The Class of 1970: ’60s Surf Culture in Long Beach, California
Coming of age in southern California in the 1960s — I’d do that again. Even in Long Beach with its breakwater. Always a beach town, and a surf town in its own way.
Our class of ’70 at Wilson High turned out some excellent surfers and makers of surf culture. The late Sean Collins who started Surfline was there, beginning with faxed weather reports and dial-up telephone forecasts. True to the ’60s zeitgeist, our standout surfer was a woman, Jericho Poppler. Already in the eighth grade she broke her board shooting the Huntington Pier. Jeri’s mom, Bobbi, herself a diving star and water woman, had dropped us off for the morning. I was haired out by head-high surf breaking into the pier and older locals barely tolerant of a young gremmie. Jericho caught lefts, and when she hit the pier, came up smiling, fearless with style.
On graduation day in 1970, the Cambodian bombing was in the air. I’d snuck a felt peace symbol on top of my mortar board for parents watching from the bleachers above. Politics couldn’t trump the bright Mediterranean sunlight. Bruce Brown, of “Endless Summer” fame, was a Wilson graduate in 1955, and our commencement speaker. We’d seen him project his film using a 16-millimeter projector at Newport Harbor High. Brown narrated from the stage in synch with the lightly hypnotic soundtrack, played back on a now obsolete reel-to-reel tape deck. The film’s idyllic journey had done its magic, masking concern that afternoon for National Guardsmen threatening student protesters far away from our Southern California paradise. Three surfing friends and I — bros was decades away — had plane tickets to be off for the Islands in a few days. Just trunks, tent, boards, sleeping bags, racks, wax. Found a used car after getting off the plane. Maui and Oahu, no Vietnam for us, at least until more draft numbers were assigned in the coming year. Not a fabulous trip surfwise, but we did luck into an afternoon at Ma’alaea Bay with its locomotive right held up by the powerful offshore pumped through the Maui isthmus.
We all thought our abilities dramatically improved over the weeks and had high expectations returning home. After just one wave, we realized that due to the continental shelf California surf was way underpowered compared to the Islands’, and how much that mattered to performance. Dream over. Time to plan another trip.
For young grems, Long Beach was ideal. In junior high we’d bike to the beach’s far east end, or sometimes paddle across Alamitos Bay, then climb down the jetty at 72nd Place, paddle across the boat channel to the Seal Beach side, and finally climb up and down the second jetty and out to the surf.
We were at “Power Plant,” or “Ray Bay”, named for stingrays attracted to the warm water heated by cooling effluent from electric generation stations upstream the channelized San Gabriel river. Warm and non-toxic return flows kept us comfortable, especially if we didn’t yet have our wet suits. A short john was the only option then, and the winters made us hardy. It was often 2’-3’ at the River, an easy right maybe hitting 4’ on a big South day and we could make out serious swells heaving over the Surfside jetty just beyond Seal Beach. Surfed out, it was a long paddle and portage back with heavy boards over the jetties and back to Long Beach. Soon enough we’d bum rides with older guys already driving to Bolsa Chica, or “Tin Can beach,” named for the many discarded soda and beer cans. Oozy oil patches were everywhere at low tide, inevitably migrating to your board wax. The home cupboard housed a grease remover to clean up your feet after a day at the beach. A few of the hundreds of grasshopper oil derricks dotting Huntington cliffs are still left today.
You may do or like best what you learn well when you’re young. Our moves coevolved with generations of short boards, mixing new gene lines with old. We had imprinted on the long board styles of our adolescence, as stoked as we were by short board liberation. Style was important because there was only so much to do on smaller waves with heavier boards. There were cut-backs, stalls, roller-coasters, head-dips, all often attempted with good posture and easy grace. For some, it was more Phil Edwards and Joey Cabell, less Dewey Weber or Johnny Fain. Well-poised arms and legs denoted control and balance. Style at its best merged athletic prowess with personality or sometimes ego. You could pick out Corky Carroll or David Nuuhiwa at a distance by their polished look as much as their expert maneuvers.
By high school most had their surfing chops down. Kurt Augsberger was good enough for the Harbour surf team, making a cut including Seal Beach luminaries Rich Chew and Mark Martinson.
We saw them in surf films and imitated as best we could. Gerry Lopez, late in the ’60s, showed us how to sideslip, hanging in the curl and being cool by slowing it all down to near stationary. It was a good move to substitute for nose-riding not really possible on shorter boards. There were nine-foot boards in junior high. Then eight, seven and six feet — many of them ‘long’ by today’s standards. Style changed with the short board revolution and new role models. Hard-chined vee-bottoms were copied from the Aussies, getting us used to a new standard for speed and acceleration banking off bottom turns taken closer to the curl. Nat Young and Bob McTavish taught us to be aggressive, more Aussie alpha male, less SoCal cool-jazz. A popular kicked-up ‘spoon’ noses kept you from pearling on steep, one-stroke takeoffs, a move stylish and quickly efficient when picking off a set wave left open by the first rider’s wipeout. All this before the added confidence afforded by board leashes. Surfers and the new boards co-evolved, their soundtrack a golden age of blues- and folk-infused rock music. Surfing’s coming of age was set in time to Bob Dylan giving up acoustic for electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Driving Pacific Coast Highway from Long Beach to San Diego in the ’60s, you hit maybe thirteen traffic lights. The surf scene benefited from Governor Pat Brown’s California. The dad of recent Governor Jerry Brown created the infrastructure of fast roads, jobs, mega water projects and affordable, broad-based education launching California’s continued re-invention for a half-century. Baby boomers like us consumed and ultimately ruined much of the best California had to offer. We became Trestles regulars to beat the crowds and enjoy the better waves just south of Orange County. The empty beaches, varied peaks and rights from Cottons to Lowers, were a constant allure. Lower’s mellow point right is today identical, as is the inside peak, its tidy section also ego-friendly, often left unridden just beyond a larger closed-out set wave. Still the rock dance walking in or out at low tide. If you didn’t hide your towel and clothes, Camp Pendleton marines on beach patrol got them for sure. You were anyway stuck in the water until soldiers left in their jeep. We felt some guilt at whatever envy the ‘jar heads’ felt about our conspicuous civilian freedoms and joyous wave-riding. As put by folk singer Phil Ochs, there but for fortune go you or I.
As always, the need was to get away from the crowds. The SoCal surf population exploded as surf culture broke free of its prehistory. Board shapers were able make a real living, with glass shops and shaping rooms opening up in Costa Mesa with its cheaper warehouse rents. The shapers were our elders, oracles envisioning surfing six months in the future. Local gurus included Long Beach native Bob Olson (‘Ole’), and Rich Harbour and Jack Haley in Seal Beach. Ole left for Maui in 1971, with his Surfside shop taken over by Bruce Jones, a Long Beach resident and Ole’s esteemed successor in the shaping arts. Board brands set your identity. The manufacturers started surf fashion through their tee-shirts with their brand graphics on the tee’s back, or front, appropriately just over the heart. The board tees morphed into fashionable shirts and trunks, and came to represent surfing as the ultimate Southern California lifestyle. Hang Ten was the first big surf clothing company, with one of the original partners, Doris Moore, also from Long Beach. Nice shirts and trunks, but every counterculture, however innovative, gets absorbed by the mainstream culture, with surfing no exception. Being a surfer meant dressing like one, and then dressing like one became looking like one whether you surfed or not.
At the same time, there were good ways back then to continue a student life, or other ungrownup lives, leaving enough session time in the prime of one’s surfing and other life. It was always surfing plus some other life, some mix of school and work, with the path forward getting less clear as you neared thirty. You might pledge to your friends never to give up surfing, or at least surf a couple times a year. Such promises never sounded juvenile. Like the lovers in Romeo and Juliet, we were living eternally young lives that made the promises no less felt and real.
You did not need to be wealthy to live near the beach. Beach towns, especially smaller ones like Surfside and Sunset Beach, were wonderful social equivalents of the intertidal zones fit for species adapted to both wet and dry habitats. In Long Beach, record and head shops had opened, selling wrapping papers and the early Rolling Stone magazine in newsprint. Store walls featured San Francisco rock concert posters, including classics by Surfer magazine cartoonist Rick Griffin. No coincidence there. Severson studied graphic arts — at Cal State Long Beach –leading to Surfer’s clean look and high photo standards. He mentored Griffin through the “Murphy” comic strip included in each issue, smartly catering to adolescent subscribers. Severson’s classic film “Pacific Vibrations” was timely in its environmentalism and rock music soundtrack, the latter sadly blocking distribution because of copyright. Griffin designed the psychedelic title typography and publicity poster, with that same look repeated for Grateful Dead concert ads. The world was moving on.
Just a few ’70 grads made surfing their life, like Sean and Jericho. One day the internet would be invented and Sean’s Surfline website would change surfing as much as the polyurethane foam blank. For most of us, we just wanted to keep up good chunks of session time, besotted as we were by the sport. So, some mix of school and work, or life guarding for those able to make the competitive cut. If lucky, we’d tap a strong south swell with the rare Santa Ana winds blowing desert heat seaward, turning ordinary beach break, sometimes, into something almost sublime. At Bolsa Chica, you parked right on PCH, before the oversized asphalt parking there today, with a long walk across hot sand to surf hidden behind the berm. Waves on such days would magically line up, their smoothed-out faces seducing you to take off later and further behind the peak.
The aeolian gods urged you on: these waves are makeable, just go for it. Not all of us were lucky enough to be out on those offshore days. Some friends had low draft numbers and disappeared for a few years or enlisted to choose Navy over Marines. Those serving overseas found no point break like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, but thank god — or just luckily — they came home alive. The ’60s were that hot wind of war, protest and rock music, of Watts ’65, of Charles Manson and his ‘family’ holed up in the desert at the Santa Anas source. The Santa Anas were our Foehn, our Mistral, our Bora wind.
Not a surf spot then, Long Beach, but a town with an authentic water culture in its calm aquatic setting. You could paddle around Naples island and its canals, or across Alamitos Bay, and dream at night, as we did, about breaks on that long, break-walled south-facing beach. On a big swell, waves sneak through the breakwater opening, making for three- or four-foot rideable surf at Claremont or Linden streets with a somewhat ridable shorebreak when it’s fifteen-plus at Newport. At low tide, enough sand had been stopped by the jetty at 72nd to create a two-foot Doheny-like wave far outside, near a sailing buoy. Many ninety-pound kids readily caught first waves here, knee-paddling into that first rapture in motion with disbelief at its magic.
A couple of the old lifeguard houses are left now, two stories with a spacious beach room above. That affords great visibility for the guards, perched on the deck outside almost livable space, while the bottom space is dark, light filtering through the wood siding, a sand-bottom garage for lifesaving dories hardly used, maybe never meeting a wave higher than a foot.
The guard shacks were like some Delphic retreat, a place that a pact made with local waters becomes permanent. It was said, by some of the elders, that by surfing from junior high school through high school, your biological and aquatic drives merged for life. Girlfriends told you this, leading you after school into the guard shack with its cool sands, and the dory garage ideal for making out, sharing a cigarette, keeping each other warm.
Afterward, hand in hand, you’d walk together to the shore. Regaining your orientation out of the darkness, you’d look distractedly east, toward 72nd Place, to the jetties and Seal Beach, maybe picking out Huntington pier in the distant haze, wondering about the rising swell. Later, much later, you got older, and you kept checking out the waves whenever you could.
