Beach Culture | Lost LA | Season 3, Episode 3 | KCET

growing up here in Southern California I never felt very far from the beach my family's weekly trips to Corona del Mar provided a sunny rhythm to my summers back then nothing seemed more natural than spending hours in the waves I always felt totally at ease in the ocean and I know I'm not alone in Southern California the beach is part of our identity in some ways it defines the Southern California lifestyle how did this sandy strip between land and sea acquire so much cultural power and why does it keep people feeling so young could these waters possibly be the mythical Fountain of Youth LA is an idea as much as a city a set of hopes and beliefs that inspired millions to move here but behind the idea of LA are the stories of people dreamers who realize their vision for Southern California and others who failed so let's look back and uncover some clues to a forgotten past in the archives Lost la explores the untold history behind the fantasy of California [Music] there's something disconcerting about these early 20th century photos of Southern California's beaches they show places that physically are familiar to us but culturally they depict an almost alien world it's not just the stifling Victorian bathing suits what's missing here is the youthful energy we so easily associate today with the beach where are the surfers the boogie boarders the sense of freedom how did we go from fearing the water to now a time when jumping into the waves is second nature for so many of us for help with this question I went to see someone who spent her entire life at the beach surf legend Joyce Hofmann Joyce was a pioneer the first female international surfing star whose competitive success in media savvy opened the sport to countless women an exciting sport and yet it is one that a woman can enjoy because you can still maintain your femininity while participating in it is important although it is difficult it is not so difficult that a girl cannot go out and have a great deal of fun and become proficient in it so how has surfing and then more generally you know Southern California and its beach culture how those changed since you started surfing oh my goodness that's like night day I mean it changed all the way to Kansas it's incredible how much influence it had everything came together it was all the Beach Blanket movies and that food chill oh that kind of stuff it was the surfing sound with the Beach Boys and the del-tones and then all of a sudden we had some big surfboard companies like they're gonna be surf we're and hang ten and they started selling not just in surf shops but in JC Penney's across the country so all of a sudden the rest of the country started to see surfing and it just became this cultural phenomena that just took off and then all the magazines that I had features in that we're not surfing magazines you know look and life and Sports Illustrated it was the 60s and surfing was just starting to take off and all of a sudden there became this interest outside of the small world of surfing in the culture of it and you know I was really lucky that I in the right place at the right time and I was able to ride that wave that wave washed out an earlier more unruly image of surfing which was downright countercultural when the sport first arrived in Southern California what after all could be more rebellious than young people spending their days at the beach instead of at a classroom office or factory but Southern California and it's entertainment industry transform surfing's image bands like the Beach Boys and movies like Gidget or beach blanket bingo crafted a fun and respectable image of a sport that was taking the planet by storm Joyce Hofmann rode that wave to stardom and so did filmmaker Bruce Brown his 1966 documentary the endless summer captured surfing at this watershed moment and introduced a very Southern California image of beach culture to the rest of the world many surfers ride summer and winter but the ultimate thing for most of us would be to have an endless summer the warm water and waves without the summer crowds of California the only way to do this is by traveling around the world following the summer season as it moves around the to surfers Robert August and Mike Hynson have been planning a trip like this for some time do you remember the first time you saw me mm-hmm and what was gonna be high school really uh-huh I knew Bruce Brown fairly well cuz he lived in Dana Point my dad knew him really well we were family friends and whatnot it was amazing I mean it was like a huge milestone because it was so more much more than any of the surfing movies had ever been you know it was so much more polished and sophisticated and he had such a great narration and in such a wonderful sense of humor and whatnot that it was you know you could see you would love it whether you live by the ocean or surfed or not it had that appeal across the country that didn't have to be a surfer to think that that was the funnest time anybody ever had in their life you it's already surf some of those places mm-hmm I like to see those surf breaks on the screen you know there's a lot better than when I was there oh yeah they must they either caught a really lucky day or they hung out there for a long time this is the place in South Africa respect Jeffrey's Bay okay yeah to better understand the legacy of the endless summer I turn to the rich video archive at the surfing heritage and culture center where Dan Foote has been processing and preserving old films and tapes that document the magic of Bruce Browns film I think Bruce was incredible storyteller and a lot of people will tell you that too but there's there's something about the way that his his personality his voice comes through in the films that he made and I think that is what really made his films popular ultimately because he was able to get this surf film accepted everywhere in the world and so a lot of that comes from the fact that Bruce is coming through and telling the story and a lot of times it's really not about the surfing it's just about this experience that that his his surfers are having and him painting a picture and I think that's a big difference I put a huge role in the success of the film the endless summer broke new ground in its distribution strategy it was not never in my wildest imagination that I would be involved with films or surfing films I was a surfer surfing is an addiction a sport that you just can't help but fall in love with I saw Bruce's first movie slippery when wet it was just fantastic I loved the movie it kind of an epiphany hit me I said hey by the way do you buddy hope you make movies and he looked at me with a strange look and he said no I I can't really even afford to pay myself and so Bruce calls me a few days later and he says well I've been thinking about something how would you like to come down we'll talk about you maybe going and showing the movie set the places were it was already shown and you'll be in business for yourself I'm not gonna pay it but if you do well you'll make money I got in my car drove down to Dana Point handshake and I took and they had knew nothing about this absolutely zero so this is how things happen with everybody you know you you get stoked on something in you and then I went to the library read all about promotion that he said to Pat and I to his wife and I said you know I'm thinking that maybe we ought to take two years to make the next movie and that's when he got Mike and Robert to go around the world searching food for the perfect wave and I went to New York to see if we could so it was summer day you know look at it there's a good film but need some bikini-clad women and also we don't ever go more than 10 minutes from the water and then on my way back from New York after the second time of guy telling me that we'll take it off your hands for about three grand and I just laughed this that's a joke bringing my head was never go 10 minutes from the water and I'm thinking gee we really never have showed it outside of California and the East Coast West Coast and why maybe there's some truth to that and so I pulled out the map in the back of the seat there and I looked the airline map and thinking about it and I look in the middle of the map is Wichita Kansas Wow what you talk Kansas maybe how to show it there that might be a good test to see how we go I had booked the theater only for a week it kept coming all week long sold out it played for over 18 at the Kips Bay Theatre in New York City and so Bruce calls the endless summer a glorified home movie well that glorified home movie broke all box office records and basically put surfing on the worldmap everything about the movie has the word magic to it and I believe in magic with a little help in promotion or marketing in 1986 a public access show tracked down Bruce Brown to talk about his legendary film one of the projects were working on is we're digitizing all the old episodes of wave watch they did 104 episodes of this show and no one's seen any of this stuff in for 30 years so this is really exciting to work on these kinds of pieces of content because I don't know it's gonna be on the tapes until I run them through the machines and just recently we discovered this interview with Bruce Brown that Randy shot in 1986 I got a call from somebody Peter town and first world champion surfer from Australia and John bass John bass was the senior editor at cable news network CNN and they said we're doing this public access show called wave watch would you come down and do an interview so at one point this is about 1985 Peter PT we call him said whatever happened to Bruce Brown I don't know I'll find him wave watch exclusive for you we've got an interview with legendary Bruce Brown our executive producer Randy North caught up with him and you know of course he was famous for the movie endless summer and also a motorcycle film called on any Sunday so we're gonna go check him out right now I just started surfing and it was a little 8-millimeter movie camera that was just beaming so I could show my mom you know I mean beach blanket bingo on those kind of movies to the real surfers those were insulting you know that they made me real manacle there's not I do you know it's not true and so I wanted to do something to show people hey what surfing was so all I can tell the kids is do what you want to do you know in the in the summer air people say what are you gonna do with you know your MA now they possibly gonna make all this money you got to buy art dismountable I like going up bitching surfing trip or something like that you know or what I'd really like to do is maybe does not work for a few years dude just what I want to do the whole time you know you never think of your father as someone he's just your dad but he was a great dad I mean I think we're literally didn't know much what to do with this as kids but the more we could ride motorcycles and go surfing with him or something then you have great value so you've become like his friend and I think he's one of the best non-fiction filmmakers ever and the best sports nonfiction filmmakers films are really in a lot of ways complicated narrative Lee you know but they don't look like it looks like he's just cruising around but he's very confident guy so if he was gonna make him movie I think he expected himself to make the best surf oh it was never gonna be made yeah the endless summer spread a distinctly Southern California image of the beach across America and around the globe so did Joyce Hoffman winning championship after championship in a sport that had been dominated by men Joyce not only became a superstar she was a powerful role model and a global ambassador for surfing and the Southern California lifestyle those couple of years were there were articles about me all the time I was being written up in the LA Times and The Herald examiner John Washington the reporter at the herald examiner named me the blonde goddess and goddess yeah articles about me all the time and I was in The Times a lot and I had all the magazine articles and I'd won the world contest I was the biggest name in surfing for a while I always took my role as as an ambassador or spokesperson for surfing very seriously because surfing has given me so much she came and describe what surfing has done for me in my life all the wonderful opportunities I've had and the wonderful people I've met in the places I've been and what not so I always felt a real need to present myself in a positive way to reflect positively on surfing so that if by chance there was some younger girl who was eight or nine and saw me and Surfer magazine or something and and was looking up to me I would be something that parents would be happy that she was looking up too I had a mother come up to me a woman and she said you know I just want you to know that my daughter when she was 12 she had your pictures on her wall and she so looked up to you and I think you were a really positive role model for Wow I mean all you have to do is hear one of those stories you know and you go wow that's amazing I mean it gives me goosebumps to think that I might have had that kind of impact you've been described as the first female international surfing star what was it like to break into a sport that you know I can tell the 19 mid-1960s was associated mostly with men it had its its pluses and it's minuses you know it was challenging to get the acceptance from all the guys because they weren't used to seeing women out in the water with them and whatnot but once you show that you could surf and that you love the sport like they loved it and whatnot then they were very accommodating and it was kind of special being the only girl most the time I mean for years and years everywhere I surfed I'd be the only female in the lineup when I started surfing not I want it I was looking for a sport to be to compete in and it it could have been it any of a million sports and it just happens that it worked out that surfing was the most was the easiest one for me because we lived at the beach and my dad and my uncle surf no I wasn't going to go out and party or or mess around or whatever because I was in training I wanted to compete it that at the highest level I could and I was sort of the first beginning of that where all of a sudden you know I'd go when there was a contest at Huntington Beach I'd go three weeks before five times a week and surf it so that I really knew the break and whatnot as opposed to just showing up and oh well whatever Here I am so as they saw me taking it so seriously then all of a sudden they're going off we want to win we're gonna have to get a little bit more serious about it and not to say that was the only one that was doing that but I was one of the one of the first ones that was turning it into more a competitive sport where are you trained and you know cross trained and everything so that you had the ability to win well Joyce participated in the moment surfing went both national and global the life she lived was far from the Victorian photo that first sparked my interest it turns out some key events set the ground for Southern California to embrace a new beach culture why did California become the epicenter of surf culture and the surf industry and all the rest of it so there's several things you need in order to have a vibrant surfing community first of all you need to have clean beaches so early in the twentieth century the oil industry was running rampant across a lot of the California coast Huntington Beach the original what is now called Surf City was Oil City 100 years ago so there was a huge political battle ran through the 20s and 30s and finally declared that the you know the future of the California coast lies with coastal recreation and real estate and not with extractive industries like oil industry so the other thing you need in order for surfing to take hold is you have to know how to swim in order to surf you can't surf if you can't swim so you need to have a population the knows how to swim so going back you know 150 years a lot of the general public did not know how to swim and that started to change thanks to things like the YMCA and swim lessons changed even more in the 1930s Great Depression all these federal works projects one of the things they did was they built a lot of municipal swimming pools and a lot of those pools ended up here in Southern California and then meanwhile Southern California's themselves from building pools in their back yards in addition to needing safe beaches and clean beaches and people who know how to swim you have to have the equipment and the equipment and a lot of cases came from the first the aircraft industry and then the aerospace industry here in Southern California so one of the big questions is how did this sport that is so associated with Polynesia and Hawaii how did it become so identified with California so it was actually surfers in fact a particular surfer named George Freeth who as a native Hawaiian came over here to Southern California in early 1900s and really revolutionized life credit if you look at the photos of Venice Beach at the time they had the system of ropes strung out over the surf zone so that people would go out and wade in the surf and if they happen to fall or a wave knocks em over they can reach up and grab on these ropes and save themselves so Freeth really revolutionized that whole approach saying you know get rid of the ropes instead have expert ocean lifeguards so Freeth got jobs lifeguarding at various Southern California beaches save countless people over several winters and summers and pretty much popularized that notion so the another city started adopting that technique in hiring ocean lifeguards with expert swimming ability and expert coaching knowledge and that completely changed the concept of lifeguarding and made the beaches safe for Southern Californians and safe for surfers in a sense surfers like George Freeth and his friend and fellow Waterman Duke Kahanamoku created the Southern California Beach of today without them my childhood summers just wouldn't have been the same I couldn't thank them in person but I did want to find a physical connection to their story so I drove down to Orange County to see one of the world's best surfboard collections and meet its creator dick Metz dick represents a living connection to the era of pioneer surfers he's been surfing since the 1930s he roadways with Duke Kahanamoku and was the driving force behind the surf line at Hobie retail chains more recently dick got serious about preserving surf history he founded the surfing heritage and culture center to document some of the dramatic changes he's witnessed in his lifetime I'm anxious to show you this this is a great collection glad you're here there's probably no greater legend in the surfing world than do know duke is considered the founder of modern day surfing now nobody knows one surfing really began but what we do know when Captain Cook discovered Hawaii in 1778 he had an artist on board that went ashore and drew a picture of the canoes and all the Hawaiians coming out to his ship including two guys on a surfboard so we don't know whether surfing started the day before Captain Cook got there or a hundred years but they were surfing in Hawaii in 1778 Duke was a great swimmer he went to five Olympian and that then the first couple he won gold medals and then later on as he got a little older he got silver and bronze but still was active and because he became so popular as a swimmer that he was able to talk about surfing because he was also a surfer so surfing them really its new wave if you will in the early 1900s and that's why they give Duke that title of the father of modern day surfing not the old days but he did rejuvenate it and people were moving around more then he came to California he went to Australia and talked surfing so that gave it its original impetus and it's it's sort of astonishing to think that before men like you know Duke and George free right you arrived here yeah that there weren't people surfing in Southern California at all so you you do have Dukes signature right here though do ya he carved it right in the board there Duke made and Road several surfboards in Hawaii and different places so there's only seven known ones that he made a road one is this Sony that's a copy of this one another one he left in Australia when he was on a journey over there made it there left it there one is in Waikiki and the other four we have here this one and this one the one over there with the painting for the chief and another one down there so you have four of the seven for don't boards at Duke yes that's incredible so this is all right here and that's why I say this collection not only has more surfboards anybody else but we have the most historically valuable ones Duke is a special guy so that really enhances this collection the material changes have been spectacular yeah we went from solid redwood to a combination of semi-hollow and redwood then to balsa wood and redwood and all balsa wood but the biggest add then in my mind came during the Second World War where England invented a bomber called the Mosquito bomber and they wanted to make it as light as they couldn't have made it out of balsa wood but it had no rigidity so they engineers came up with a solution to making the rigidity factor work by inventing fiberglass and resin and so right after the war that became a commercial product and it was available so then the Redwood and the heavier woods went away the boards became totally balsa wood fiberglass and I cut the weight from 80 to 100 pounds to 30 to 40 pounds now we had a seven or eight inch deep fin that was fiberglass that wouldn't break off when it hit the beach and it changed everything so foam really gradually came about 1958 Hobie started experimenting with foam when all we had then with styrofoam large cell and very soft and it was so soft that a tools couldn't cut it it was just kind of mush it's where you get the the coffee cups are made over yeah yeah and so that didn't work and then we learned that the resin and fiberglass would dissolve the styrofoam so the cell structure would kind of collapse so that then but if you put shellac on it then you can kind of do it so there was a lot of experiment to get so it took three years really from 1958 to 61 to get to the foam consistently at the same density and and then it could be clear and it made it easier and cheaper and everything else this was the end result but these are the two first foam boards well there might be some others but as far as we know those are there and you have them we have [Music] and I noticing that all the boards they have this little white it looks like a catalog number here well that's exactly what it is so we've inventoried every board taking pictures from every angle have it all digitized on a computer along with the history that we know of that board who made it shaped it you know how we got it the whole background you know that's important factor to keep all that history together and the boards that we have upstairs we've inventoried those as well those are boards that we lend out to other museums but the ones here on the floor we don't lend those out go look up there absolutely go up there right now and these are all inventory - this is s6 6 - uh-huh and that corresponds to some computer entry right there all on the computer I love it this surfboard archive and all the decades are clearly represented here I mean you can tell that this comes from a certain period and well know it's all you know that's why I say we have enough boards we could have three museums you know if we were gonna take all these down and display them yeah and there's some really great boards there that have a lot of history to them but we just can't show all of them technological innovation literally transformed surfing today surfing looks quite different than it did in the endless summer but the youthful energy we saw in Mike Hynson and Robert Auguste continues to define the sport surfing is so identified with Southern California I mean if you go anywhere on the world and pull over somebody on the street and say you know Southern California what do you think of when you think about Southern California most people are going to say okay they might say Hollywood they might say Disney we had good chance they're gonna say serving so surfing is one of the main cultural exports of Southern California way in addition to being central to what a lot of Southern Californians do so it's so it's so wrapped up and so central to the history of Southern California over the last hundred years and surely you would want to document that history and save it and show not only didn't Italy show you about this you know subculture the sub community within Southern California but teaches you so much about Southern California self because so much of Southern California was and going to beach there might be nothing inherently magical about these coastal waters perhaps the Fountain of Youth doesn't exist outside of Mythology after all but California created a potent mythology of its own colorful personalities and courageous pioneers found ways to have fun and stay fit here they infused our ocean with that illusive youthful energy today anyone who spends an afternoon at the beach can't help but get anointed with those bright cool drops of Southern California's elixir of youth [Music] I still see me shine mental waves still crash in the pie [Music] Union Bank is proud to support lost la additional funding for lost la made possible in part by the Ralph M Parsons foundation California State Library and Ray foundation and California Humanities

Channel: PBS SoCal

Views: 49,080

Keywords: kcet, southern california, beach, California, Nathan Masters, history, The Endless Summer, surfers, bodybuilders, acrobats

Id: KoBhr4CC6GM

Length: 26min 57sec (1617 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 24 2018