For generations, Ventura has thrived on the dedication and determination of extraordinary
individuals, cultures, and families that guided and inspired our community.
Family members from these pioneering families celebrate their remarkable histories by sharing
captivating stories and personal memories.
These are Ventura Legacies.
Hello again, welcome to another edition of Ventura Legacies, the program where we share
stories about the history of Ventura with the people who made it happen.
And today's a real treat, a real treat, because we have three surfing legends in our studio
who will share stories of their experiences about the sport they love, simply said.
We've got Betty and Bill, or do you prefer Blinky?
Blinky's fine.
Blinky's fine, and Frank.
So introduce yourself, start one at a time, give us a little background of how you fit
into the equation.
Betty, why don't we start with you?
Do I start from the beginning?
Sure, start wherever you want.
I was born in Ventura.
We lived in a very, very, it was this new area, so there was hardly any houses.
And what was surrounding us was voluntary farms, lima beans, huge areas of lima beans.
We're the Macy's now, is where the lima beans were.
And cars, some people had cars, it was luxury.
And we had to walk everywhere, or ride bikes.
And when the bus started, that was a real neat thing, because you were able to get around
a little bit better.
And what I wanted to do was go to the beach.
So I had the bus take me to Seaward, and then I walked from there, from Thompson to Seaward.
And I walked down, and there wasn't, what we had to do to get down there was to go around
the S-curve, and it was quite a climb.
It was a thing to get, easy to get down, very beautiful climb getting up.
And then we went to the beach, and there was nothing there, except for a few houses.
And now, of course, it's packed.
And we just, I just had the ball down there.
And that's where my, I was probably about ten, when I really started to get hooked on
the ocean.
It didn't matter whether it was lifeguard or not, we just went in the water.
And sometimes we had a little problem, but we managed.
And then as time went on, I did other things.
I worked at the telephone company when I was old enough.
That was a very, very interesting process.
And then as I went along, and my, I got married, had kids, and we became water rats again.
And, and we lived at the beach, Salomar Beach, for almost twenty years.
And that's where we, everybody came out to my house to surf.
So that's how I started to know all these guys.
We got friends nodding over here, yeah.
This was the destination.
Yeah.
This was it.
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
In fact, in fact, in fact, the one of the cutest things that I had at Mikey's Paddle
Out was, this fellow came over to me, I did not know him, but he said he knew me.
And he says, I'll never forget.
You gave me that peanut butter sandwich at your house.
Surfers are always starved.
I thought that was sweet.
So anyway, then I met these guys and that's, you know, it's just, I could go on and on,
but I think it's their turn.
We'll pick it up.
We'll pick it up.
Blinky, where do you fit into the equation?
Well, I was a transplant from Bittsport, Connecticut to Recita in 1951.
And then from Recita, my parents both worked at, my dad worked at Rock and Dime.
My mom worked at Atomics International.
So we moved to Semi Valley when I was in the fifth grade.
And so I was pretty much raised in Semi Valley and when we did go to the beach, my parents
had friends at a beach house up at Seacliff.
So we went there a lot.
And then we'd always went to Point Dune, which my dad used to call beer can gulch.
And there weren't houses at Point Dune either.
And then we'd go to Zuma Beach.
We went there a lot.
And as a kid growing up, we'd go, I would go, when we started surfing, we'd start surfing
until my junior year in high school.
And so we would go to California Street or it was actually closer for us to go to Malibu
in that area there.
And then when I got out of high school in 1961, I went to Ventura College.
And then I was right in my surfing mecca where I wanted to be and probably the best
time ever to be in the surfing area.
I mean, in the era of surfing, the 60s was what they called the golden age of surfing.
So I was right there where I wanted to be, Ventura, going to college, playing football,
surfing.
Just loving it.
Living the life.
Yeah, it was when you're a young man.
Yeah, I had a wonderful life growing up as a young man in Ventura and throughout the
60s.
Very cool.
And yeah, I'm still here.
And the people were great.
Well, the people were especially wonderful.
But it's a great place to grow up.
And then anyway, I went in the surfboard business in the, working for Mori Pope in the 60s.
Went in my own business in 1967.
And I'm still making surfboards.
Wow.
So I'm going to come back to that because I want to know more about that.
Frank.
I grew up in the wilderness of British Columbia.
There was no paved roads or street lights or anything.
I was out there.
And curiously, this place that I heard about called California to someone that doesn't live
here because we take it for granted.
When you live in California, you just assume it.
But up there, the word California was like somewhere halfway between heaven and Disneyland.
And one day we were traveling with my parents and my four other siblings.
My father said, we're going to California.
I remember that moment very clearly because it was like a gong from heaven had gone off
in my head and we're going to California.
And the next, the year after that visit, we moved here was 1961.
I moved here on my 12th birthday.
And I was full on Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies.
There is no question about it.
I had the plaid shirt with the Red Cross badges because I donated some pennies to the Red Cross.
So that was good.
Big Hill was Presley Wave, Claude Hopper boots on.
And I was in Cabrero Junior High School.
And it was just a matter of time until my head was lopped off and was carrying it under
my arm right here because I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on.
It was such a culture shock to be around all these people.
And the surfing guys, people, young ladies and guys, seemed really naturally cool people.
They were just like cool.
And for me, I had to try to be cool, but that's not cool.
People that are naturally cool, like Mike Smith and John Wright and Phil Ranger, they were
just cool every day.
So it was an interesting group to be attracted to.
The first time I ever served a guy named Lloyd Hipp, of all things.
We carried a big, huge longboard down California Street right off the edge of the bluff right
into the water first time.
And being in the ocean and it's moving, you know, when you live on lakes, it's stationary.
But when you actually get down and that water is moving, it was about two, maybe three foot.
And I was like, oh, my God, it was scary.
It was like, yeah, it was like, holy cow, this whole thing is moving here.
So it was very interesting.
It was eye-opener, it was exciting.
It was everything and more than you dreamed of as a person that thought of California
as a place that you could never really go to with something you'd read about or see
on a film.
I hear you.
So.
And you touched on something that, and you, of all touched on it, there's a culture, there's
a community.
You mentioned that you have ceremonies and things for past surfers and things.
It really is a family down at the beach, it seems to me.
It is.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Excuse me.
That's okay.
You can continue.
I've mentioned announcing surf contests, which I've done as a result of my friendship with
Betty, is that there's a street called California that goes right down to the sea.
And there's a fantastic wave down there that people can go and enjoy surfing in California.
One of the coolest places on earth, and there's a city called Ventura with a street called
California, and these beautiful waves.
To me, it's just...
It's free.
Yeah.
It's free, which is to surfers is very important.
No, but it is.
But you know, I thought about that the other day.
I mean, so many other sports, there's all this paraphernalia and all this stuff and you
got to get there.
I know.
You guys just walk out.
Yeah.
And you're there.
Well, there's more to it than that.
But yeah.
But basically, you go out in a pair of trunks at the water's warm and start surfing.
And then there's my good friend, Ned Doheny, who I met surfing in Hawaii.
He said that there's also the surfers that accessorizing was way more important than
surfing to have all of the best and the neatest and the coolest and the newest, and to just
stand there on the beach and be seen.
I am so good.
I don't even want to paddle out.
And that resonated with me because there is that bunch that in the middle of the summer
hot and sweaty, they've got a full wetsuit on with everything in your leg going, dude,
you're killing yourself.
Get to the lycra.
Give me a little education on a surfboard, how they've changed and how, you know, because
you manufacture, you make them.
Yeah.
It's kind of interesting.
I mean, the old, old board, you know, in the 40s and 50s, you should have there wood.
And they weighed a lot of, they're 60, 70 pounds, some of those, these 80 pounds even.
And then in the late 50s, early 60s, they started using polyurethane foam and making
surfboards out of that material, which made them much more lighter, more renewable and
easier for everybody to cart around.
And then in the late part of the 60s became the start of the shortboard revolution, where
the longboards, they were pretty much gone and by the early 70s, and everybody was shortboarding.
So that was wild.
What's the advantage of a shortboard?
I'm not a surfer.
Well, there really, there is no advantage.
I mean, you're the shortboard or the longboard, longboarding is more of a larger board, you're
styling out, doing certain maneuvers that that board lets you do, and the shortboard,
you're thrashing the wave, trying to get every bit of energy out of the wave and do things
with a shortboard.
You're doing two different, completely different things.
Like skiing and snowboarding?
Those are pretty similar in some ways, but they're just different.
And are people, longboard people and people are shortboard people, or do they go back
and forth?
No, a lot of people surf both boards, and that's great.
And then like California Street, you see all the shortboarding surfing up towards the
stables and fairgrounds, where the waves are a little bit crispier, a little faster.
And inside the point the waves roll along, they're a little more gentle, and you'll see
the longboarders out there.
So they're looking at two different, well, I mean, longboarders can ride any kind of
wave too, but inside the point, it's too slow of a wave for the shortboarders generally.
And then there's a lot of longboarders there, so it's harder for them to get waves.
So most of the shortboarders go up farther, farther north, and they sure have beach breaks
because the boards are quicker and sort of smaller waves and faster waves, and they can
do a lot more things on it.
Longboarders, it's a big piece of material that you have to learn how to manipulate,
and it does what it kind of wants to do.
From a business standpoint, how did that evolution take place?
Was there somebody who came up with the, I'm going to, the shortboard idea, and that started
it, or do you have an idea?
Yeah, there was, it started kind of all over in different parts of the world, about the
same time.
I mean, in Ventura, no one had even seen us surfboard until they started making them.
And I have pictures in the paper from 1967 showing a little board and a big board and
all that stuff.
And I did it accidentally.
And then...
What do you mean you did it accidentally?
Well, I was broke, and I needed a surfboard, and all I had was a, was a board I had sawed
the front end off for repair, so I had an eight-foot board instead of a ten-foot board.
So all of a sudden, I made a nine, an eight, a seven-foot, eleven surfboard, and the surfboard
went, oh my God.
And then all my friends went, oh, let me try it, and then pretty soon I was going to,
I had started out making longboards, and I made about 30 or 40 longboards.
And then all of a sudden, I was making shortboards.
Did Mike Cundith and Kevin Sears and Bob McTavish, were they in that very beginning aspect of
the shortboard?
Cundith and Sears weren't in originally.
I was surfing RenCon on my shortboard on a really good day, and I saw another guy out
there on the shortboard on a really good day with me.
And I started to talk to him, and it turned out to be Bob McTavish, and Greener introduced
us, and that was when Greener was driving these old police cars and stuff, they're black
and white.
He was a knee-boarder.
Yeah, and McTavish had just come over from Australia, where he had kind of been the first
kid over there on the block to start making shorter boards.
So we hit it off, because there was nobody around doing it, but the two of us, he was
from Australia, I was from here.
He came to work with me in my shop, I had a little shop on Callens Road.
We started making boards together, and George Greener was in our place making his kneeboards,
and he was making camera housings and all kinds of crazy stuff.
So it was a real frontier beginning right here in Ventura.
Cutting edge.
It was way ahead of a lot of people.
And so that's kind of how it started, between I had quit Morrie Pope, but I was getting
royalties for slip-check, this crazy waxed-be-placed, and I had invented them, because it was for
another deal.
I used to put that on when I worked for him, yeah.
And so I was making up money off my royalties from slip-check, and between Bob's orders
and my orders, I was able to buy my first 55-gallon drum of resin and really start manufacturing.
So it was just a fluke that I was even involved in it.
I mean, why did I make a 7-foot-11 surfboard and start waiting until I saved up enough to
buy a bigger blank?
So it was just something I did, and it worked, and I just knew it worked, and I was excited
about it.
You're also a tester.
I mean, you're out there doing it.
Yeah.
Just like to hand it off to somebody and say, go tell me if this works.
Yeah.
That's how it worked.
Well, the contrast between the shortboard and the longboard is, the shortboard allowed
you to make incredibly critical moves in the most critical part of the wave.
You could do things that you could never do on a longboard before, and it opened up such
a arena of possibilities that they're still exploring to this day.
And so that contrast, where the longboard is sort of like a finesse, it's like a dance
that like a matador or a ballet, or you can mix all these different dance or art mediums
that would apply to the longboard that you don't see so much on the shortboard.
But Betty brought probably one of the best and longest-running longboard contests to
California and to Ventura.
And one of our guests of honor was a person, a rabbit kikai, who was the first one in Hawaii
to take the 12, 13-foot boards that Ducan and Moko and them rode in at Waikiki and cut
it down to close to a 10-footer.
If I am remembering correctly, there was a big concern that the shortboards were going
to take over.
And so about 1985, 1986, it was determined by a very small group, Mike was involved,
you're Mike who's not here anymore, and he wanted to have a contest, just a longboard
contest, nothing else, just longboards, and they had to be a certain length to qualify.
That's how the longboard championships started in 1986.
And they went to 2004.
Really?
Yes, 18 years.
And that's how I got involved.
Even though we had people that were very qualified, that were helping us to get started, we had
one little man who was just, he was just famous for starting out the judging system, you have
to have points, and his name was Hoppy Swartz, and so somebody got him involved.
And our first contest that we had in 1986, we had him doing the scoring.
And he had gotten the formula for how to score the surfers, and there's always six at a time
that you're scoring at the same time.
And then by the time you're through with all the heats, then at the end of the day or the
end of the two days, the men with the highest score are the winners in these divisions.
And we had age groups.
And so I just kind of went around.
I just was somebody who was picking up trash in the very beginning.
We all started out there.
There were people, we had a trailer where Hoppy was reigning with his system.
And the girls were in there doing the, you know, getting the adding up and stuff like
that.
And Bobby Giannelli's wife, and Bobby Giannelli, and I was trying to think of the main people
who were Rick King, Rick King was one of the main men, and Mike Smith, and tons of other
people were involved, but the planning stages were what we had to do.
So I got involved in that.
And so anyway, we successfully ran one contest, and it was very popular.
So we decided to do another.
And on the third one, Hoppy died.
So we had to scratch and learn again all over again how this scoring system worked.
And it took a couple of years of trial and error, but we finally got the system down.
And so then we started just moving on ahead and improving every year.
And they were, at first they were local.
Two years we had locals only, which was a very popular thing.
And when we moved to the city, the city was sponsoring us, they footed the bill, and it
was about the fourth year that they confronted me and said, Betty, you're going to have to
do something because we can't swing the bill on this unless you've got more contestants.
So that's when I said, well, I think we're going to have to open it up.
And everybody was chafing at the bit.
There were some people who are not happy with that.
And we did lose a few who wanted to, who were so desperate to keep it local.
They just fired me.
They literally, and some people were very unhappy and let me know that.
But there was nothing we could do.
So it opened up where I couldn't believe the flood of people that were so, were watching
our contest and wanted to be in it.
Was Ventura on the map, or did this put Ventura on the map, this whole contest?
Pretty much.
Ventura a little bit.
It helped.
The first thing really put Ventura on the map in surfing was the Maureen Polk put up
a professional surf contest in 65.
And in fact, I brought a newspaper article that shows some of it, and you'll see a handsome
looking man's back with a shirt that says, contest, that's me.
I was a beach marshal.
I measured all the surf boards and enforced the rules, so I weighed 197 pounds.
Anyway, that was a thrilling contest, and then you really had all the best in the world
there in Ventura.
The biggest purse ever in the surf contest, in the history of the sport.
And that kind of put Ventura on the map that way.
And Betty worked that contest, too, if I remember, she did some pictures.
Yeah.
She was like her gadget.
The gadget doesn't hold a candle to our Betty.
The gadget could only wish she could buy it in the shadow.
That was Tom Maury's contest.
It was fun.
Well, see, surfing in the 60s, there are only so many surf spots where people went.
I mean, they surfed Ohini, they surfed Dana Point, they surfed Trestles, they surfed
Swamis, Malibu, I mean, Hermosa Beach, Rencon, California Street.
So people traveled.
I mean, it was people traveled hundreds of miles to go surfing, but they had to go to
a certain spot or 50 miles to go here, or, I mean, there was a book called The Surfing
Guide to California, and it listed every surf spot.
And so about, I think, 1963 Billy Delaney and I, we got Woody, we got the book, and off
we went.
We went to every surf spot from, you know, Ventura, of course, down Malibu, all through
all of California, into Mexico.
That was wonderful.
But we went to all these spots.
And that's kind of what it was like, because the longboard, you couldn't really surf a
lot of spots.
When the shark board came into play, and when the leash came into play, people were riding
surfing everywhere.
And there were places like the Richfield Pier.
People never surfed there.
And then when the shortboard came along, they started.
And then they really started surfing.
There were a lot when you had a leash, because if you lost your board, it was in the rocks.
So lots of things changed the surfing industry.
What's unique about surfing Ventura?
Why surf?
Because you mentioned all these spots.
I assume each has its own personality or characteristics.
What's unique about Ventura?
One thing that I think was unique about sort of someone from the outside looking in and
finding my way in was the pack of beatniks that Blinky and his buddies, Steve Imel, Jim
Devine, Bill Delaney, you could name some names.
Homs Cave, Pickens, I mean, these were people that were living life in the moment freely
there.
They were like beach beatniks that listened to Bob Dylan and Herbie Mann and had to swing
in cool parties with awesome chicks to watch the lifestyle that these guys were living.
It was natural to them.
The can of beans, that's all.
There's where's some food, you know, just a little food, some surf.
And that sense of freedom that radiated from that bunch was contagious.
And it was like, wow, man, this is the life.
It was the beginning of the hippies.
In the 60s, it was all hippies.
There was the tooling oil and there was a lot of hippies.
Plus, you know, you had the Vietnamese war going on.
Most of us were trying not to go in.
There was a distinction between the hippies and the surfers though because I moved to
Kauai for almost 20 years.
And there was a hippie culture there.
But there was the surfing culture there.
And they were different.
They were distinctly different.
Although a lot of their behaviors and interests and things overlapped, they were distinctly
different because, and this guy, my son and I went to the World Surfing Championships
in England.
We went to France afterwards to pick grapes.
And a guy from New Zealand said that no matter where in the world you go, surfers are like
a nation unto themselves because they have these strange, similar values, similar nature,
and behaviors that you can always sort of tell, well, this person's got to be a surfer.
There's just something about this one.
No matter where in the world, and I thought that was interesting hearing about it in a
grape field in France from a New Zealander.
But this bunch was, they set a sort of a tone that younger people fell into.
But it was a surfing lifestyle that wasn't so much the hippie thing.
I think the hippie thing was due to come, I suppose.
But even that may have emanated out of the surfing culture.
Well, the music itself, the beach board, the sea, those things start being popular.
They want to be a surfer.
People have, at Woody's, we cruise.
We cruise.
I mean, I don't know how much peroxide and lemon I squeezed on my hair, and I would
take Babywell and iodine and plash myself to get a tan.
And that's what everybody did.
It was kind of silly, but there are a lot of people who want to be surfers, long blonde
hair and played the music and cruising surfers.
A lot of guys just cruising around with the surfboards on their cars and never surfing
hard.
They were doing that in Kansas.
I mean, I'm serious.
At that time, it was a cult.
Yeah.
You were, because you're right, California was mecca.
This is, for that age, that's where you wanted to come.
And you were living it.
You were living it.
Yeah.
It wasn't uncommon to see a guy out sitting on his board surfing and have a pack of cigarettes
roll up in his t-shirt and smoking.
Jan Michael Vincent, did he hang out with you guys?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jack Nicholson.
He was one of my roommates.
I did a lot of time with Jan.
And they had these big Victorian, there was two of them, the White House on Front Street
and then there was a big White House called the House of the Rising Sun.
At the end, right down by California Street, about a block up, right on the ocean.
And the debauchery that must have occurred in there.
I wasn't allowed.
I was too young.
And it's just the fun they had.
