of The City of San Diego on." Below it sit twenty eight empty boxes, four each for Ross G. Tharp, William R. Hartley, Chester E. Schneider, George Kerrigan, Frank E. Curran, Justin C. Evenson and Mayor Charles C. Dail. Yeas, nays, excused, absent. Not one of them is marked.
It got as far as the chamber. There is a date stamp on the certification line for the day of introduction, and it reads APR 4 1961, the Tuesday the council had asked for. The line next to it, for the day of final passage, was never filled in.
What stopped it was about a hundred surfers in neckties and three thousand five hundred and thirteen signatures.
That is not the only time this city has gone to law over its own water. The Marine Corps fired rifle rounds over the heads of surfers at Trestles for thirty years. The city legalized nude bathing at Black's Beach in 1974 and the voters took it back in 1977. And forty three years before the ordinance, thirteen people drowned at Ocean Beach in a single afternoon, which is the only reason San Diego has lifeguards at all.
The Kumeyaay were on this coast for thousands of years before a European saw it. The National Park Service describes them as skilled fishers who sailed "far out to sea in reed canoes," and the Museum of Us documents their tule reed boats, woven from a reed called asuk.
What the record does not show is wave riding. No archaeological or ethnographic source puts a Kumeyaay person on a wave. San Diego had a thousand years of skilled watermen and no evidence that any of them surfed.
Ralph Noisat came to San Diego in 1910, enrolled at San Diego High, and told his daughter he surfed from 1910 to 1914 on a board he made himself. He enlisted in the Navy before his eighteenth birthday. He died in 1980, and in 1998 his daughter donated the board to the California Surf Museum in Oceanside, where it still is: about seven feet, koa, square tailed.
That is family recollection plus a surviving object, not a newspaper. It is also the earliest San Diego surfing claim anybody can point to, and the board is real.
It was a Sunday. Unusual tide conditions near the entrance to Mission Bay set up rip currents along Ocean Beach, with surf running eight to ten feet and thousands of soldiers and their families on the sand. The water took thirteen people. Eleven of them were service members stationed at Camp Kearny, North Island and Point Loma.
The San Diego Union's front page the next morning counted it the only way anybody could count it that day: "2 DROWN, 11 MISSING, 60 ARE SAVED AT OCEAN BEACH." Thirteen is those two plus the eleven who never came back. Below it, in a column of its own, the paper ran a subhead reading "Deeds of Heroism Recorded."
More than sixty were pulled out alive. Only three of the thirteen bodies were ever recovered.
The names of the men who went in after them are on the record. Police lifeguard Louis Chauvaud, who had given warnings nobody took, made rescues until he collapsed. Glen Freese. Frank Gilroy. Frank Merritt. And civilians who simply went in: Arthur Wilson, John Andrews, Paul Pialsted, Paul Scaletta, William Napolitano, Walter Weldenbeck, R. A. Shea, R. F. Vautone, Jesse Watts.
Henry Hanson got five swimmers to shore and did not come back from the sixth. His name is also on the list of the dead. The San Diego Union printed it three days later: Hanson "had gone back into the surf" a sixth time, "after rescuing five of his companions." He was Navy.
The same page of that paper has a father in it. Chalmer Pollitt was stationed at the wireless station on Point Loma and went into the water that Sunday afternoon. His father came down from Los Angeles, spent two days at Ocean Beach looking for him, then went home and said he would come back Thursday if the sea had not given the body up.
The entire City Council came out to Ocean Beach the next morning. The county coroner opened an inquest, and the jury blamed "unusual conditions of tide and currents."
Bodies kept coming ashore for two weeks. On May 19 the Union reported three more. And on July 17, more than two months after the fact, it reported that Corporal Paul Scaletta had been granted a certificate for heroism for saving soldiers' lives at Ocean Beach on May 5.
The City of San Diego does not hedge about the cause. Its own lifeguard history says ocean lifeguard services began in 1918, "prompted by the drowning of 13 people on a single day at Ocean Beach." Three lifeguards were appointed and attached to the Police Department. The city's history then names Calvin "Spade" Burns as the first chief lifeguard, in 1923, working out of Police Substation Number 1. The San Diego Union had already given that title to somebody else five years earlier, which is dealt with below. The service stayed under the police until 1947, when it moved to the newly formed Park and Recreation Department, where it remains.
Two weeks after the thirteen died, on May 19, 1918, the city hired George Freeth.
What is usually left out is that Ocean Beach had been shut. The bathhouses would not rent suits and the authorities would not declare the beach open, and the Union reported that the people running them were having "extreme difficulty in making the public understand" it.
Freeth is the name attached to the arrival of surfing in California. Born in Oahu in 1883, he left the islands in July 1907 and was surfing at Venice inside three weeks. In December 1908 he pulled Japanese fishermen out of a squall off the Venice pier, and Congress awarded him a gold lifesaving medal for it. He came south to coach swimming at the San Diego Rowing Club.
On June 1, 1918, twenty seven days after the drownings, the City Council declared Ocean Beach open again. The Union ran the announcement and was specific about why it was safe now. The safety zone was marked "so that bathers cannot possibly get beyond the quiet waters." There were lifeboats, an unsinkable surf boat, and a first aid motorcycle with attachments. And there was a man.
"George D. Freeth, a famous swimmer, who holds a congressional medal for saving lives has been appointed chief of life guards at Ocean Beach. Under Freeth will be a group of life guards employed by the city as well as a corps of volunteer life guards organized at the beach."
That is the whole origin of the San Diego lifeguard service in two sentences of a 1918 newspaper. The city did not add lifeguards to a beach. It closed the beach, and the lifeguards are what let it open.
The same notice says that Freeth and other aquatic stars would give diving, swimming and surfboard exhibitions that afternoon and the next. He gave another in July, unannounced, and the Union wrote that "four thousand beachgoers received a surprise and enjoyed a succession of thrills." He leapt clear of the board, turned a somersault, got his balance back and finished with a dive. He did another in August, assisted by a man the paper names only as McIntosh.
Under his watch that summer, not a single swimmer drowned.
The city's reopening lasted two days.
Most of the dead had been soldiers, so the Army had run its own investigation, and it was not a small one. A board of commissioned officers at Camp Kearny called more than three hundred and fifty people before it. On June 3 the camp's correspondent filed the result: an order forbidding any man at Camp Kearny from bathing at Ocean Beach, because the board had recommended closing what it called a dangerous beach to men in the service.
The same board recommended certificates of merit for thirteen men. Corporal Paul Scaletta, Private R. A. Shea, Private Ralph Hockbinder, Corporal Everett D. Newcomer, Corporal Edward Snow, Sergeant Jack Hansen, Private Grant H. Mann, Private Jesse Watts, Corporal Walter L. Nelson, Private Ralph H. Nattress, Private Thomas A. Rishel, Chief Yeoman R. Oeser, Yeoman Lemonte Brundiger.
Thirteen died and thirteen were written up for it.
Scaletta's came from the top. The San Francisco Call reported in July that his certificate of merit was signed by President Wilson. By the twenty third he had been promoted, and the Union recorded Sergeant Paul Scaletta being decorated at a full parade of the 159th Infantry at Camp Kearny for entering the tide rip and bringing out five men.
George Freeth caught influenza in the pandemic, entered Agnew Hospital on January 15, 1919, developed pneumonia, and died April 7 at thirty five. His ashes went home to Honolulu.
Charlie Wright was photographed surfing at Pacific Beach on New Year's Eve 1925 with a young woman on his shoulders holding a torch. The photograph is in the California Surf Museum's collection.
Emil Sigler arrived in 1928, found Wright's two piece pine board at the Mission Beach lifeguard station, a hundred and twenty five pounds with an iron tip, got permission to borrow it, and rowed it north in a ten foot dory to the beach now called Tourmaline. He said he never saw anyone else surf there for years.
Nobody rode Windansea until 1937, when Woody Brown, a glider pilot, took a homemade hollow board out there with a handful of La Jolla men.
Then the war, and then the thing that is still standing. After it, Woody Ekstrom, Fred Kenyon, Don Okey and a few others came home and built a shelter above the break at Windansea out of branches gathered from the old Scripps Hospital grounds, draped with palm fronds. They rebuilt it bigger in 1950 with poles from Camp Matthews, which is now UC San Diego, bolts instead of nails.
It is an official City of San Diego historical landmark, Number 358, at 6800 Neptune Place, designated May 27, 1998. The permanent plaque calls it the oldest continuously used shelter of its kind on the West Coast. Storms have taken it down twice, in 2003 and on Christmas Eve 2015, and locals have rebuilt it both times.
Bob Simmons moved to San Diego in 1949. He had tested into Caltech without a high school diploma, studied advanced mathematics there, and come south to finish a degree. What he actually did was rethink the surfboard from hydrodynamics up, building sandwich boards with a foam core between plywood skins and balsa rails. His own description of them: "My surfboards are hydrodynamic planing hulls." Every modern board descends from that idea.
He drowned on September 26, 1954, at thirty five. The break where it happened still carries his name.
In 1959, Larry Gordon and Floyd Smith started Gordon and Smith in Pacific Beach. Smith grew up surfing Windansea; Gordon was a chemistry student at San Diego State whose father worked in plastics, and the two had married each other's sisters. They had been building boards in a garage since the mid 1950s on two hundred dollars of pooled materials. In January 1960 they moved to 763 Turquoise Street, and the chemistry let them blow their own polyurethane foam blanks when almost nobody could. By the 1970s they were the largest surfboard manufacturer in the world, running three to four thousand boards a year.
Two miles up the road from all of this, the man who invented the neoprene wetsuit was working at Scripps. Hugh Bradner laid out the thermal insulation concept in a letter dated June 21, 1951: suits "do not need to be watertight if thermal insulation is obtained by air." He never patented it. He let the application go because, as the Scripps record puts it, he saw no large commercial application, there being "only a few hundred divers and surfers in the world at that time." He was a professor at Scripps in La Jolla from 1961 until he retired in 1980, and the industry he made possible grew up in the same county around him.
A Santa Ana hit on December 17, 1960, during Christmas vacation. Eighty degree air, water near seventy, surf. Surfers came, in the San Diego Union's word, by the thousands. They filled the designated beaches and spilled onto the ones closed to them. Lawns and flower beds got trampled. Some used street corners as dressing rooms.
Captain Carl A. Schlack, USN retired, of 341 Archer Street in La Jolla, woke up to find gasoline had been poured on his lawn and burned. He had broken windows and a wrecked garden, and he said police had been called forty five times since November. At the Pacific Beach Coordinating Council on December 27 he said, "I've had enough." He also said of the surfers, "they're playing the Communist role."
The city's aquatics superintendent, Don Vynne, put it more plainly: "The devil is breaking loose on the beaches."
On December 29 the Council looked at licensing surfboards, on the Laguna Beach model, and the Park and Recreation director, the police chief and the City Attorney all said it was unenforceable. Surfboarder insurance got floated in January. In March, Ordinance 8452 moved the surfing zone away from Law Street and put a swim zone there, pushing surfers out of a residential block and into a commercial one. Councilman Ross Tharp explained the thinking: "We wouldn't allow a trampoline center or a miniature golf course in a residential area, so why should we allow a recreational activity like surfing?"
Then came the March 30 route slip, and the blank ordinance. A deputy city attorney named Robert J. Cooney typed it, initialed it RJC, and signed it approved as to form on April 3. Remember his name.
On Saturday, April 8, about seventy five surfers put on coats and ties and marched from the Civic Center to Horton Plaza at Fourth and Broadway carrying signs that read "Save Surfing" and "Surfers Also Have Rights."
At the April 11 hearing, Ron Church, a diver and photographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, handed over petitions signed by eight hundred and seventy five people and gave the council the line that should have ended the argument: "When a drunk is driving down the street, you don't close the street to all drivers."
Church chaired a meeting of seventy five surfers from twelve clubs on April 21. On April 25 more than a hundred of them filled the chamber, and Andy Jones presented a substitute ordinance carrying three thousand five hundred and thirteen signatures. A reporter in the room wrote the sentence the whole campaign was designed to produce: "The surf board riders were neatly dressed and restrained in conduct."
The Council postponed. On Thursday, May 4, at three in the afternoon, a Surfing Committee met in the Mayor's office: eleven people including two councilmen, the mayor himself, and Robert J. Cooney, the deputy city attorney who had drafted the ban five weeks earlier. They studied a map showing which water belonged to swimmers and which to surfers. Councilman Hartley moved that the ordinance due before the Council the following Tuesday be continued two months, and that meanwhile the existing rules not be changed. It passed unanimously.
The memo recording it was presented to the City Council at 11:17 in the morning on May 9, 1961. That is the minute the ban died, and somebody wrote the time on the page by hand.
What finally passed, on August 1, 1961, was Ordinance 8502. It closed no beaches. It gave officials power to close one if the surfers using it were deemed to be contributing to a public nuisance. By September 1 the San Diego Union reported that the designated areas plan "has been withdrawn after it stirred up a storm of protest."
The surfers won, and they won it in a coat and tie.
The fight produced something nobody expected. The Council approved a plan for Tourmaline Surfing Park in February 1963, approved the canyon as a city park in February 1965, and dedicated it on May 29, 1965, during the Western Regional Surfing Championships. San Diego Union sportswriter Jack Murphy called it the first surfing park in the United States and counted ten thousand surfers in San Diego across thirty clubs.
Larry Gordon, who had been on the wrong end of the ordinance fight, remembered being suspicious of the gift: "We thought for sure they would build that surfing park for us," and then it would be the only place they were allowed. He surfs it nearly every day now. His verdict on his younger self: "I was wrong."
The Windansea Surf Club was formed to win a contest. Chuck Hasley put a team together and chartered a bus out of Pacific Beach for the Malibu Invitational in August 1963, leaving after closing time at Maynard's Bar with an R&B band playing in the back off a generator. Butch Van Artsdalen poured a pitcher of beer on a police car before departure and was arrested, so the first stop was the holding tank to post his bail. Pat Curren rode part of the way naked, held out a window. They arrived at six in the morning, several of them unconscious, and won the thing, taking the individual places and the team trophy.
Mike Hynson and Skip Frye were on that roster. So was Van Artsdalen, out of La Jolla High, who moved to the North Shore in 1966, lifeguarded at Pipeline, and became the first man anybody called Mr. Pipeline. He died in 1979 at thirty eight, and his ashes were scattered at the break.
The club had a publicist, which tells you something. In December 1965 seventy five Windansea surfers flew to Hawaii carrying keys to the City of San Diego and a letter of introduction from Governor Pat Brown. Five years after being called Communists, they were a delegation.
The rest of the fame was less official. A four hundred pound concrete statue called the Hot Curl, by Lee Teacher and Mike Dormer, went up at Windansea, was removed by the city in May 1963, came back in July, and was destroyed by vandals on July 27. The Mac Meda Destruction Company, which was Jack Macpherson and Bob Rakestraw and no actual membership, held conventions where people demolished barns in Sorrento Valley with the farmers' permission, and listed a fictitious president named Albert Mac Meda, after a San Diego Zoo gorilla, in the La Jolla phone book. Police opened an investigation into him. The San Diego Evening Tribune of June 21, 1965 ran the headline: "MAC MEDA DESTRUCTION CO. A JOKE? AUTHORITIES DON'T FIND TEEN GROUP FUNNY."
And in February 1966, Tom Wolfe published a two part piece called "The New Life Out There" about a group of La Jolla kids who hung around a pump house at the end of Nautilus Street. It became the title essay of The Pump House Gang in August 1968. The kids were not impressed. Susie Brandelius, one of them: "Tom Wolfe really was a jerk when he was with us." Somebody eventually painted "Tom Wolfe is a dork" on the pump house itself.
The Ocean Beach pier opened July 2, 1966. Governor Pat Brown cut the ribbon in front of more than seven thousand people. At 1,971 feet it was the longest concrete pier on the west coast.
Twelve weeks later the World Surfing Championships came to San Diego, September 29 to October 4, the first world championship the United States ever hosted. Fifty three men and fifteen women, moving between La Jolla Shores and Mission Beach before the finals at Ocean Beach. Surfer magazine put the Sunday crowd at roughly eighty thousand. Nat Young of Australia won the men's title and Joyce Hoffman the women's.
Young, on the water: "I respect the ocean, all right. But I want to beat it." And Kathy Lacroix, asked about the city that had tried to outlaw her sport five years earlier: "I think they have finally realized that surfers are people."
That June, a film shot three years earlier went wide. The Endless Summer cost fifty thousand dollars and made five million domestically, and one of the two surfers in it was Mike Hynson, who grew up riding Pacific Beach and La Jolla. He and Robert August each put up fourteen hundred dollars for a round the world ticket. The Smithsonian now holds the program, the poster and a ticket stub from the barnstorming days, priced at a dollar fifty.
In December 1966 a California surfboard was nine and a half to ten feet long and about twenty three inches wide. By 1970 the standard was about six feet four, eighteen inches wide, three inches thick. The sport threw away roughly forty percent of its own volume in three years.
San Diego got the news by mail. Floyd Smith, the San Diego half of Gordon and Smith, was living in Caringbah, New South Wales, running the Australian branch during the exact years the shortboard was being invented there. In May 1967 Midget Farrelly wrote to G&S describing the V bottom, and G&S put it into production for 1968.
The other thing that happened here was homegrown. In 1967 a sixteen year old named Steve Lis was kneeboarding at Ocean Beach, and his swim fins kept hanging over the rails of his board and dragging. So he traced around them. "I just put down some butcher paper, got down like I was kneeboarding, and traced it out around me." That is the fish, and it is still in production everywhere, fifty eight years later. He had already won the Paipo World Championships at fifteen, at Ocean Beach, on a board he shaped himself.
Two years earlier, a man in La Jolla had filed a patent on a surfboard that was deliberately not symmetrical, on the reasoning that a wave is not symmetrical either. United States Patent 3,337,886, Asymmetrical Surfboard, Adolph Carl Ekstrom, filed August 6, 1965, granted August 29, 1967. Andy Warhol bought boards from him in 1968. Ekstrom's brother Woody was one of the men who built the Windansea shack.
Not everybody came along. Skip Frye, born in San Diego in 1941, whose first board was a balsa shaped by Mike Diffenderfer, had his own Gordon and Smith model by 1967 and a number two national ranking. He quit competing in the early 1970s rather than ride boards that short, and went the other direction entirely, toward what he called grace and smoothness and distance. He was right about his own career and the sport eventually came back around to him.
While San Diego argued about ordinances, some of the best waves in the county were behind a fence.
Trestles and Church sat on Camp Pendleton land, and the Marine Corps kept them off limits to civilians from 1942 to 1971 because they were intended landing craft training sites. The Trestles nomination to the National Register of Historic Places records it in the plainest possible terms: surfboards "were often hidden by their owners (and sometimes confiscated by the Marines)," and "ammunition on occasion was fired over the heads of trespassing surfers." Military police chased surfers on foot and by vehicle for thirty years. Mike Doyle said he could see the bullets plinking in the water around them.
The surfers got in by lease. In 1952 the San Onofre Surfing Club formed and rented a twenty five hundred foot strip of beach from Camp Pendleton for a dollar a year, and the base let club members in the water. The 1967 base directory made it official: twenty five thousand feet of beach reserved for surfing, open to military personnel, their dependents and guests, and bona fide members of the club.
The fence came down in 1971. On March 31 President Nixon, who had bought a house in San Clemente two years earlier, announced that a third of Camp Pendleton's beachfront would be opened to the public. San Onofre State Beach was dedicated April 3 under a fifty year lease from the Navy. State parks director William Penn Mott Jr. called it "the finest beach in one continuous stretch in the United States." That July the state announced part of it would become California's first beach zoned for surfing and nothing else.
Then the city did the whole 1961 thing again, with a different activity.
In 1974 the City Council authorized nude bathing in a nine hundred foot stretch at Black's Beach. The mechanism was identical to the surfing ordinance: Municipal Code 56.53 banned nudity on all public beaches except in zones the Council designated by resolution, with the City Manager putting up signs. The signs read "Swimsuits Optional Beyond This Point. San Diego Muni. Code 56.53."
It lasted three years. Proposition D went on the ballot on September 20, 1977, asking whether to prohibit nudity on all public beaches without exception. It passed, 86,336 to 71,108. The official argument for repeal claimed the city would be asked for nearly six hundred thousand dollars in trail, restroom, lifeguard and parking improvements, and that only twelve percent of Black's users were San Diego residents. The argument against, printed on the facing page of the same pamphlet, said three fourths came from the metro area. Both were official. Both cannot be true.
A blanket prohibition with council carve outs, twice in sixteen years, on the same coastline.
Surfing's industrial history is substantially a San Diego County story, and most of the names in it are not famous outside the water.
Mike Eaton came down from Hermosa Beach in 1972 when Bing Surfboards was sold to Gordon and Smith, kept building Bing boards, and opened Eaton Surfboards in San Diego in 1978. At the G&S factory his shaping room was four steps from Skip Frye's. He built over four thousand Bonzers and, by Easy Reader's count, something like fifty thousand boards in a career that ran before shaping machines existed. He also built paddleboards and paddled the Catalina Classic into his seventies, finishing dead last in 2005 in nine hours and thirty two minutes. His line about it: "There are only two positions in the Catalina Classic. First and finish." The 2015 race was dedicated to him. He is not in the San Diego Surfing Hall of Fame, which somebody should fix.
Donald Takayama flew from Honolulu to Los Angeles at twelve years old on a one way ticket he paid for with newspaper route money, because Dale Velzy had seen him surf at Makaha and told him there was a job. He slept in the loft of Velzy's shop. He designed the David Nuuhiwa Noserider at Bing in 1966, won the Masters division of the US Championships in 1971, 1972 and 1973, and founded Hawaiian Pro Designs in Encinitas in the late 1970s before moving it to Oceanside, where the federally registered trademark still reads "Surf Boards by Donald Takayama, Oceanside, California USA." When he died in 2012 the paddle out was at the Oceanside pier, and Skip Frye spoke.
Mike Diffenderfer, raised in La Jolla, shaped close to twenty five thousand boards and named the Banzai Pipeline. Pat Curren, born in Carlsbad and raised in Mission Beach, started riding at Windansea in 1950 at eighteen, was probably the first shaper to put rocker in a board, and built the big wave guns of the Waimea era. Asked who taught him, he said: "Nobody taught me to surf. Does anybody teach anybody?" His son Tom won three world titles.
Allen "Dempsey" Holder ran Imperial Beach lifeguards and rode the Tijuana Sloughs on the biggest days of the 1940s and 1950s, from a wooden building on the sand the crew called the White House. Imperial Beach named its marine safety center after him, at 950 Ocean Lane. His standard for a big wave: "If you make every wave you're not calling it close enough."
Barry and Nick Mirandon started Surfboards La Jolla in a garage near Windansea in 1964 and built the Twin Pin, an early twin fin, in 1967. Rusty Preisendorfer, raised in La Jolla, shaped for G&S, Canyon and others through the 1970s before putting his own name on boards in 1985. Carl Ekstrom has the patent. Linda Benson of Encinitas won Makaha at fifteen. Debbie Beacham moved to La Jolla at thirteen and won the women's world title in 1982; the board she won it on is in a museum collection.
And Chris O'Rourke took to Windansea at twelve, was called the best surfer in California by Gerry Lopez in 1976, was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in April 1977, and kept surfing through chemotherapy and brain surgery, wearing a helmet, until he died in 1981 at twenty two.
Two corrections while we are here, because both come up constantly. Greg Noll, "Da Bull," was born in San Diego on February 11, 1937, under the name Greg Lawhead. He moved to Manhattan Beach at three and his entire surfing life happened in Los Angeles County. And Big Wednesday, the most famous California surf film ever made, has not one documented frame shot in San Diego County. Its climax was filmed at Sunset Beach on Oahu, and its Tijuana sequence was shot in El Paso, Texas.
There is a story, told constantly, that Duke Kahanamoku surfed the Ocean Beach pier around 1916 or 1917 and handed his board to a teenage lifeguard to keep for him.
The Ocean Beach pier opened on July 2, 1966.
The story traces to one source: a local surf historian who interviewed the lifeguard, Charlie Wright, shortly before Wright's death in 1994. There is a second, completely different San Diego rumor, that Duke surfed the Mission Bay channel in the 1920s, which traces to a different man's childhood hearsay.
In fairness to the first one, there was a long wooden structure at Ocean Beach in 1916: a fifteen hundred foot fishing bridge with railings and sidewalks, built in 1915 and removed in 1951. A man recalling it seventy years later could easily have called it a pier. That removes the impossibility without supplying any evidence.
But here is what the record does show, and almost nobody prints it.
Duke Kahanamoku came to San Diego on the Fourth of July, 1922, and the San Diego Union sent a staff photographer. He was at Coronado Tent City, in front of a crowd the paper put at close to twenty nine thousand, a thousand more than had come for the fashion parade the Sunday before. He entered the San Diego county championships and won the fifty and the hundred against a running tide. He got a bad start in the fifty because somebody let off a firecracker and he mistook it for the gun.
And in the middle of that account is a sentence that settles the question better than any recollection. "Efforts are being made to have the duke visit Coronado later in the season for both surfboard and aquaplane exhibitions."
Being made. As of July 1922, San Diego was still trying to get Duke Kahanamoku to ride a surfboard here.
So he was in San Diego, documented, photographed, six years after the date the pier story gives. Whether he ever rode a wave here is still open. The pier detail cannot survive a construction date, and it is worth saying out loud, because a story repeated long enough is still not a record, and because the real one was sitting in the newspaper the whole time.
Surfing is not a lifestyle amenity in San Diego. It is a reason specific blocks cost what they cost.
A break does not move. Windansea, Sunset Cliffs, Tourmaline, Ocean Beach and Pacific Beach are fixed features of the coastline, and the walk to them is fixed with them. That is why the pricing gap between a street with surf access and one without it is stubborn in a way most neighborhood differences are not. A new building can change a view. Nothing changes where the reef is.
The same shoreline drives coastal permitting, bluff setbacks, public access rules and beach parking, and those shape what can be built and how long it takes. The 1961 fight was an argument between beachfront owners and beach users, and some version of it is still on the agenda at City Hall most months.
Current pricing, inventory and days on market are in the Ocean Beach market report, the Pacific Beach report and the La Jolla report, each updated monthly from closed MLS sales. The surrounding coastal communities are in Beaches and Peninsula.
Whether the 1961 ban was ever enacted. The evidence that it was not is strong: the drafting form carries no ordinance number and no votes, the Surfing Committee continued it on May 4, the designated areas plan was publicly withdrawn by September 1, and what passed in August took the nuisance closure approach instead. But a negative cannot be proved from the documents that are online. The City Clerk's adopted ordinance series for April through September 1961 is not digitized and would settle it. We have described the ordinance as drafted and not enacted, and shown the blank form.
That 63.20.8 was an amendment, not an original. The 1961 caption reads "amending Section 63.20.8," so a surfing provision already existed before April 1961. Its original adoption date and ordinance number are not online. Anyone citing 63.20.8 as the surfing law today is citing the 1961 numbering; the current section is about lifeguard enforcement authority.
The date of the Ocean Beach drownings. Settled. Secondary sources give both May 5 and May 6, 1918, but the San Diego Union and Daily Bee carried it on its front page on May 6 as having happened the previous afternoon, and the paper's own follow ups on May 19 and July 17 both refer to it as "Ocean Beach May 5." May 5 was a Sunday. The May 6 date in circulation is the publication date, not the event date.
When the Windansea shack was built. The City of San Diego's own plaque says 1947. Friends of Windansea, the group that got it landmarked, says 1946. Both agree on the builders and on the 1998 designation. We have given the period and the names rather than choosing a year.
Where Bob Simmons drowned. The date, September 26, 1954, is consistent across sources. The location is not: some say Bird Rock, others say Windansea, and those are two different reefs about a mile apart. We have printed the year and the fact that the break carries his name.
When the Windansea Surf Club was founded, and who founded it. The Journal of San Diego History says 1962, by Chuck Halsey, citing a San Diego Union article of September 4, 1963. Matt Warshaw says Hasley reformed it in the summer of 1963 to field the Malibu team, and records a separate Windansea Surf and Ski Club in 1947 that did not last. The spelling of the founder's surname differs between them.
Who San Diego's first chief lifeguard was. The City of San Diego's own lifeguard history names Calvin "Spade" Burns, appointed 1923. The San Diego Union of June 1, 1918 reports George D. Freeth "has been appointed chief of life guards at Ocean Beach," with city guards and volunteers under him. Both can be true if the 1918 post was Ocean Beach only and the 1923 one was citywide, and the city's page may simply be counting from the permanent service. We have printed both and not merged them.
The earliest Freeth surfboard exhibition in San Diego. July 1918 is not the oldest documented surfing at a named San Diego break. The San Diego Union of May 24, 1917 has him giving exhibition surfboard riding at the beaches, and the June 1, 1918 notice announces exhibitions for that weekend. The July 1918 piece is the most vivid account, not the earliest record.
The 1923 lifeguard photograph. The Los Angeles Public Library catalogues a Houston Chronicle gravure of May 20, 1923 as showing George Freeth rowing a dory at Redondo Beach. The printed page names nobody, and Freeth had been dead four years when it ran. We have used it for what the page itself shows, California lifeguards taking a dory out through surf in the period, and we have not printed it as a picture of Freeth.
Duke Kahanamoku at Ocean Beach. The pier is impossible and we have said so. He was demonstrably in San Diego in July 1922, which the San Diego Union covered and photographed, and the same article shows the city was still trying to arrange a surfboard exhibition at that point. Whether he ever rode a wave in San Diego remains unestablished. We have printed the 1922 record, we have not printed the pier story as fact, and we have not called it a fabrication, because an undocumented memory is neither.
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