A Fine Little Revival

Jack London Loves Purple

California: The New Frontier

Beachboy Life

Duke Kahanamoku

Surf Shooting Down Under

The Bronzed Islander Shows How

Surfing in the Jazz Age

Tom Blake Redesigns the Sport

What Depression?

When Clubbies Ruled Australia

Surfboard as Woodcraft

Palos Verdes Surfing Club

San Onofre: the Nearest Faraway Place

Riding the Hot Curl

Enter Makaha

Death at Waimea

The Overwhelming North Shore

Gliding Return

San Onofre was the sweet and easy low-simmering crucible of American surfing in the 1930s and early 1940s. Tiny pod-like surfing communities took root in California from San Diego’s Mission Beach all the way up to Pacifica in the San Francisco Bay Area; Virginia already had three decades of surf history; and Florida had enough riders by the end of the Depression that Daytona Beach was able to host an annual contest. But San Onofre, located halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, was where the mainland version of the sport shined brightest.

San Onofre wasn’t a town, or a street, or a commercial hub. The name “San Onofre” just began turning up on mid-nineteenth-century maps on the western edge of the vast two-hundred-thousand-acre Rancho Santa Margarita y Los Flores, for reasons now long forgotten. By the time San Onofre was first surfed, in 1933, all that marked this little section of coast was a tumbledown fishing camp, a Texaco station, a roadside café, and a faded gable-roofed Santa Fe line train depot. The coast itself was unremarkable. A long scrub-covered bluff kept the beach hidden from the road, cattle grazed on foothills to the east, a ribbon of sand below the cliffs trailed off into a warm haze to the south, and a mile or so north was a wave-fringed point. (Surfers from the next generation would lug their boards up there, discover a trio of cobblestone pointbreak waves, and name the whole area Trestles, after a pair of railroad overpasses that cut along the base of the point).

It was a well-marked half-day’s journey to get to San Onofre from any of Southern California’s beach communities. The not-quite-finished Pacific Coast Highway still contained sections of unpaved road, and a rutted one-lane track connected the highway to a packed-dirt beachfront parking lot. “You’d go there for a long weekend,” one 1930s regular recalled, “and it usually meant four flat tires.” The isolation was more imagined than real; San Clemente, just five miles to the north, was already a thriving beachfront town. But San Onofre felt hidden and private—an exact fit for what Beach Boy Brian Wilson would later call the nearest faraway place.

The San Onofre wave was perfectly engineered to work with a 40-pound wooden surfboard. A telescoping set of reefs produced a long stretch of beginner’s surf near the beach, and a more concentrated peak further offshore—like Waikiki, but at one-third the scale. San Onofre waves were longer and better-shaped than those found at Venice, Hermosa, Pacific Beach, or any of the other surfer-populated Southern California beachbreaks, and unlike the winter-only reefs at Palos Verdes Cove, it had rideable surf all year. A typical San Onofre wave not only broke both ways, left and right, but reformed as it went; a surfer might begin a ride by pulling a tight angle toward San Clemente, then aim for the beach, then dip a rail and charge off in the other direction. Overhead surf arrived pretty often, but maybe the best thing about San Onofre, surf-wise, was that it could conjure waves from nothing. Beaches to the north and south might be completely flat, but there was always something to ride here.

The Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships moved to San Onofre in 1938, after the break at Corona del Mar—the contest’s original site—was ruined by a jetty extension. Surf competition rules also changed. The paddling race was out. Riders now gathered next to a buoy placed just beyond the surf line, and over the course of a two-hour meet they earned a point for each ride that took them past a second buoy, anchored near the shore and about fifty yards to the north. Trophies were given to the finalists. Tom Blake donated the engraved cup he’d won in 1928 to be the Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships perpetual trophy, which was handed off to the winner of each year’s event.

Top surfers from Pacifica to San Diego arrived for the contest—their cars loaded with a weekend’s ration of Spam tins, a few wax-papered deviled egg sandwiches, and a rack or two of Blatz beer—hoping to catch Pete Peterson on a bad day and have a shot at claiming the Blake trophy. Peterson was a quiet, tightly-wound Santa Monica lifeguard lieutenant, with thin sun-blonde hair that he combed back severely from his forehead. He wasn’t unbeatable, but it was always a surprise when he lost, and not just in surf contests; he set paddleboard records that stood for years, and beat Olympic gold medal swimmers Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe during impromptu rough-water races in front of the Santa Monica lifeguard headquarters. His reputation grew from there. Peterson also made the best surfboards in California—as well as the best paddleboards and surf boats. In 1932, he and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison, a cheerful lifeguard from Orange County and Peterson’s only real match in the state as a wave-rider, were the first two notable mainlanders after Tom Blake to make the surfer’s pilgrimage to Waikiki.

Peterson had a sharp, pared-down riding style, and seemed to have a special radar for the chops and bumps that threw other surfers off-balance. It was a fastidious way of riding, developed by the era’s most fastidious surfer. Unlike all of his contemporaries, Peterson refused to rub paraffin wax on the deck of his boards for traction, because it dulled the five-coat Valspar finish that he so carefully brushed on. Not using wax was the equivalent of racing on bald tires, strange to the point of eccentric—but it didn’t seem to affect his performance in the least. The Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships were held nine times between 1932 and 1941. Peterson won four. Nobody else won more than once.

San Onofre’s cachet had a lot to do with the surf contest and the great performances by Peterson, Harrison, and others. But what made San Onofre unique had as much to do with what happened on the beach as what took place in the water. Before and after wave-riding events, twenty-five or so “Sano” regulars and another fifty to seventy-five fellow travelers—assorted friends, siblings, and girlfriends—came together informally into a kind of self-contained surf cooperative. There were no outside influences. No lifeguards. No beachfront hotels. No performing on behalf of tourists or reporters. No carnival schedules to plan around or club rules to obey. For the first time in its modern era, the sport had a space in which it could develop on its own. Over the course of three or four hundred Depression-era weekends at San Onofre, surfing socialized itself.

It was probably the sport’s communal high point. Boards were placed in long informal rows just above the high tide line, while surfers hunkered down shoulder to shoulder around the firepit. Clams, halibut, bass, and abalone were brought up, cleaned and filleted, dumped into a huge cook pot, and served to all by the bowlful. Everyone threw their arms around each other and pressed together when a folding pocket camera was aimed their way. A particular surfer look took shape, borrowing heavily from Hawaii. A palm-frond hut was built in front of the San Onofre parking lot, and anyone who played guitar bought a ukulele and learned the chord progressions for “My Little Grass Shack” and a half dozen other Waikiki beachboy standards. “Hawaii to us was like what heaven is for religious people,” one of San Onofre’s original surfers recalled. “Nobody had actually been, but we all hoped we’d get there sometime, and the next best thing was to sing about it.”

The San Onofre pioneers also developed many of the protocols for what it meant to be a surfer, in and out of the water. This understanding had little or nothing to do with Hawaii, and it provided much of the rough timber from which surf culture would be built. Travel was part of it, and self-reliance. There was also a grinning sidestep from the culture at large, justified in language that often wavered between honorable and fatuous. “You’ve got to keep away from things you don’t like,” San Onofre original Whitey Harrison said. “I just live to ride waves and enjoy myself.” Not counting food-fights and the occasionally beery night out, the San Onofre gang didn’t act especially defiant or unruly—that would be a job for Eisenhower-era surfers. But they were the first to imbue the sport with the pride and knowingness of an exclusive secret society.

The bellwether years didn’t last long. In 1942, six months after Japan bombed Pear Harbor, more than half of Rancho Santa Margarita y Los Flores, including San Onofre, was unceremoniously requisitioned by the United States Marines, cleared of all civilians, stocked with barracks and training fields, and renamed Camp Pendleton. A beach access gate was installed not long after the war, but surfers couldn’t get in unless they belonged to the new military-approved San Onofre Surfing Club, whose original members weren’t especially interested in expanding the membership. The good times continued, but the sense of adventure and discovery that had made San Onofre the coolest, most progressive surf break of the 1930s never returned. Camper vans filled the parking lot. The palm-frond shack was surrounded with beach chairs, hibachi grills, and a growing assortment of kids. Some wag nicknamed the main reef “Old Man’s,” which everyone accepted with a smile, and at that point San Onofre’s time as the exemplar of modern surfing was well and truly over.

There were no outside influences at San Onofre. No lifeguards. No tourists or reporters. No club rules. For the first time in its modern era, the sport had a space in which it could develop on its own. Over the course of three or four hundred Depression-era weekends at San Onofre, surfing socialized itself.

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

San Onofre: the Nearest Faraway Place

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