"In Trim: Mark Martinson," by Drew Kampion, ran in the September 1999 issue of Longboard. This version has been slightly shortened and edited.

I met Mark Martinson in April 1968, at the first-ever AAAA surfing contest, which was held in extra-clean waves at the San Lorenzo Rivermouth in Santa Cruz. It also happened to be the first U.S. surfing contest at which shortboards (under 9') outnumbered longboards; in fact, it was quite apparent that board length here was inversely proportional to hair length. Mark, sporting sideburns and a thickening mat of brown hair, rode an 8’6”. His surfing was powerful, deep, and absolutely solid; his style was a sublime blend of established longboard nuance and bold shortboard commitment. He won the lesser AAA class that day and managed a fifth in the big show, but he surfed more heats than anyone, and I was most impressed.

The next time I saw Mark was November 1968 at the World Contest in Puerto Rico. He was traveling with Billy Hamilton and filmmakers Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman, and they’d just come from France and Portugal where they’d bumped rails with their Australian movie counterparts, Nat Young, Wayne Lynch, Ted Spencer and filmmaker Paul Witzig. I was surprised that Mark didn’t surf in the contest; he was one of the hottest guys during the free-surf sessions and would have been a world title contender. But apparently, in opting for the cinematic path with Mac-Free, he had come up short on the requisite qualifying points. Mark didn’t seem to mind; he was smiling the whole time. While the rest of the surfers were standing around while officials debated daily over whether or not the contest was on, Mark and Billy were off slashing warm waves in this Caribbean paradise.

Mark and I became friends over the next couple of years, and he finally confided in me (I was editor of SURFER at the time) that he was hoping to avoid an unpleasant paid vacation to Southeast Asia, and that if anyone—the FBI, for example—inquired about him at the magazine, he would appreciate it if I told them something like, “The last time I saw Mark Martinson he was being attacked by a large shark in Panama, and there was a lot of blood in the water.”

I remember being part of the North Shore household where he, MacGillivray, Freeman, Hamilton and a few others stayed during the winter of ’68-’69. Mark was the most low-key member of the crew. Quiet but never down, just taking it all in. If I had a memory I could remember specific examples of his humor, always sharp, always right on the money. Didn't say much, but his words were always well-chosen. Impossible not to like. Generous and kind, but he could draw a line. He has to be burned hard to remember, and then he remembers.

I knew Mark when he met Jeannie Ybarola at Trestles in 1969. She and her sister were enthusiastic Long Beach High volleyball players. Jean was 15, Mark was 22. It seemed like a big gap at first, but they’ve been together 30 years now, so I’d say there were some sound instincts at work.

I was the guy who picked up Mark at Fort Ord late one Friday evening In 1971, I think it was, and drove him home to Jeannie in Dana Point, dropping off a series of furloughed soldiers along the way like societal depth-charges until, finally, it was just Mark and me rolling south on 1-5 until we hit the coast at four in the morning. He waved from the porch as I drove away, leaving them to their reunion. After all, he’d been in uniform, a guest of the U.S. Army, for a whole three weeks.

After that, Mark and Jeannie moved to the North Shore. He stayed a while with his good friend Larry McElheny. Earlier, Mark had gotten involved with Larry in a small company called Surf Design, in Sunset Beach, California, and they partnered to build some very nice boards when he first moved to Hawaii. Then Mark rented a duplex unit from his Long Beach bud, the eclectic and erudite (at least in his own mind) Roy Crump, who lived on the other side of the wall and rented out a dumpy little spot in the garage to strapped surf travelers from all over the world. Then when a spot opened up about 15 houses down the beach toward Pipeline, he and Jeannie took it. It was a luxurious two-lot set-up, and one of them was a perfect volleyball court.

After a while, Martinson started flying back to California over to go fishing out of Dana Point with Bruce Brown, and that turned into its own bundle of adventures. But through it all, Mark remained almost implacably the same—quiet, unassuming, genial and absolutely straight-shooting.

Still, yet, and however, Mark Martinson is a total anomaly. He is right there solid and up-front, yet somehow invisible. Which is why it took the FBI seven years to run him to ground. Which is why, despite being the first US Surfing Champion, and appearing in nearly every Harbour Surfboards ad for three years, and starring in several MacGillivray-Freeman surf films, and even appearing on the cover of SURFER (one of the best bottom-turns every photographed)—despite all of this and more, Mark Martinson never made the SURFER Poll top 20, This is uncanny or frightening or both.

I am looking forward to seeing my old friend as I flow south on the 405 from LAX—past the South Bay melting pots of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo beaches, across the neck of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, past Long Beach and down Beach Boulevard to the backwaters of Huntington. There, on an exquisite Saturday morning in June, I find Mark Martinson enjoying a refreshing beverage with several business associates in the famous “shapers lounge” out back of the Spanners factory.

I haven’t seen Mark in ten years, maybe longer. From the late ’60s through the '70s, I saw him every winter for the North Shore contest season. He and Jeannie always had a bed for me. It was my home away from home, and I loved it. Since then we’ve spoken only rarely—at trade shows or at Dana Point, his swordfishing home base in the 70s and early ‘80s. Then he took his boat to Hawaii and seemed to vanish. I heard he was golfing a lot, and rarely surfed at all. So in 1994, when a feature of him, Robert August and Wingnut Weaver surfing Costa Rica turned up in an issue of 

, I was most pleasantly surprised. As it turns out, it was that trip that kicked off Mark’s surfing renaissance.

Sitting there grinning in the sunlight as I walked up, Mark today looks pretty much like a somewhat older and thicker version of himself. Built like a fireplug, as they used to say, he’s sporting patches of mostly white hair over his upper lip and chin, but his eyes glint merrily under a Mark Martinson Model cap. He lofts a silver can in my direction. “Hi,” he says magisterially. “Help yourself to a beer!”

I grab a cold can, pull the tab and take a swig as I greet the other two gentle loungers, legendary Huntington-area surfer John Boozer and the youngest of the quartet, local shaper Mike Minchinton, who has a hot-selling model. Business is good and everyone is fully kicked-back as we talk and drink beer. “Our glasser went to Mexico for a couple of days—only right in the middle of the busiest time in the history of the company? Mark tells me. There’s a backup glasser, but he can’t keep up. “It’s a surfboard deal,” Mark shrugs, then gives a laugh that’s shadowed by a high-pitched wheeze, a lifelong affliction and (at least once) his saving grace.

Mark, who learned to shape at Harbour Surfboards in Seal Beach in the mid-’60s, is one of Robert August’s mainstay shapers. He does about 20 boards a week—his own Mark Martinson Model, and anybody else’s that needs to be done. Actually, any shaper here can shape any board, any model, I learn; they’ve all got it wired at Robert August Surfboards.

“Think of General Motors,” Robert explains. "Mike’s a Dodge, Mark’s an Oldsmobile. It’s their model. Instead of calling it the Z-12B, it’s the Paul Strauch Model, or the Corky Carroll Model, or Jericho's or Wingnut’s. They’re all models. Anyone who works here can shape anything we do. The other guys can shape Mark’s boards, and Mark can shape theirs.”

It’s a great consortium—and it brings together a group of guys and the odd woman (nothing personal, Jericho), who, for the most part, go back 30 or even 40 years together. And the operation functions in a way that allows each of the shapers time away from the “office.” That helps explain why Mark’s sitting here grinnin’ that familiar crooked smile, reveling in the warmth and companionship of a Southern California afternoon—while underneath it all he’s chompin’ at the bit for his next trip to Costa Rica.

Mark almost went to Costa Rica in 1965 when he was working on a film with Jim Freeman and Greg MacGillivray called 

. They spent months surfing around South America, then headed up to Panama. They heard there was good surf to the north, but never checked it out. “The ironic thing was, the only country we 

 go to was Costa Rica,” Mark tells me. “It probably would have changed my whole life if we would have gone there.”

We have adjourned to the privacy of the Spanners foyer, where it’s just the two of us, a tape recorder, a nice breeze, and the dog. Robert is in Beth’s office, probably trying to get her to send somebody out to drag that glasser back here forcibly. We work on a little background. To summarize: Mark Martinson is the greatest surfer ever to come out of Long Beach, California He was born there in 1947 and grew up within walking distance of the beach at Belmont Shores. Mark's mother, Helen, was all sweetness and light. His father was a darker presence—a mechanic and driver on the Peter DePaolo factory-sponsored stock-car racing team (winner of the ’25 Indy 500, DePaolo was the first driver to break 100 mph average speed, a mark it took five years to match and seven to break). Mark has an older sister and a younger brother.

“Was your dad a rebel?" I ask. “Yeah, you’d have to say that,” Mark says. “He hated post-office workers (laugh-wheeze).”

“Yeah, sure. And the occasional punch.”

“So he had a temper?” I say. “Punch your mom at all?”

And Mark answers deliberately: “I don’t know.”

Like the other kids in the neighborhood, Mark spent most of his free time at the beach, skimboarding, matting and bodysurfing. Then in 1957, when he was 10, an older friend of a friend loaded up a bunch of the kids and took them a few miles south to Seal Beach. The older kid had a balsa surfboard, and let Mark try it out.

“We were at Power Plant,” Mark recalls. “Reform kind of stuff on the inside—the wave would break then reform, and I went out, took off on a wave, stood up, and rode it into the channel. That killed me. That was it—you wanna go surfing every single day."

His father was not pleased, however. “It was a sore point,” Mark admits. “He was a motorhead. He was into cars and racing, and that was, I suspect, what he wanted me to do. Maybe it’s a good thing he died.” Harlan, Mark’s father, had given up the racing life and was commuting to a "regular job" in the Valley when he died at 52. Mark was 15. As we’re talking it occurs to me that Mark turned 52 in February. “You just outlived your dad,” I said.

An indifferent student but an excellent athlete, Mark, as a kid, played every sport he could. The football coaches at Long Beach’s Millikin and Wilson high schools were hot to get their hands on him (“I was touted”), but he never made it that far. “Y'know, they wanted me to play, and I said, ‘But I surf.’ That was it.”

That was it. As far as Mark was concerned his homeroom was the San Gabriel Rivermouth at Seal Beach—that’s where he met lifelong friends Robert August and Corky Carroll when he was 11 or 12. When he scraped together $75 to buy himself a board, Seal Beach was where he came to surf it. As things developed, that was the only board for which he’s ever paid full retail. By the time Mark was ready for his second one, the word was out that this kid was hot, and the folks at Crow Surfboards in Surfside gave him a team deal.

Mark started getting rides down to Huntington, Doheny, and finally The Trestle, which was the closest thing to heaven he could imagine at the time. Before he was old enough to drive, Mark was at the mercy of his mother, friends’ mothers, or older surfers like Leo Hetzel.

Leo had a ’54 VW bus, and he’d load it up with kids from Seal Beach and Newport and head south. The gang included Bill Fury, Bill Wetzel, Charlie Lennon, Stu Herz, Steve Pezman, Mike Marshall and Roger Zeiger, to name a few. Of them all, Hetzel remembers being most impressed by Martinson and Fury—the latter for his poise and positioning, Mark for his sheer power.

Corky and Mark became great friends. They surfed together all summer, on weekends and after class during the school year. When they started dating, they sometimes doubled.

“We used to borrow Mark’s mom’s car for parties,” Corky remembers. “This one time we were out with two girls, I was in front, Mark in the back, and his date barfed all over the back seat. So we took her home and the only way we could figure to clean out the backseat was to completely hose it out. When we got home Mark goes right in and tells his mom what happened: ‘We parked at the Power Plant to check the surf, and we couldn’t see how high the tide was, and a huge shorebreak wave broke over the car!’ Which was so unbelievable she believed him!"

He stands 5’6”, weighs 190 pounds, and what hair that is left after I gave him a crew cut is all gray. We started referring to him as the 'Large Predator,' dormant most of the time, only moving quickly for beer and bottom turns. As with most large predators, they are most dangerous when startled. So never, and I mean never, touch an ice-cold beer to his ribs while he is dozing on the beach.


—Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, “The Wild Bunch,” 

When his father died, Mark told his friend, Roy Crump, “Well, he can’t tell me what to do anymore." Ironically, he inherited Harlan's ’54 Lincoln, and thus became even more prone to doing what he wanted, which mostly meant taking his friends surfing. The more Mark drove, the more he surfed; the more he surfed, the better he got. After two Crow surfboards, he and his pal, Corky, moved over to the Ole team.

“Actually? Mark confides, “Ole was owned by Hobie at the time, and Ole was gettin’ his boards made at Hobie's in Dana Point, so Corky and I were actually riding for Hobie.

The competition scene in California grew up more or less in tandem with Mark’s surfing. In the beginning, there was only the big Huntington Beach contest, then more started coming online. Mark gets a little hazy when the subject comes up.

“The early competition stuff is kind of vague; I remember I was in the Huntington contest and did pretty well, got 2nd in the Juniors one year [1962], then won it a couple years later [1964, still in Juniors]. I remember getting 2nd to Corky in a lot of contests." Mark shrugs, not all that interested in who beat who in a surf contest 30-something years ago.

Then he sniffs a way to get out of sitting in a stuffy room talking into a tape recorder. “Corky lives right around the corner,” he says. “Hey, maybe we oughta take a drive! We'll cruise by Corky’s house and go to Seal Beach—maybe look at Power Plant.”

“A trip through history!” I enthuse. “Got a car?”

As we’re leaving Spanners, Robert August asks if I’d care to join the two of them for dinner at his apartment.

“Anything else happening tonight?” Mark asks.

“Not much,” answers Robert. “Couple of chicks were gonna come over with a bunch of drugs,” he shrugs. Mark laughs, but for a beat I wonder if it could be true.

Robert keeps a room for Mark at his home in Huntington, a couple of miles from here. Whenever Mark’s in town to work, that’s where he stays. They live like a couple of ascetic middle-aged bachelors most of the time—work, dinner, TV, bed, work, dinner, TV, bed—keeping the complications and expenses of life to a minimum so they can fully enjoy their frequent escapes to faraway places.

We pull away from the factory, make a few turns and we’re on Main Street, heading towards the beach. As we cut across town, he’s talking about Trestles and getting caught by the Marines (“lots of times”), how his mom had to take him down to Camp Pendelton get his board back.

We hit PCH just up from the Huntington power plant and turn right. The parking lots are all packed. We can see the blue horizon, but the highway is too low to see the surf. Mark talks some about the years he spent on the Harbour Surfboards team. He had a chance to go with Hobie but stayed with Harbour for about ten years, and he doesn’t really want to talk about it. ‘Hobie offered me a nice deal—a real nice, secure deal," his voice trails off.

One thing, Mark is loyal. Harbour appealed, matching Hobie's offer, and Mark stayed. But it never paid off like it was supposed to. “That was one of the mistakes I made,” Mark shrugs, looking out the window as we pull up to the glitzy corner of PCH and Main. “Because Hobie and I get along good; I like him. He’s a straight-shooter.”

We’re sitting at the light in the Las Vegas of surfing—the pier area—where Huntington Surf & Sport and Jack Surfboards rise up like twin Las Vegas ziggurats, guarding the corners of Main Street.

We finally move forward, past the huge condo complex on the sand where Mark and Jeannie lived with Chuck Dent in 1970, back in the days when the FBI, state and local cops, and the Selective Service were all after Mark’s ass. There’s a tale worthy of a digression.

Starting in 1959, the West Coast Surfing Championships (later called the United States Surfing Championships) was the only big contest in California. That changed in 1964 when Oceanside hosted the first United States Invitational Surfing Championships—an obvious bid to grab some attention away from Huntington. Roy Crump, Mark’s lifelong friend and another Long Beach original, remembers that '64 contest well:

“It was February. Jim Barker and I picked up Mark in Long Beach in my woody wagon early on Saturday morning and drove down to Oceanside. It blew offshore all weekend, with 4-6-foot tubes, and everyone was there—even Paul Strauch and Fred Hemmings from Hawaii. Mark wins the Juniors. Ricky Irons wins the Mens. But Mark got the best overall performance award, good for a round-trip ticket to Hawaii. The fact that this young high school kid won the overall was a big deal. We drove Mark home that afternoon with his big trophy in the car, and he was stoked in his low-key way, and we told him, ‘Man, you’re 16 years old, kid, and you’re the US Surfing Champion!’”

The National Title seemed to ensure that Mark would represent California at the first World Contest, scheduled for Sydney, Australia that summer, but the invitation never came. “I guess I was too young," Mark says. “Mike Doyle and Joey Cabell went down there. You know, I’m one of those guys who always gets the empty plate.”

Mark wanted to quit school early to use his plane ticket, “but it flipped my mom out, and I thought she was gonna commit suicide.” Ever the dutiful son, he stayed his senior year and finished school during the summer (dedicated surfing can set you back), did table setups at the Newport Chart House to earn some cash, and flew to Hawaii with some Long Beach friends in the fall of '64.

“The first place I surfed was Sunset,” Mark recalls. “And it was big Sunset, there was nobody out, just completely deserted. Heavy north side-wind, but there were some inside corners where you could pick off one or two. So I went out there and caught a couple of corners with a friend of mine, and when we got in Butch van Artsdalen was on the beach, and he gave me a lecture about not going out when there’s nobody around and it’s semi-closed out. ‘You guys shouldn’t be out there; you don’t have enough experience.’ He kind of laid it on the line without trying to embarrass the shit out of ya.”

Butch turned out to be their next-door neighbor, and he put ’em through the drill. He’d come over early in the morning and get the lads on the program—baseball, basketball, whatever. “He didn’t ask,” Mark says. ”He’d come over and say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna play baseball today’ and that’s what you did. You didn’t go, ‘No, I don’t wanna play!' Butch made it really fun for me that first time In Hawaii. He was tough, but I come from a tough crowd anyway."

Opportunity knocked on Mark's cabin door one day in the form of Greg MacGillivray. The budding Laguna Beach cinematographer was shooting his new film, 

, and wanted Mark to come to Maui. Mark was 17 and Greg was 18, so they brought along 21-year-old surfer from Virginia Beach named Butch Maloney to rent the car, then they headed out to Honolua Bay.

“It was paradise!” Mark sighs. “I mean, Butch surfed a little bit, and Greg surfed a little bit, but it was deserted. There was nobody there. One evening it got probably 8-feet, and it was really nice beautiful, pristine waves.”

MacGillivray shot more footage of Mark back on Oahu, and things seemed to be going awfully well. He was anticipating a trip to Peru for the 1965 World Contest when he felt a cold draft: A letter from the Selective Service informing him he’d have to register for the draft on his 18th birthday

“I wanted to do the right thing,” he says today. “I went in there and told them that I was gonna go to the World Contest in Peru, and I wouldn’t be able to register when they said, cause I didn’t know how long I was gonna be there. I said I'd register when I came back. They said, ‘You can’t go to Peru. You must be here when you’re 18 to register.’ And that was it. That was the start of the whole thing. ‘That’s not gonna happen, man.’ I tried to be reasonable, but they weren’t reasonable, and they never were reasonable.”

Mark went to Peru, where the waves were crappy and the hosts worked hard to keep the opposing surfers off balance. He did poorly in the contest (“They kept us up all night drinking”), but he made lots of friends and bonded with Robert August. Most of the others were into marijuana and cocaine, whereas Mark and Robert shared other Interests. “I wanted to get with the girls, and I wanted to surf,” Mark says. “I was simple. I was simple-minded. I had a new girlfriend down there, and really liked her." Mark liked her so much (she’s a news anchor in Lima today), he stayed three months after the other competitors went home. Robert stayed too; he was dating her sister.

Mark came home to a letter informing him he’d been drafted. Then came a series of deferments (hepatitis from Peru; a broken leg from Rincon) and a few no-shows. He was trying to live a normal, care-free surfer’s life while the Selective Service started bearing down harder and harder. Still, he managed to learn the basic boardmaking skills from the shapers at Harbour. He even worked the night shift with Dick Brewer, who was in transition between Hobie and Bing and spent the interlude shaping guns for Harbour. Dick and Mark surfed the Trestle together, and Mark’s signature board, the Trestle Special, was Harbour’s best-selling model.

 was playing to surf audiences around the country and Mark was becoming a well-known surfer. MacGillivray and Freeman were rolling right into their next film, 

, and wanted Mark to co-star with his Laguna friend, Billy Hamilton. “Bill was a good surfer,” Mark deadpans. “Once we got him away from stand-tall-and-do-nothin’-at-all.”

Things were speeding up for Mark even as the pressures mounted. A big chunk of his Harbour paycheck was going to help support his mother and younger brother. Mark and a friend started a building maintenance business so they could work off-hours and keep their days free for surf and other work. Meanwhile, there was always another surf trip: to Hawaii, Baja, across the country on promo-sales trips for Harbour (his new Rapier model was doing great), and a huge junket around the entire continent of South America with MacGillivray and Freeman

In the process, he managed to miss another World Contest—won by Nat Young in San Diego in September of ’66.

All of this (and so very much more) is not to mention the draft police, who were increasingly anxious to press young Mr. Martinson into service if not into prison He tried everything he could think of to get out of it, to the point of feigning insanity He even got drunk and assaulted a Long Beach cop, but when they beat him up and hauled him in a ranking officer by the name of Marty Martinson (no kidding) knew Mark and interceded, claiming they were cousins and that he’d handle it. “What the hell were you trying to' do, Mark?” asked Marty. “I was tryin’ to get out of the draft, Marty!”

 came out in 1967, Mark’s notoriety took another leap forward. MacGillivray-Freeman Films at that point was doing tie-in stories for SURFER magazine on every trip they took and Mark was generously featured. It seemed like a good time to not be home—or even in America. So when MacGillivray-Freeman wanted Mark and Bill for their new film, featuring the new shortboards, and were looking to film in Europe when they headed off to Europe, Mark signed right up. In Biarritz they ran straight into Australian filmmaker Paul Witzig, shooting his movie 

 with world champ Nat Young and the phenomenal Wayne Lynch. An ensuing pissing contest (“No, you 

 photograph my surfers’) put a strain on things, and when Mark’s enthusiasm for the Aussies’ performance and equipment made it back to the U.S. in the form of a Harbour ad showing an Aussie-inspired shortboard (the Spherical Revolver), Nat called rip-off.

“I thought I was pretty respectful with how I handled it,” Mark offers. “But it was like Nat didn’t understand at all. He didn’t get my deal. He thought I was trying to copy his design, or . . . I don’t know what he thought." But while Mark admired Nat’s surfing and his boards, he didn’t like what was happening to Lynch. “Those guys were doing a lot of drugs, and a little paranoia was creeping in there, and Wayne was real young, 15 or something, and they had him blacked-out all the time.”

Ironically, it was the clean-cut Martinson who smuggled some pot back into the U.S. from France—taped to his body under his suit and tie. It was a gift for a friend. Once they cleared customs in New York, Mark showed Bill Hamilton. “I can’t believe you did that!” Bill exclaimed, to which Mark responded, “What are friends for?”

Of course, Mark didn’t get to surf in the 1968 Puerto Rico World Contest either. “You had to compete during the year, and I did a few but my numbers weren't high enough. I just missed out by a couple of points. Revenge was sweet, though. Mark was free to surf all day every day—no heats, no points, no worries. He estimates he put more time in surfing Puerto Rico than anywhere else outside of California and Hawaii.

Back in California after the contest, things took a turn for the better when he met Jeannie Yberola at Trestles one day. Mark was living in Surfside with Robert August and Rich Harbour, and the continual flow of beach chicks through his apartment had inspired a next-door neighbor to shed his suit and business career to become a surfer (the guy eventually went nuts). Now all that changed as Mark settled in for the long haul with this beautiful 15-year-old from Long Beach; after all, he was just 22 himself.

But the heat was really on, and he had to keep low to the ground. After appearing in every full-page Harbour ad in SURFER for a couple of years, he ended the relationship in 1969 and went to work shaping for Chuck Dent Surfboards in Huntington Beach. Instead of cash, Chuck paid him in merchandise—boards, clothes, accessories—which Mark in turn used to set up his own place, the Laguna Surf Shop, on Coast Highway in South Laguna. He got work with Walker Foam in San Clemente, too, and was paid him in blanks. Mark should have had a thriving business. “The rent was cheap,” says Mark. “The only problem was the speed limit there was about 65, and when you stepped out of the shop you'd swear they were doing 80.” No-one stopped, and Laguna Surf Shop soon folded.

HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT: MARK MARTINSON PROFILE BY DREW KAMPION (1999)

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