SURFING YEARS IN REVIEW
By Corky Carroll
Normally at this time of the year I list off my resolutions for the coming one, and normally they never come true because they always have to do with losing weight and getting more tuned up. But I stay the same year after year so it’s really hopeless at this point to keep going on about it. Instead I decided to do a year in review story.
But then I realized that this marks the end of my SIXTIETH YEAR surfing and that being at least some sort of little milestone made me decide to do a sixty years in review story instead. Sooooo, with that task in mind here we go on my little adventure through the years. Of course this will be abbreviated due to the fact that to tell the whole story would be a book, and that is a separate project. What I would like to do is highlight important things that happened in the sport, and to me too, along the way.
I rode my fist wave when I was seven on a board that belonged to a dude named Larry Conroy. I had snuck it out of his backyard when he wasn’t home. It was a big solid balsawood plank. This was in the mid 1950’s and the state of the art surfboards were all solid balsawood. In about 1957 Hobie Alter started working with polyurethane foam to make lighter boards. He and Gordon “Grubby” Clark developed a new surfboard blank that cut a lot of weight off the average board and made surfing much more accessible to all ages and to women as well. The wood boards were so heavy that it was hard for anybody except dudes in great shape to lug them around. The new “foamies” opened the door for anybody to surf and had a lot to do with the upcoming surfing boom of the early 1960’s. That, and the movie Gidget combined created the enormous “fad” of surfing that took over the country. Surfing went from “a few water beat nicks along the California coast and in Hawaii to a world wide addiction almost overnight. I grew up in the middle of all this.
In 1959 they held the first big “West Coast Surfing Championship” at Huntington Beach. This would morph into the “United States Surfing Championship” in 1961 and later into the “OP Pro,” “Gotcha Pro,” some other “Pros” and eventually into the current U.S. Open of Surfing. At about the time this event got under way other smaller surf events started taking place up and down the coast. There had been the Makaha International in Hawaii even before this, but it was in the early 1960’s that surfing competition really took off in a big way. Within a few years there were events every weekend at one beach or the next. I won my first at San Clemente in 1962 and then my first big one was the Jr. Men’s at the United States Championship in 1963.
What had only been a small handful of surfboard builders all of a sudden blossomed into a full-fledged surfboard industry. The manufacturing of boards went from the back of the sales shops to big modern surfboard factories almost overnight. I still remember in the early days when you walked into a surf shop you could smell the resin from the boards being made in the back room. And other than the boards themselves about the only other thing you could buy was maybe a t shirt or one of the early surf magazines.
Surfer (magazine) hit the market in 1960 and immediately became the “bible” of surfing. I read and reread every word in that thing at least 100 times. The first issue went along with the release of a surf film titled "Surf Fever." Both were produced by surfing artist and photographer John Severson (John Severson's SURF). A year later SURFER came out as a quarterly magazine then would later go bi monthly and eventually monthly. The influence that this magazine had on the surfing world was massive. The photos glamorized the surf stars of the time and helped to forge the fledgling surfing industry to get on its feet.
In the spring of 1964 Hobie Alter put me on salary to do nothing but surf. I became the first actual full time Professional Surfer!
Stay tuned next week for PART TWO.
*Pictured: Surfer Magazine's July 2009 issue
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