The Goodby Wave : Nancy Katin, ‘First Lady of Surfing,’ Reaches the Far Shore

The music may have been “Ave Maria,” not “Wipe Out” or “Surfin’ Safari,” but the cars that packed the parking lot of the small Long Beach chapel were dotted with surf racks and boards, and an occasional surfer shirt stood out among the somber suits inside.

Nancy Katin, who died last Wednesday after a four-year bout with heart disease, never stepped on a surfboard in all her 85 years, but she was still the “First Lady of Surfing.” She earned her title by selling the most chic surf wear around for more than three decades--Kanvas by Katin--and by mothering the thousands of aspiring surfers who walked through the door of her Surfside shop.

When she was interred Monday in a cemetery about five miles inland from the California coastline where she plied her trade, the assembly of mourners was a “Who’s Who” of the world of waves: Peter Townend and Shaun Tomson, former world champions; brothers Jack and Mike Haley, consecutive winners of the first two U.S. surfing championships in 1959 and 1960; Chuck Linnen, a well-known California surfer, and World Cup winner Ian Cairns.

And in a brief memorial service, the Rev. David M. Reed gave the group an interpretation of the 23rd Psalm that a surfer could love: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . . ,” Reed intoned. “He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and they staff they comfort me. . . .”

“You know, this may even be pictured as not just a valley,” he said, translating King James to beach talk. “Think of it as being in the tube . . . in that position of shooting the pipeline of life’s grandest and most beautiful wave . . . and to come out not on the Shoal of Destruction, but on the Shore of the Everlasting.”

After the service, as Mike Haley stood in the February sunshine, waiting for the funeral procession to leave, he hunched his shoulders--clad in a light blue “1986 Katin Pro-Am Team Challenge” T-shirt--and spoke of the sport he loves and the woman who helped him get his start.

“Surfing,” the 42-year-old aficionado said, “is like the quest for the Holy Grail. Surfers are kind of like the knights of the Round Table and what they wear in the water is like their coat of arms. She produced that.

“This is a big loss. (Nancy Katin) was like the vanishing white buffalo, the original.”

Shop Opened in Surfside

After living in landlocked Ontario and Riverside, Nancy and Walter Katin moved in 1952 onto a boat docked in Long Beach. Walter learned to sew canvas boat covers from a fellow boater and set up shop in Surfside. His store was near a surfboard shop run by young surfers, who pestered him into sewing them canvas trunks, Nancy Katin said in a 1978 interview. The rest is “Kanvas by Katin” history.

The couple helped sponsor early California surf contests and organizations, and in the mid-1960s started the “Katin Underdog Contest” for competitors who had never won a contest. When Walter died in 1967, Nancy kept the business going and later expanded her involvement in the surf world, providing surfing scholarships and starting the Katin Pro/Am Team Challenge in 1977.

“I love this business because I love kids,” Katin said in 1978. “I’m enjoying myself too much now to think about retirement. I’ve always said I’ll retire when they carry me out of here. I’m completely happy.”

For the last four years, she had suffered from heart disease too acute to allow her to work, and she died Wednesday after devoting 34 years to a sport she insisted was unlike all others.

Taught Meaning of the Sport

Dru Harrison, a 35-year-old surfing champion, first met Nancy Katin in 1965, when he was “a snot-nosed kid trying to make it in the surfing world,” he said. Later that year, Harrison won his first major surfing contest, which was held at Swamii’s, a surf break in northern San Diego, and he retired from professional surfing in 1972.

During the course of their 21-year friendship, Harrison said, the spry surf queen supplied Harrison with custom-made trunks and taught him the real meaning of the sport that brought him fame: “the freedom of individuality, the succession of doing what must be done to excel and the honest knowledge that, if you try your best, you will succeed.”

Harrison stood with the group around Katin’s sea-blue casket Monday morning, as the Rev. Reed said a last goodby:

“Nancy Katin is in God’s good hands, received, embraced, loved,” he said. “Farewell, Nancy. We will meet again. May you find your strength in the God who made the surge of the sea.”