The First Wave

Jack Cantrell casts an eye at the crowded surf outside the window of his Faria Beach home and chuckles incredulously at the unfolding scene.

Two surfers paddle frantically for one of the small, sloppy waves. One stands and rides for four seconds before the wave peters out. The conditions could hardly be worse: small surf blunted by a high tide and a steady west wind.

Yet two more surfers leap into the water to join the half-dozen others already battling for the mushy waves.

“It looks almost like more trouble than it’s worth,” says the 70-year-old Cantrell. “But they’ll surf just about anything these days.”

Forty years ago, he was about the only one surfing this gentle break, dubbed Mandos for an old Mexican fish shack that stood nearby. Cantrell remembers when he could count the number of surfboards in Ventura County on his fingers.

He recalls sitting on the rocky beach at Rincon on cold mornings waiting for someone to show up so he wouldn’t have to surf alone. And the weekends spent with friends riding the short, meaty waves at Stanley’s--a once-favored surf spot that was swallowed by the Seacliff offramp 20 years ago. He remembers drinking beer and swapping stories about the day’s longest rides at Roger and Pam Kolblaugh’s old beach house at the end of Palm Street in Ventura. The spot is now a hive of condominiums.

That was back in the 1950s. Before wetsuits and epoxy resins. Before the birth of the California beach culture. Back when people, no matter how different, became lifetime friends because they shared the “stoke.”

“Back a long time ago I’d be happy just to see someone else on the beach, but take a look at it now,” Cantrell said. “It’s a zoo.”

Today, the coastlines of the world are crowded with more than 3 million surfers, riding breaks from Peru to Pismo to Padang Padang. The sport is a billion-dollar industry replete with photogenic superstars and big-money endorsements. Last year, more than 500,000 surfboards were sold. A dozen magazines are dedicated to the sport. Three different professional tours now lavish millions in prize money every year.

Ventura County and the early surfers who charged its immaculate breaks helped lay the foundation for all of this. Besides being home to some of Southern California’s first surfers, it had several of the nation’s first surf shops. It also played host to the world’s first professional surfing competition.

It was where one of the first women to surf earned a storied reputation hooking 10-foot waves at Rincon. And along its beaches, icons such as Mickey Dora, Jim Fisher and Greg Noll pushed the sport’s physical and aesthetic frontiers.

Yet those contributions have largely gone unrecognized, in favor of surf meccas such as Huntington Beach, Malibu and Waimea.

While the glamorous, money-soaked sport of today owes a tremendous debt to the beaches and people of Ventura County of 40 and 50 years ago, Cantrell isn’t waiting for any special recognition.

“Credit?” Cantrell asks rhetorically. “No one’s ever paid us any attention, so the place never got much of that.”

The Birth of Surfing

The story of surfing predates Ventura County’s earliest surfers by 3,000 years.

Hawaiians made it central to their K’apu social and religious system, but it wasn’t until 1907 that surfing took root on the U.S. mainland.

That’s when George Freeth--the “bronze mercury” described by novelist Jack London in his essays on the sport--moved to Redondo Beach from Hawaii to promote Southern California’s beaches for the Pacific Electric Railroad.

Trying to increase ticket sales on the company’s coastal line, the P & E hired Freeth to put on surfing exhibitions around Santa Monica Bay.

Inspired by Freeth, people began shaping their own boards from whatever materials they could find and headed out to ride the long Pacific swells.

By the early 1930s, there were about 100 surfers in California. They surfed the Palos Verdes coves, San Onofre and the long, sandy shores of Manhattan Beach.

As their numbers grew, so did the hunger for bigger and more spectacular waves.

That sent surfers streaming south to Baja, Mexico and north to a backwater Ventura County.

Bill Flores remembers the enthusiasts well. It was a sunny day in 1932 when he happened to see a handful of surfers riding the crumbling shore-break just south of the Ventura Pier.

“What they were doing was amazing. . . . They looked like these beautiful statues when they rode a wave,” recalled Flores, now 85. “I guess that’s kind of what did it to me. . . . After that, I was hooked.”

Although he doubts it, Flores is considered by many to be, if not the first, then one of Ventura County’s earliest surfers.

He began riding a paddle board owned by his brother Emilio, a lifeguard at Ventura State Beach.

Compared to the scalpel-like precision engineered into today’s surfboards, Flores’ was a languorous log.

More than 14 feet long, the plywood board weighed close to 85 pounds. It had no skeg, or fin, for control, and took on water almost every time out.

“I lost it one time and watched it ride in with the wave and hit my sister in the head. . . . After that I was always kind of nervous about surfing around people,” said Flores, a quiet man with salt-and-pepper hair whose smooth, shiny skin belies his age.

Not that crowds were much of a concern. In the early 1930s, Ventura was home to as many bean fields and oil derricks as people. To early residents, Flores was considered a bit eccentric.

“Sometimes you got some funny looks from people,” he said. “But it was nice. . . . Whenever I went, I was the only one out, and I kind of liked it that way.”

Just 20 miles north, however, at the Ventura and Santa Barbara county line, another group of surfers was beginning to explore a remote point break that would later be known as the Rincon.

Then called “Three Mile” because it was three miles south of the Carpinteria train depot, the Rincon is one of only a few California surfing spots--such as Trestles, Mavericks and Steamer Lane--whose name resonates with surfers around the world.

In the early 1930s, the Rincon was little more than a nondescript spit of rock jutting into the ocean.

Gates Foss, then a gangly, towheaded teenager out of the Arizona desert, saw this and decided it looked about as good a place as any place to surf.

Foss, who died in 1990 at the age of 75, is considered the first person to ride the Rincon. He rode boards similar to Flores’ and would charge the breaking rights on gray winter mornings wearing nothing more than cutoff denim shorts and a surplus army sweater to beat back the cold.

The waves broke smoothly, peeling along the sloping point, powerful enough to propel heavy boards hundreds of yards.

Foss and a handful of friends had the Rincon almost to themselves until the 1950s, when men such as Cantrell and the Malibu “hot-doggers” learned of it.

Mastering the Sport

In the novel “Moby Dick,” Herman Melville writes: “There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.”

Anyone familiar with the ocean, its moods, quirks, serenity and violence understands what Melville was saying.

His desire to surmount that mystery and that violence is what lay behind Cantrell’s passion for surfing. A passion that, despite his failing eyesight, a heart attack and bad knees, keeps him looking toward the horizon for signs of a good swell that will reveal the hidden soul beneath.

For most of his life, Cantrell has lived within spitting distance of the ocean.

A third-generation Venturan, Cantrell didn’t know what surfing was until the early 1940s, when he saw Flores paddling around off the beach near what is now Sanjon Road. A few years later, Cantrell got his first surfboard--an 11-foot balsa board with a scalloped nose and a squash tail that weighed close to 50 pounds.

He surfed Mandos when he was still learning the sport’s subtle moves. The break was a good place to “get the hang of it,” Cantrell said, because the waves moved in like lazy ripples due to the gently sloping sand bottom.

“There wasn’t a lot to worry about with those waves,” he said.

Later, with friends such as Tom Williams and Tom Hale, Cantrell trekked up to the Rincon. It wasn’t difficult to adapt to the larger, more powerful surf, he said, but it was more mentally challenging and “a lot more fun.”

Williams remembers those days at the Rincon as “pristine moments” compared with the territoriality of surfers crowding the lineup today.

“It was like a little fraternity out there,” he said. “Yes, surfing was something that we all did individually, but it was something that you shared with other people, and it was the best when you did it at Rincon.”

Depending on the swell, its direction and wind patterns, the county’s early surfers would venture up and down the deserted coastline picking the best spots.

Cantrell, Williams and others drove to Stanley’s, a surf spot near Seacliff named after an old clapboard diner that once stood there. Or they would head to California Street or Secoits, now known as Leo Carrillo State Beach, to surf the fast rights that peak behind the rocks.

“There were a lot of good places to surf back then,” recalled Williams, now 61 and a manager for a Ventura laboratory that tests construction materials.

“You’d surf all day, then head in and roast a pig on the beach. . . . There was never a bad time.”

‘Mandos Mary’s’

In the living room near the front door of Mary Monks’ home hangs a framed piece of wood glossed over with shellac. On it is a soliloquy written in faded black ink.

“The first time I surfed here was in fifty-six and they called it ‘Mandos Mary’s,’ ” it reads. “As I waited for a set that at no time would I forget, I asked why they called it Mary’s. . . . I was told who she was and later that year I met her and she surfed this spot no matter what size so they called it ‘Mandos Mary’s’ and the fame of her surfing and of her own surf spot spread from Rincon to Cumkerry.”

Monks’ husband, Bob, found the wood plank propped up on the patio of their old Faria Beach cottage almost 30 years ago. It is one of her few mementos attesting to the fame she achieved as one of the nation’s first female surfers.

“That thing’s pretty nice,” said Monks, now a plucky 80. “I don’t know who wrote it for sure, but I think it was probably one of those boys who used to come around here.”

Although she hasn’t surfed in more than 30 years, Monks still has vivid memories of her days among the swells. She took up the sport in 1953 while vacationing in Hawaii, renting “a board and some man” to teach her.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was surfing that day, but I sure as heck was having some fun, and it hooked me,” she said.

When she returned to Ventura, Monks worked for three years to save $160 to purchase boards for her husband, son and herself.

She visited Greg Noll, a legendary big-wave surfer from Hawaii, to see if he would shape the boards. At the time, Noll was living in a shack in the hills behind Carpinteria, shaping boards on a mahogany dining table to make ends meet.

Within a few weeks, he shaped Monks’ three honey-colored balsa boards, each longer than 8 feet and outfitted with a single, fiberglass fin.

By the late 1950s, Monks was a regular at the Rincon and earned respect among her male peers for being a tenacious and fearless surfer.

“She knew what to do when she got up on a wave,” Williams said. “But she wiped out a lot because she went after everything. . . . It was never a problem--she’d just let out this big ‘Wahoo!’ and paddle right back out.”

At the time Monks lived with her family in a small house near the end of Pitas Point at the north end of Faria Beach. She began surfing there because it was convenient.

Cantrell, who also surfed the Rincon break, began calling her Mandos Mary, a moniker that has stuck to this day.

Later, people started calling the south end of the point “Mary’s,” or “Mandos Mary’s.”

The name even showed up in the legendary 1967 “Guide to Southern California Surfing.”

“Can you believe they actually put that into that surf book?” she said. “I still can’t believe it. . . . We just surfed there because it was right outside the house.”

Then Came ‘Gidget’

Most of the county’s early surfers agree on the moment when the sport changed forever.

It was the summer of 1959, right after Columbia Pictures released the movie “Gidget.”

Sandra Dee, who portrayed the perky Gidget, falls in with a group of surf bums in Bahama shorts who spend their days at the beach surfing and strumming ukuleles.

The movie rocketed the California beach lifestyle and surfing into the pantheon of popular culture.

“It was kind of funny how fast everything changed after that,” said Hale, now 56 and living with his wife in Jackson, Calif. “Before that, you had to find someone to go surfing with, but after that, you couldn’t get away from everybody in the water.”

Cantrell didn’t like it. “It was liking watching mushrooms sprout,” he said. “You’d be out there surfing one day with five other people and then there’s 10, then 20, then I don’t know how many more.”

But the newfound popularity brought opportunities.

In 1960, Hale opened the Ventura Surf Shop, the county’s first business dedicated solely to the sport. Located in an old garage off Olive Street in Ventura, the business sold custom surfboards and straw sun hats.

A few years later, surfing industry pioneer Tom Morey, who would later develop the foam body board, opened the Australian Surf Shop in a Ventura warehouse at the west end of Santa Clara Street.

“He was a real innovator and was a lot better at the business end of things than I was,” remembered Hale. “He was really the one who realized how big the business could be.”

Looking for a way to promote his fledgling enterprise, Morey decided to hold a surfing competition.

The Tom Morey Invitational, the sport’s first professional contest, was held July 4, 1965, at California Street in Ventura.

Unlike other competitions in which judges scored a surfer’s finesse on a wave, Morey’s contest awarded only the longest nose rides. The lure of a $2,000 cash prize attracted the sport’s elite riders: Mickey Munoz, Dewey Weber, Mike Doyle and Corky Carroll.

With them came photographers, journalists and filmmakers such as Bruce Brown, who would earn acclaim for the film classic “The Endless Summer.”

“To be honest, the whole thing was kind of strange,” said Hale, a contest official. “I don’t think I’d ever seen so many people surfing C Street. . . . But the whole thing was a really good time.”

Malibu surfer Munoz won the contest with a combined 67 seconds riding the nose. Ventura resident Terry Jones got the third-longest nose ride at 5.1 seconds.

Some Things Never Change

Cantrell doesn’t go out much anymore. The waves are crowded with hundreds of other surfers, who bob among the swells like the flotsam ejected from a storm-swollen river.

“Too many people fighting for waves, yelling at each other and just being mean,” he said.

But that doesn’t diminish the sport’s allure. He still relishes the burn of salt in his eyes, the sore shoulders from paddling and the indescribable feeling of gliding along a wall of water.

“No matter how crowded it is, that’ll never change,” he said.

And although Ventura County has never gained the fame of Malibu and San Onofre, its legacy is enshrined in the memories of the men and women who surfed there. They never got on a board looking for fame anyhow. All they wanted were good waves and long rides.

“I don’t think any of us knew that surfing would be the thing that it is today,” Hale said. “To us it was just fun, and that’s the way I’ll always remember it.”