QWIIGS of Point Loma High : Surf-Happy Boys Enter Their Golden Year

Paul Fordem remembers get-togethers where the tools of substance abuse--if you could call it that--were cheeseburgers and chocolate Cokes. That was as serious as it got.

When Fordem graduated from Point Loma High School in 1948, his concerns were making a living, starting a family. But more than that, he said, he and everyone else lusted for a fast car.

“Our chief fear in life,” he said, “was that we wouldn’t get one. Anybody who was anybody in 1948 wanted a ’36 Ford, preferably a convertible. What I got was a ’35 Chevy coupe, hardtop.”

Life Became Less Certain

By the time Jerry Hembury graduated from Point Loma High in 1959, life was different--more chaotic, less certain, more fearful. Getting drafted was a fear. Substances were also a lot harder than the chocolate in Cokes. Neither alcohol nor rowdiness was a stranger to Hembury’s crowd.

The acronym linking both these men is QWIIGS. That stands for Queters Who Indulge in Great Sports. QWIIGS was a boys club, founded at Point Loma High in 1938. It lasted until 1961, when the school administration, which never liked it, succeeded in putting a stop to it.

Fordem, a former member of the county Board of Supervisors, was a QWIIG. So was Hembury. Other alumni include former City Councilman Bill Cleator (class of ‘45), tuna boat mogul Ed Gann, Sea World trainer Jim Richards and restaurant baron Mike Morton.

All of these men and scores of others--about 125 in all--will get together tonight at Hembury’s restaurant, QWIIGS Bar and Grill in Ocean Beach, for a golden anniversary celebration of the founding of QWIIGS. QWIIGS from as far away as Pennsylvania and Alaska are expected to attend.

OK, so how did it get its name? No one seems to know for sure. Hembury said the original title was Queeners Who Indulge in Great Sport. Queener referred to, in his words, anyone who could surf Queen Surf in Hawaii or something equally forbidding. Queener lost its appeal, he said, when it “started to take on homosexual connotations.” He said he thought queter was Latin for “anyone who indulged in great sports.”

But he really isn’t sure, and neither is anyone else. For that matter, nobody seems to care.

“We just want to have fun,” Hembury said.

Died Because of Social Climate

Hembury, 46, was one of the last to become a QWIIGS. He said QWIIGS died because of the “anti-social” climate that pervaded the 1960s. He blamed the club’s death on Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the feeling that boys clubs--especially surf-happy, drink-happy boys clubs--were frivolous and silly and out of step with the changing times.

Hembury said school authorities never liked QWIIGS, which he described as relentlessly non-academic and, during his time, “wild . . . yeah, you could put us in the wild category. . . . We would have informal competitions, with clubs in other parts of town, and most would end in skirmishes.

“One of us, say, would go out with a girl from La Jolla High School, our big rivals, and they would get mad, and then we’d get mad, and it ended up being this territorial war. You might call it the forerunner to local gangs. . . .

“It was the whole ‘Blackboard Jungle’ time, when the term juvenile delinquent was coined. We weren’t bad kids, but the more rambunctious we got, the less inclined we were to sip chocolate Cokes, which I guess the earlier crowds were into.”

Cleator remembers a gentle, innocent, carefree club that mirrored the times--as Hembury said all QWIIGS did. Cleator’s QWIIGS were marked by the end of World War II and a fierce unity that led to his generation becoming the parents of the “baby-boomers,” today’s “thirtysomething” crowd.

“We had an annual dance,” Cleator said, “and a little pin. If you went with a girl, you gave her your pin. I guess, though, that we were a little bit like renegades. Didn’t exactly fall in line. Most of us were jocks. I played football and baseball.”

Memories of the Music

Cleator’s fondest memory of the era, and of QWIIGS, was the music. His crowd listened to Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. He said that, if he could turn back the clock, and spend a month doing anything he wanted, it would be listening to the Big Bands within the context--and the innocence--of the times.

Music was a true barometer of how much the QWIIGS changed. Hembury’s QWIIGS embraced Elvis and Little Richard and especially the Beach Boys--because the last embraced what QWIIGS were all about:

Surfing.

“Surfing was the one common denominator, from ’38 to ‘61,” Hembury said. “Even if they didn’t surf way back when, all QWIIGS were driven to the water.”

The QWIIGS’ ethnic makeup “was almost entirely WASP,” Hembury said, hastening to note that women had a group not unlike the QWIIGS. The administration didn’t like them either.

Regardless of age, regardless of the era that QWIIG members were QWIIGS, Hembury is looking forward to tonight like a kid who can’t wait for a birthday.

“Once we get together and the stories start rollin’, it’s gonna be fun to see how tall the tall tales grow,” he said. “That’s a lot of what being a QWIIG is all about.”