Santa Cruz Sentinel

Santa Cruz Style

Subscribe

The original members of the SantaCruz Surfing Club with their vintage boards pose in 1941 and has become the stuff of county lore.

The Mighty Bosco, and other swell guys

It’s a compelling photograph: 11 guys, bare-chested and posed in front of hilariously oversized surfboards. They’re young, healthy, and blissfully lacking in adult responsibility. The caption reads: Santa Cruz Surfing Club, June 1941.

The photograph perfectly captures a moment in an age of innocence.

In Santa Cruz, a family could rent a furnished 13-room house for $15 a month. Only a handful of cars drove down Mission Street each day. World War II was a distant conflict; America’s involvement was over a year away.

Who were these strapping young men? And where the heck did they get those boards?

The Beach Boys hadn’t been born yet, so how did these early surfers know what to wear, let alone how to catch a wave?

Did they go off to war?

Where are they now?

Harry Mayo, third board from the right, is the keeper of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club’s flame. He’s a jaunty 76 years old, still trim and active in such community organizations as the Salvation Army’s emergency canteen.

A retired fire captain living with his wife Judy on the Eastside, Mayo keeps meticulously organized scrapbooks recording the glory days of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club, 1936 to 1952.

When asked how much dues were, Mayo is able to refer to the club’s original ledger books. (It cost $5 a year, plus 50 cents a month to stash a board in the Cowell Beach boardhouse.) In June 1941, the Santa Cruz Surfing Club had 27 card-carrying members.

"We consider ourselves the first Santa Cruzans of surf," says Mayo, who was a senior at Santa Cruz High School when the picture was taken.

Here’s the story behind the picture: To entice visitors to the Boardwalk, the Seaside Company hired a photographer to shoot publicity photos of the strapping young fellows who could be found on the beach in Santa Cruz.

The photographer showed up at Cowell’s on a June weekend. The Sunday photo is now available as a postcard and emblazoned on a T-shirt for sale at the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum, where surviving members of the club show up on Friday afternoons to shoot the breeze with anyone who cares to chat about the early days of surfing.

"I know that this was the Sunday photograph because Sunday was my day off," says Mayo.

Though later generations of surfers would gain reputations as beach bums, Mayo is quick to point out that all the members of the Surfing Club were upright citizens. None of the teenagers drank or smoked, according to Mayo. If the older guys did, they indulged elsewhere.

In the wake of the Depression, all Surfing Club members were in school and/or holding down two or three jobs. For example, both Mayo and Thompson delivered the Sentinel-News before school each morning. In addition, Mayo drove a truck for Ledyard’s Wholesale Grocers.

None of the surfers really had their names on the boards. The writing you see in the photo was added to the publicity shots by the Seaside Company.

Several names in the picture are misspelled: Don Patterson had two "t’s" in his name; the "a" is missing from Harry Murray, and Tommy Roussel only has one "l."

While growing up in Santa Cruz, boys like Mayo, Thompson, Alex "Pinky" Pedemonte, and Dave "Buster" Steward spent as much time as the could at the beach, goofing off, swimming, body surfing.

Steward recalls the days that a man could be fined for being bare-chested on the beach.

Though topless men were permitted on the beach by the mid-1930s, for warmth the boys wore their fathers’ old woolen two-piece suits (or ones purchased at the Goodwill for 10 cents). The wet suit was years away from being invented. (Steward wears one of those wool tops in the photograph.)

In 1936 surfing was an established sport in the warmer waters off Hawaii and southern California. There one could buy professionally shaped, solid-plank boards, which were state-of-the-art in the days before fiberglass and styrofoam-filled sticks.

San Jose State attracted a number of college surfers from Southern California, who found their way to Santa Cruz.

The first surfers:

The locals were impressed by the sight of these guys catching waves and "sittin’ on top of the world" (as the Beach Boys would later describe the sport) — and made a deal: If they’d teach the locals to surf, the college guys could stash their boards in Buster’s barn, and sleep there on weekends to catch early morning surf.

The Santa Cruz boys made their surfboards in shop class, using instructions published in Popular Mechanics for lifesaving paddleboards. Pedemonte recalls spending about $12 for materials.

These early boards were barge-like and hollow, 10 to 12 feet long, constructed from marine plywood on top and bottom, redwood panels along the sides, pine in the nose and tail.

Each board weighed about 60 pounds, 100 pounds by the time they inevitably filled with water. The boys would have to drain the boards at the end of the day, plugging the drainhole with cork found on the beach.

When the college guys weren’t around, "It was trial and error (to learn to surf)," says Bob Gillies, who was an original member of the Surfing Club but is not in the photograph because he was working that day.

"We fell down a lot. But we always followed the Red Cross rules of never going into the water alone."

"It was a good thing, because I didn’t know how to swim," Mayo says. "I surfed long before I could swim."

The neophyte surfers were soon joined by beach lifeguards like Don Patterson (first board, far left), a local legend known as "The Mighty Bosco."

On Friday and Saturday nights at the Boardwalk, the Plunge (the natatorium now a miniature golf course inside Neptune’s Palace) hosted a water carnival, featuring bathing beauties, stunt divers and trapeze artists.

Patterson would wrap himself in old bathing suits and long johns, light himself on fire, and dive off a high platform into the pool.

In the summer he took his act outdoors, sliding on a cable from the top of the Coconut Grove rotunda into the water out past the breaker line.

Harry Murray (second board on the left, next to Patterson) was also in show. Murray would hang onto Patterson during a trapeze act and, sometimes, during Patterson’s Slide for Life into the ocean.

Bill Grace (sixth board from the left) was already a notorious local legend by the time he started surfing.

In 1938 when he was 16, Grace made headlines after he and some friends "borrowed a yacht and set off to sail to the South Seas.

They made it as far as Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they were detained by local officials. The owner arrived to get his boat, and the boys agreed to help sail it back to Santa Cruz. Grace was made a ward of the court and placed in the custody of his aunt.

In the summer of 1938, Grace spied Steward surfing at Cowell’s and thought it looked like fun. He asked to measure Steward’s board and made one for himself.

Grace then became one of the first boardmakers in Santa Cruz. He continues designing and constructing them to this day.

Grace and Steward made the pattern for the board held by the bronze, surfing statue overlooking Steamer Lane.

The Club:

In 1939 the Santa Cruz Surfing Club was formalized with dues, by-laws and membership cards. The local Jaycees built a boardhouse next to the Wharf on Cowell’s Beach, where the surfers could lock their boards when not in use.

The club dues were used to pay rent to the city (the boardhouse was on city property) and to make T-shirts and warm, hooded jackets emblazoned with the club logo (good for meeting girls).

The surfers would build giant bonfires against the cliffs at Cowell’s where the West Coast Hotel now stands (all the remaining members still refer to the place as the Dream Inn). After spending hours in the chilly water, they’d roast their blue bodies next to the fire, turning themselves like frankfurters over an open flame.

Sometimes they’d strap their surfboards to the top of Bob Gillies’ Model A, securing the boards with clothes line and journey further south to Pleasure Point or beyond.

But most of the action took place at Cowell’s, where there was a bathhouse, a concession stand, a hamburger shack, and the original Ideal Fish company, located on the Cowell’s side of the beach. In those days they boys could buy a huge sack of french fried potatoes for a quarter.

"We had a lot of fun," says Mayo, "and nobody got hurt."

December 7, 1941:

The radio at the bathhouse broadcast the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

":Our lives were forever changed," says Bill Grace.

The age of innocence was over.

The older members of the surfing club had already enlisted in the National Guard reserves, and they shipped out the following morning.

Gillies and Bill Grace hitchhiked to San Francisco to sign up for service, Gillies in the Coast Guard, Grace in the Merchant Marine.

The younger guys had a semester or two of high school to finish before enlisting. Eventually, every member of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club served during the war.

As luck would have it, Harry Mayo (who had enlisted in the Coast Guard), was assigned duty on the Santa Cruz Wharf.

"I thought a lot about Harry on the Wharf while I was sitting in a foxhole in Germany," says Pedemonte, who joined the Army and went to the front lines in Europe.

During the war, the hamburger shack at Cowell’s wasn’t able to get meat. The Surfing Club leased the building as a clubhouse, where they played cards and strummed ukuleles out of the cold when the surf was flat. At the end of the war, the club purchased the shack for $210.

None of the guys in the surfing club were killed or seriously injured in the way, although Fred Hunt hurt his knee and stopped surfing.

But the spirit on the beach wasn’t the same when the guys came home. Boys had become men.

One by one they married high school sweethearts or girls they met on the beach, and served as best men and ushers at each other’s weddings.

They started families, had bills to pay and less time to surf. The cost to rent a spot in the boardhouse skyrocketed to $10 a month.

They tried to attract younger surfers to the club, but the glamorous era of surfing — featuring the Beach Boys’ first national hit "Surfin’ Safari" and the Frankie and Annette beach party movies — was a decade away.

In 1952 the Santa Cruz Surfing Club disbanded.

Today:

The original members of the Surfing Club have remained close friends over the years, even though they eventually gave up surfing. Today only Bill Grace had plans to return to the waves, as soon as he finishes the new board he’s building.

In the 1980s the club held several reunions, with their pictures in the paper and a dinner dance at someplace swanky.

"What has kept us together is the lighthouse," says Alex "Pinky" Pedemonte, now 75.

The Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse was built in 1967 by the nationally known photography team of Charles and Esther Abbott, whose son died while surfing in 1965. His ashes are interred at the foot of the steps leading to the light tower.

Originally open to the public as a gallery of Ms. Abbott’s oil paintings, the lighthouse was converted to a surfing museum in 1986.

Operated by the city, the museum houses the memorabilia of Santa Cruz’s pioneer surfers, including photographs culled from Mayo’s extensive archives and several of those oversized, antique surfboards.

On Fridays Mayo and whoever else is up to it volunteer at the surfing museum. They wear matching blue windbreakers with their names stitched on the front, the Surfing Club logo on the back.

Interviewing them as a group is like trying to talk to an uncapped blender, with memory and anecdotes enthusiastically flying in all directions. They bicker about details of events that happened 60 years ago, and laugh heartily together.

In Steamer Lane, a favorite surf spot located below the cliffs of the surfing museum, the current generation is decked out in neoprene, riding streamlined, lightweight boards.

The pioneers seem content to stay warm and dry inside the lighthouse.

They seem amused that surfing evolved into a lifestyle.

"We were by ourselves, not popular, not thought too much of," says Mayo. "One father warned his son (about hanging out with us): ‘If you lie down with dogs you come up with fleas.’

"We were the dogs."

The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum is in the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse at Lighthouse Point on West Cliff Drive. Call 420-6289

Hours: Noon to 4 p. m., closed Tuesdays

Admission: Donation encouraged

Subscribe