Recreation: Surfs Up!

Bleached-blond Boy with bangs meets beach-bound Girl with bikini. They stow their surfboards in his “woodie” (a vintage paneled station wagon) and take off for Malibu. En route, a transistor radio beats out the tune that has been topping the charts nationwide, Jan and Dean’s Surf City:

They say they never roll the streets up ‘Cause there’s always something going . . . You know they’re either out surfing Or they got a party growing!

Like skiing, surfing was until recently the private passion of a few bronzed daredevils. But in the past few years, surfing has become something like a way of life for thousands of devotees all along the Southern California coast. Every weekend an estimated 100,000 surfers paddle into the briny on 7-ft. to 12-ft. balsa or polyurethane boards, struggle upright into a precarious balance with nature, and try to catch the big breakers coming in.

No More Nudes. Surfboard riding did not really make a West Coast splash until the advent of a 1959 cinespectacle called Gidget. Teen-age Heroine Gidget (Sandra Dee) was the pelvic oracle of surfdom. After her came the surf bums, the peroxided boys and girls who at first gave surfing a bad name—and not only because of their outlandish hairdos. Throbbing to guitars at midnight twist parties, they were fond of nudity and occasional ransacking of beach homes. But slowly the genuine challenge of the sport attracted a better ilk, and bit by bit an entire subculture emerged.

Today, California newspapers offer frequent columns of surf news. Magazines such as Surfer and Surfing Illustrated have appeared on the stands. Surf songs keep deejays spinning even in Chicago, which is relatively surfless. And from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, when the word goes out that “surf’s up!” whole families go streaming toward the handiest stretch of Pacific shore. “Ninety percent are beginners,” broods Bill Cooper, executive secretary of the U.S. Surfing Association. “Half of them give it up in a year or two, but then there are more—and the real danger of surfing is in numbers. One surfer gets knocked off his board, gets hit by another. Most of the injuries are facial and head bruises—and a lot of teeth are lost.”

Boys in Baggies. The true surfer is scornful of the “ho-daddies” (a gibe of undetermined origin) and “grem-mies” (gremlins, usually girls), those hangers-on who may never get wet behind the ears as far as surfing goes but like to immerse themselves in the dense jargon of the in group. To all, “baggies” are the loose-legged boxer swim trunks worn by the boys. “Hot dogging” is either class-A surfing or show-off stuff. To “take gas” or “wipe out” is to lose a board in the curl of a wave and land in the foamy “soup.”

The board itself—commonly a polyurethane foam strip coated with Fiberglas and glossed with polyester resin—used to be cut to order, depending on the user’s height, weight and skill, at a cost of $115 to $150. Now popular demand has brought readymade “pop-out” models for $70, even finish-it-yourself “blanks” that sell for as little as $30 wholesale. This year dealers expect to sell at least 30,000 boards, and rentals are booming too.

Good Clean Kamikaze. Despite its dangers (several beaches have banned surfers because the flying boards threaten other bathers and small paddlers), surfing goes on, its glamour enduring in the clean-limbed skill of those bronzed Poseidons who constitute a distinctly elite minority. Shouting the surfer’s cry “Cowabunga!” they climb a 12-ft. wall of water and “take the drop” off its shoulder—arms stretched wide in a maneuver known as kamikaze—till the wave carries them in to the hot white shore where gremmies, ho-dads and wahines watch in wonder.