Long May They Wave : After All These Years, Surfing Still Holds Charm for Kellar Watson, Lorrin Harrison

Kellar Watson was spending a carefree day near his summer home on Balboa in 1928 when he heard that some people were riding wooden planks on the long, billowy breakers at Corona del Mar.

“We couldn’t believe that,” Watson, now 82, recalls. So he ran to the end of the Balboa Peninsula and perched atop the rock jetty to see what all the commotion was about. What he saw was Jerry Vultee, who later developed a plane used to train World War II fighter pilots, propelled across the water by nothing more than the force of a wave. Although it would be 30 years before surfing would capture the fancy of the country, if not the world, Watson immediately was enamored. He swam across the channel to Corona del Mar and was introduced to a cast of characters who left a lasting mark on Orange County’s beaches.

Looking today at the serene entrance to Newport Harbor, luxury yachts bobbing at their moorings, it is difficult to envision it as once one of California’s best surfing breaks.

Newport Beach, however, started attracting surfers as early as 1907. George Freeth, who brought the sport to Redondo Beach from Hawaii as a promotion for Henry Huntington’s Red Cars, surfed Balboa that year.

Few remember Freeth, but Duke Kahanamoku, known as the father of contemporary surfing, left a much more lasting impression during a visit in 1912. Kahanamoku, the swimming star of the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, thrilled curiosity seekers the day he surfed at Corona del Mar.

Even more came to watch when Kahanamoku, Sam Kahaliana and other Hawaiians returned in the mid-’20s, surfing at Corona del Mar on weekends while spending months at a time working in Hollywood as bit actors. Kahanamoku, a handsome, gentle man, began bringing his Hollywood friends along, and they would park their jalopies on the bluffs overlooking the beach and hold Hawaiian-style picnics.

When Kahanamoku surfed here, the south swells hit a sand bar just off the Corona del Mar jetty, forming nicely shaped waves that could be ridden a quarter-mile all the way to China Cove. These were the best waves on the coast, wrote Frank Tucker in “Great Surfing.”

By the time Kellar Watson became a member of the surfing crowd at Corona del Mar in 1928, the sport was established among a cadre of 20 or so.

Two of the earliest Orange County surfers to tackle the Corona del Mar break were Delbert (Bud) Higgins of Huntington Beach and Loren Harrison of San Juan Capistrano.

Higgins, now deceased, was the chief lifeguard and, later, fire chief of Huntington Beach. His association with the sea naturally brought him to Corona del Mar, where he met the Hawaiians in the summer of 1927. Along with lifeguard Gene Belshe, Higgins decided to try to make what is regarded as the county’s first homemade board. Kahanamoku suggested that his 11-foot board was too large for the Corona del Mar breakers, so the young locals set out to make two scaled-down, 10-foot boards.

“We found we could buy a solid plank of kiln-dried redwood 20 feet long, 24 inches wide and three inches thick for $40,” Higgins wrote in the “History of Surfing in Huntington Beach.”

Higgins and Belshe cut the plank in half and shaped two boards with a block plane and draw knife. It took them three months to make their first boards, which, when completed, weighed 135 pounds each and were too heavy for most. “To carry them, they had to be stood on end, then carried on your back,” Higgins wrote.

Surfers such as Watson soon were experimenting with redwood-balsa wood combinations. “I can remember copper boards--redwood inside with copper sheeting all around,” Higgins once recalled in an interview. “And they had a drain plug to let the water out.”

Higgins was the first surfer to “shoot the pier” at Huntington Beach. Now, not a day goes by without some young surfer steering a surfboard through the pier pilings.

Because they worked at Huntington Beach, Higgins and Belshe spent most of their time riding waves near the pier. They invited the Corona del Mar group to try their break, but because the rides at Huntington were much shorter, Corona del Mar remained the main surfing beach.

Harrison would not go anywhere but Corona del Mar in those days. Harrison, perhaps more than any other Orange County native, embodies the spirit of surfing. Now a 76-year-old grandfather, Harrison remains a familiar sight at south county beaches. “I still surf three times a week,” he says.

In the late ‘20s, he would not miss a day.

Harrison says he and his sister, Ethel, would walk along the bluffs from their summer home in Laguna Beach to Corona del Mar before the Coast Highway was completed. Harrison, who was born in Garden Grove in 1913 and attended Orange High School, moved easily among the Hollywood crowd. His surfing skills helped make him popular; he quickly established himself as one of the best. Ethel, too, was an outstanding surfer, and she later married and moved to Hawaii, where she practically reared her children on surfboards at Waikiki.

Ethel also made surfing trunks for the Corona del Mar regulars. “We liked our suits custom-made, and Ethel turned out white canvas trunks ideal for bodysurfing,” wrote Tucker. “The trunks sported the owners’ names and perhaps a few individual touches: ‘hump up,’ ‘slide left,’ ‘slot,’ ‘outside.’ ”

Besides the Harrisons, the “in” crowd at Corona del Mar included Matt Brown, who later owned a popular Santa Ana bookstore, Barney Klotz, Mac (Laho Leo) Beal, Sol (Crazy Nel) Kalami and Gene (Tarzan) Smith.

The times, the surfers recall, were good ones. For three summers, Kellar Watson and his buddies ran a hot dog stand on the beach. Watson had just earned a degree in pharmacy from USC, but could not resist the beach life.

“My folks were greatly worried about me,” says Watson, who eventually took over his father’s drugstore near the Orange Plaza and ran it for some 40 years.

In 1928, surfers started the Pacific Coast Surf Board Championship, which became the summer’s biggest event. On the day of the first contest, Aug. 5, the Santa Ana Daily Register reported the largest “crowd that had visited the beach in the last five years” was on hand.

Tom Blake of Redondo Beach was the victor in 1928, but Watson won the next year when he caught the longest ride of the day: “The wave was in a little from where most of the rest of the group was,” he says. “And it got real big; it fooled them.”

These contests were a prelude to the U.S. Surfboard Championships, which started in 1958 at the Huntington Beach Pier and were held there each year through 1969. The competition, which was rotated to different sites in the early ‘70s before giving way to professional surfing, involved many of the world’s best surfers and attracted crowds of up to 75,000 to Huntington Beach. In 1982, the Assn. of Surfing Professionals started staging at Huntington Beach a major contest featuring the world’s best surfers. ASP’s Bill Sharp says this event has become the world’s largest in terms of spectators.

Orange County also paved the way on the high school level when coastal schools started holding competitions in the early ‘70s. In 1975, Marina High School in Huntington Beach had more students sign up for surfing than varsity football. That year, some schools petitioned the Southern Section of the California Interscholastic Federation to sanction the sport but were turned down. In 1978, surfers established the National Scholastic Surfing Assn. in Huntington Beach, which helped organize surfing programs for high schools and colleges.

Before surfing tournaments became serious, however, Watson and his buddies were holding contests for fun. Watson’s winning wave in 1929 was estimated as a 10-footer, but Harrison says that the breakers often reached heights of 20 feet. The big waves made for exciting times.

For example, there was the day Mac Beal broke three surfboards on the jetty in three hours. Watson says many surfers crashed their boards on a concrete jetty after a wipeout, but few had the sour luck of Beal, who lost his board on a rough day and could do nothing but watch as it washed in and smashed against the rocks.

He swam in and sat dejectedly on the beach until a friend loaned him a board. But Beal lost his friend’s board, which also washed up and was demolished on the rock jetty. “Mac came in swearing he’d never borrow another board, but it wasn’t long before he’d been talked into paddling out again on a generous friend’s mount,” Tucker wrote.

And so ended board No. 3, also lost in the rocks. Quipped Tucker: “Mac flew P-38s for the Air Force during World War II but didn’t crack up one as far as I know.”

The days of fun and surf, however, were numbered at Corona del Mar. Government officials, trying to turn Newport Beach into a safe harbor for small craft, commissioned the dredging of the channel. By 1935, surfing was all but lost when the rock jetty was extended outward beyond the natural break, effectively obstructing the waves.

Harrison remembers the day in 1935 when Corona del Mar’s waves became so dismal that the surfers packed three carloads of friends and drove to San Onofre. After their discovery of the good waves there, they never returned to Corona del Mar.

“We wanted a remote place where we wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. San Onofre was great; there was nothing there.”

Although it’s about two miles beyond the Orange County border, San Onofre became an integral part of the county’s surfing lore. Its expansive beaches provided a haven for surfers and proved to be a magnet for Los Angeles youths searching for the endless summer. Many of the San Onofre regulars took up residence in nearby San Clemente and Dana Point. They also found favorable surf at Dana Point, which they called “Killer Dana,” until August 1966, when construction of a small boat harbor began.

The 1930s turned into the ‘40s, and times changed for surfing. Most of the San Onofre regulars were involved in World War II in some capacity, and surfing for the most part was dormant.

In a subtle way, though, the war had an influence on surfing. With the United States becoming a naval power, the need for aquatic products intensified. One tinkerer who helped the Navy was Bob Brown, who, according to Higgins, invented the spearfishing swim fin.

In 1945, Brown was manufacturing fins for the Navy on Garfield Street in Huntington Beach. The Navy asked him to try making a rubber wet suit. According to Higgins, Brown made a mold of a figure of a man, dipped it in liquid rubber, then cooked it in steam. Wet suits, of course, have turned surfing into a year-round venture.

By the late ‘40s, even the sanctuary of surfing was ripe for modernization. It was the age of plastics, and some surfers began experimenting with fiberglass surfboards. Their imaginations helped spawn the surfing industry, whose roots can be traced to the San Onofre regulars living in Dana Point and Capistrano Beach.

When Dow chemists developed Styrofoam for use in making floats in harbors, surfers finally had a material both durable and light enough to produce better surfboards. Much of the innovation was done in Palos Verdes by surfers such as Bob Simmons and Joe Quigg, who also spent many a day at San Onofre.

But it was a kid who spent his summers in Laguna Beach, Hobie Alter, who advanced board-building to an art form. Alter, who opened one of the world’s first surfboard shops in a Laguna Beach garage in the early 1950s, began in the early ‘60s mass producing 10-foot boards that were made of plastic products and had a balsa wood strip down the center.

Alter had help. Gordon (Grubby) Clark, who had earned a physics and mathematics degree from Pomona College, began a foam company nearby that today is one of the largest manufacturers of Styrofoam surfboard blanks. These blanks, shaped like wooden 2x4 planks, are turned into custom-made surfboards.

Innovations were not limited to water-related products. Accessories, including clothing, became important. Guiding the country’s fashion palate were Capistrano Beach’s Hoffman brothers, Walter and Philip, who in the early 1960s started the casual beach-wear designs with floral print and pin-stripe shirts.

About the same time, Jon Severson, who has since moved to Maui, left Los Angeles to start Surfer magazine in Dana Point. Today, Surfer and Surfing, the sport’s oldest publications, are based in the south county.

The surfing-film industry also mushroomed from these roots with the help of photographer Bud Brown. Such films as “The Endless Summer” and “Five Summer Stories” were produced by south county film makers. Some of the scenes featured Orange County surfers.

The transformation of a casual sport into a multimillion-dollar industry with its own films and magazines has had its effect on the evolution of surfing as well.

The Corona del Mar and San Onofre surfers experimented with better surfboards as they sought innovations. They were not content to ride an immobile 10-foot piece of wood. They wanted to defy the laws of gravity when gliding up and down a fast-breaking wave.

Phil Edwards of Dana Point, a 51-year-old catamaran builder, changed forever the way people surf by using the edge of his surfboard to cut across the surface.

Edward’s innovative style in the 1950s was the steppingstone for county surfers in the 1960s and beyond with Corky Carroll of San Clemente, Brad McCaul of Newport Beach and Mickey Munoz of Laguna Beach gaining international recognition for their personal styles.

They might have come from different eras, but they all had an affinity for the sea. For many of them, that bond still has a tight grip.

Kellar Watson says he went bodysurfing at Dana Point last year at age 81. As the waves brought him tumbling toward the shore, long-dormant memories of a bygone era were awakened.

“I think back to those days as being the best times of my life,” Watson says. “Looking at those waves at Dana Point, well, I couldn’t resist it.”

Just like that summer day in ’28 when he saw his first surfer.