TODAYS COLUMN IN THE OC REGISTER SURFING THROUGH THE YEARS …. PART 2 By Corky Carroll Last week I began a brief look through the past 60 years that I have been surfing. I started to do a year in review piece but then figured since it has been 60, and that has to be some sort of minor milestone, I would try and give as brief a recap on the whole period as far as surfing, the surfing industry and my own participation in the whole thing as possible. I am working on a book that will be in much more detail, but thought a short run through of the main events would be fun. We left off in the spring of 1964 and I had just been put on salary by Hobie Surfboards to be the first full time professional surfer. Shortly after that I signed on with Jantzen Swimwear to be a part of their Jantzen International Sports Club. This was a similar and more compact version of the Miller Lite All Stars, which I would become a part of much later. At that time the surfwear industry was just starting to become a reality. There had been custom surf trunks available from such brands as Kanvas by Katin here in Orange County and Take and M. Nee in Hawaii. The first big surfwear brand was Hang Ten, which was started in Seal Beach by a lady named Doris Moore and a dude named Duke Boyd. Dukes first sales call was to the Ole shop in Seal Beach where Mickey Munoz was the manager. I just happened to be there that day and heard the whole thing. Mickey thought it was a great thing and ordered and the rest is, as they say, surf history. The door was now open for the giant companies that would follow such as Ocean Pacific, etc. etc. etc. I did my best to steer Jantzen into a line of cool looking surfwear and appeared in their ads on the back cover of SURFER magazine for many years. The really big thing that happened in the summer of 1964 was the release of the epic surf film, “the Endless Summer.” The film had been made by a Dana Point surfer named Bruce Brown and was about the journey of two surfers, Robert August and Mike Hynson, on their search for perfect surf while following summer around the world. Bruce was a well-respected surf moviemaker and this was his masterpiece. He had a couple of private showings of the film and then did an eleven city premier tour down the East Coast. For the tour he hooked up with Hobie and put together a combo movie showing and surfing exhibition package. They got a mobile home and loaded themselves along with Phil Edwards, Joey Cable, Mike Hynson and myself into the thing for the cross county drive and then down the Eastern seaboard from New York City to Miami Beach. Bruce, Hobie and Phils wives also came along. One of the highlights of that trip for me was doing the first skateboard exhibition on national television. 16 year old me wearing a full suit and leather shoes went on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to show off the new “craze” of skateboarding. It wasn’t much of an exhibition as I only did a couple of easy turns and that was it. I had decked some dude in the audience during rehearsal when my board flew out from under me due to the extremely slippery floor. So for the live broadcast they wanted me to not kill anybody. Johnny was gonna try it but changed his mind when he saw them take out the spectator on a stretcher. It was an amazing tour and almost everywhere we went at least 10,000 people would show up to watch us surf, and most of the places more. Our first show in New York was a mind blower. The surf was tiny at Gilgo Beach and there were so many people that they waded out into the water to get a better view of our surfing exhibition. Problem was they waded all the way out to where we were sitting waiting for a tiny wave to come along. In order to ride one we would have to mow down dozens of onlookers standing there gawking at us. It was classic. This was the beginning of the enormous surfing boom on the East Coast that would change the entire surfing industry forever. Stay tuned for part 3 next week.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 17:44:04 +0000
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