Senior Surfers : Old Long-Boarders Don’t Fade Away, They Just Stay Loyal to Wimpy Waves

On a recent Sunday morning at San Onofre State Beach, a young surfer surveying the ocean from the hood of a black pickup was asked for directions to Old Man’s, home of the San Onofre Surfing Club, which may well have the oldest surfers in Southern California. Certainly it has some of the most eccentric.

“You mean the long boarders?” the surfer replied dubiously. He pointed toward a cluster of campers about half a mile down and said dryly, “It’s not the end of the world, but it’s close.”

Tom (Opai) Wert, a 64-year-old who’s been coming to San Onofre since 1941, laughed a little when he heard that description and said with resignation, “The surfing world is changing.”

What hasn’t changed is the surf at San Onofre. It has always been wimpy. That’s what makes it so attractive to the old-timers, the founding members of the San Onofre Surfing Club.

Biggest Club Around

Easily the biggest surf club around, it also is the only one with its own stretch of beach, marked by a tattered grass shack that is known to everyone at San Onofre as Old Man’s. The club has about 400 members, many of whom are the children and grandchildren of the surfers who founded the club about 40 years ago. Its members include doctors, architects, construction workers and high school gym teachers, some of whom met their spouses while surfing at San Onofre.

On almost any weekend, no matter what the surf is like at San Onofre, you can find scores of club members there, sitting on lawn chairs in front of their RVs. Likely as not, they’ll be eating, drinking and gabbing like old neighbors. In their enclave at Old Man’s, which most everyone at San Onofre respects as the turf of the old-timers, the San Onofrians can afford to ignore the young short-boarders who regard them as relics from surfing’s early Stone Age.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when San Onofre was the happening place in surfing. That was in the 1950s, when surfboards were huge and difficult to maneuver on fast waves. The beach was private then, and only club members could surf at San Onofre. “It was a big deal to be a member of that club,” said Steve Pezman, publisher of San Juan Capistrano-based Surfer magazine. “Memberships were passed down from father to son.”

As the beach’s reputation grew, the club became increasingly exclusive. At one point, its waiting list grew to about seven years. Things got so bad, according to Mark Stavron, who used to come as the guest of kids whose parents were members, that “somebody had to die, just about, before you could get in.”

Its Own Beach Culture

The club also developed its own beach culture. By the 1950s, Pezman said, it became so well defined that the club even put out its own cookbook.

“One of the recipes was, essentially, take a fork with you and wander from fire ring to fire ring,” he said. “And it recommended which fire rings to stop at.”

In 1973, however, the beach went public, and the San Onofre Surfing Club opened its membership to all who applied. But even before then, San Onofre had lost much of its mystique.

Because the water at San Onofre is shallow, the waves there break long and smooth. To keep from sinking, a surfer who weighs more than 90 pounds must have a 9- or 10-foot board, the kind that went out of style about 20 years ago.

Because they are easy to stay up on, long boards are good for beginners and older surfers like Opai and Alice Peterson, a veteran club member who once swam in Esther Williams’ movies.

But by the mid-1960s, most surfers had traded in their long boards for shorter ones. And the new breed of short-boarders moved on to the dicier breaks of Huntington Beach and the Wedge at Newport Beach.

Immune to Changes

Immune to the changes in surfing fashion, the veteran members of the San Onofre Surfing Club stayed, and kept their long boards. Before long, they found themselves in a sort of time warp, where they have remained quite happily ever since.

Old-time members can still be found at San Onofre on just about any weekend. Some, like Byron (Curly) Dahl, who will be 80 in February, haven’t gotten on a surfboard in years. But that doesn’t keep him from being active in the club, because members long ago discovered there’s more to surfing than surfing.

There’s partying, for example, which is something club members have long enjoyed. The San Onofrians even have a name for those among them who prefer a drink on the beach to a ride on their boards. They’re called the Cocktail Crew.

There is perhaps no better representative of the Cocktail Crew than a 53-year-old man who prefers to be known simply as “Tubesteak.” A legendary eater, yarn spinner and all-around beach bum, Tube-steak became a San Onofre regular rather late by club standards. It was around 1968, as he recalls, maybe 1969, when he came down from Malibu, where he had achieved surfing immortality in the 1950s.

Tubesteak’s Tale

Tubesteak loves to tell that story.

“I was living in a grass hut on the beach at Malibu,” he said nonchalantly. One day a girl named Kathy Kohner walked by, carrying a bag lunch. Within minutes Tubesteak and his friends talked her into a deal: They would take her lunch, and in return, she’d get free use of their surfboard. Kathy, whose father was a novelist, became a good surfer and got in tight with the crowd at Malibu. To make her a true insider, Tubesteak gave her a nickname, which is another story Tubesteak likes to tell.

A few years earlier, before he got canned--”I had problems going to work because I was surfing all the time,” he explained--Tubesteak had worked for an insurance company in Los Angeles. After work, he’d go out drinking with the guys, one of whom liked to give people funny names. One day, the guy brought a girl into the bar and introduced her as “Gidget.” Everyone laughed and asked what a Gidget was.

“A Gidget,” he is said to have explained, “is a girl midget.”

When Tubesteak saw Kathy on the beach, he thought she looked just like that girl in the bar, so he dubbed her Gidget. It was Kathy’s father, Frederick Kohner, who in 1957 wrote the novel that became the movie “Gidget.” Kohner based the Great Kahuna character on Kathy’s friend Tubesteak.

Cult Hero

Over the years, Tubesteak has become one of surfing’s cult heroes. “Whenever you want to inject a little personality into a surf function,” Pezman said, Tubesteak is always on the list of people to call.

That’s why Tubesteak likes to say, when being introduced: “I am the Kahuna from north of the Laguna.” Kahuna, he explained, is a Hawaiian word for witch doctor or medicine man: “a semi-rabbi or something.” In short, he said, a leader.

But not everyone at San Onofre is a publicity seeker. In fact, some club members say the last thing they want is to let the world know just how nice it is at San Onofre.

“There is no place like this place,” Curly said, “but I never tell anybody.”

“Don’t build it up,” pleaded Alice Peterson, a San Onofre regular since 1952. “We don’t want people coming here.”