Russ Spencer’s profile on Kemp Aaberg ran in the Summer 1999 issue of Surfer’s Journal. This version has been slightly edited.

Kemp Aaberg paddled by in the steel blue light, the body still ropy and confident at 58, head down in concentration. A serious early-evening fog had settled onto Rincon, lending the chest-high waves a diffuse perfection, as if they had been created in a factory somewhere and then laid onto the ocean and pushed gently toward shore. The timing couldn’t have been better.

It was exactly 38 years, three months, 17 days and four hours since John Severson had photographed Aaberg pull a fading arched-back bottom turn at the same break. Severson had been standing on land that is now occupied by the southbound lanes of U.S. Highway 101, up for the day from Los Angeles to get pix for a new magazine that he was calling 

. “I had borrowed a big lens,” Severson remembers, “and there was something wrong with the lens mechanism. I shot three rolls of film and out of all those pictures, all were black except this one bright spot, and that was the picture.”

The Picture. The same lens flare that had exposed the rest of Severson’s photos gave the image a holy and wholly unreproducible shimmer, throwing a conclusive backlight on Aaberg’s fancy footwork. The insinuated motion of Kemp’s high-thrown right arm made him look like a cowboy bucking a bronc. You can almost hear him shouting “

” The balletic swing of his hip, the exaggerated curve of his torso, the big old balsa board carving along the perfect head-high wave—it all came together to make an enduring statement about the joy of surfing.

The photo would appear in Severson’s second issue of 

 and go on to become one of the most instantly identifiable surf images of all time. For years, it was used as the conclusion mark at the end of each story in 

, and in certain Los Angeles tattoo shops you can have that arched-back turn permanently inked onto your body. Kemp Aaberg’s stylish moment came to represent, for surfers, what Marilyn Monroe over a sidewalk grate and Marlon Brando on a Harley represented to the rest of the world—the summation of an era, the definition of an attitude.

Aaberg now lives on the Mesa in Santa Barbara. He has all the surf-legend credentials—appearances in the early Bruce Brown films 

, Malibu pioneer, world traveler, and, in a 1964 cover story in 

 magazine, the first person ever to describe surfing as “a dance.” He was one of the three famous hell-raising Aaberg brothers of Pacific Palisades, one of the first surfers ever at University High School, and a famous LA County lifeguard. A character in 

More than all of that, though, Kemp Aaberg remains one of surfing’s first true stylists.

Tom Morey: “The guy was flight and fancy incarnate. He was very aware of the art of surfing. Grace and charm and art and beauty—those were Kemp's virtues.”

Bruce Brown: “In the old days, you could identify the best surfer from five miles away by his style. Kemp was one of them. He was an unbelievably good surfer for the day, he had a really smooth and graceful style.”

Tubesteak: “Kemp was the best surfer I ever saw.”

What truly set Kemp apart from the pack was his purist approach to the whole thing. Unlike many surfers who defined the era, Aaberg was never one to run surfing up a flagpole. He never capitalized on his “legend” status. He never even got a dime from the Bruce Brown movies or 

. He didn't design surf clothes or make wetsuits or start a magazine. That leap from “I really like this” to “I want to make a living at this” never entered Kemp Aaberg’s mind. On the other hand, while others were marketing surfing, Kemp continued to actually live the lifestyle that a lot of other people tried to mythologize and claim for their own. From the time he started surfing at 16 until he was 34, Kemp Aaberg succeeded in creating a life of continuous surf-related adventure, travel and personal exploration. It was his own 18-year version of 

. Except it was no movie, no scripted fantasy shot through a viewfinder. It was real.

Because Kemp was off traveling in France, Spain, Hawaii, Australia and Malaysia, while the rest of the world discovered or was force-fed the sport, he became mostly lost to the annals of surfing. Kemp’s personality lives somewhere between self-deprecating gee-whiz humility and all-out irrepressible enthusiasm. Cockiness and look-at-me boasting aren’t in the mix. He doesn’t need or want attention. As a result, his profile has remained very low. So low, in fact, that this is the first and only magazine article that has ever been written about him.

“I kind of lived through an era that was formative, and that became, I guess, what we call surf history,” Kemp says. “But that history was happening without me knowing it was history. I was just doing it.”

At Rincon, Kemp moved quickly and smoothly in the water. I haven't surfed with many old-time surfers, but I immediately recognized the complete sense of ease and clarity of purpose. Kemp in the ocean just seemed to make sense. It wasn’t big at Rincon that day, and when it’s not so big, the vibe gets sketchy. Too few waves, too many guys. But Kemp’s attitude was perfect. That is to say, there was no attitude at all. Just the clarity of purpose. Surfing. It was as if he didn’t see the 35 other guys in the water at all, just the waves, and I'm not positive he even saw those. It seemed more like he could just feel when a set was on its way, and intuitively find the perfect spot from which to take off. Zoom, there goes Kemp, smooth as silk. Zoom, there goes Kemp again, feet hardly touching the board. Never a discouraging word about the crowd, just a big grin paddling back out.

“Hey, Russ, what a fun little swell, where’d it come from?”

“Man, this is neat. Hey, this is great. Isn’t it?”

Kemp applies himself to the few endeavors he chooses with calculated ferocity. In 1957, a year after trying his hand at the pole vault, he won the Western High School League title. Meanwhile, as a surfer he went from raw beginner at age 16 to a member of Bruce Brown’s 

 crew in just two short years. Later, when he chose to learn flamenco guitar, Kemp didn’t just take lessons at the local music store. He dropped everything, gave up surfing, moved to Madrid and studied under one of the world’s flamenco masters. At age 41, Kemp decided to become a triathlete. In scores of races over eight years, he was always either first, second or third in his age class.

“I like to master things,” he says simply.

Kemp grew up strong and well-built, a natural athlete, with long arms and big hands and feet, the oldest of three brothers from a family of hardy Norwegian stock. His brothers are Steve, a musician, and Denny, a writer and entrepreneur who consulted on the 

 script. Growing up in Pacific Palisades, the Aaberg boys made the most of the trouble that Southern California teenagers could get into in the late '50s. Their father moved out of the house when Kemp was 12, and that allowed even more freedom. They rode dirt bikes, worked on cars, cut school, raised hell, lived life to the marrow with sand between the toes and a nose that always peeled.

Kemp’s life took a big turn during his sophomore at University High School.

“I had wood shop, and this guy I knew from the track team, Jack Lameroux, the only surfer in the high school at the time, suggested I make a balsa bellyboard,” Kemp says. When the board was done, Lameroux took Aaberg out to Malibu in his Chevy convertible. “This was way before the hype,” Kemp says. “To actually drive to Malibu at that time was like, wow, a big trip up the coast.” Lameroux’s own big flat Velzy and Jacobs board, nicknamed the Butter Knife, stuck out the back of the convertible. It had blue footprints painted on the deck to let the aspiring surfer know where to put his feet.

At Malibu, they stopped and watched, but thought it would be impossible to weave through the intense crowd. There were 15 guys in the water. So they continued up the coast to Secos. “This was in June of 1956,” Kemp says, “and I saw Mickey Muñoz and Freddy Pfahler, and they were riding these beautiful three-foot waves, walking up to the nose and squatting into these fabulous little tubes. The waves would curl over their back and it was fascinating to me. It was magical. That did it. That was when the lights went on.”

The bellyboard? Forgot it. Lameroux lent Kemp the Butter Knife for the summer. Little did Lameroux know what he had set in motion. “It was on that board, at Point Dume, that I actually got the feeling of paddling into a wave, standing up, and I could see the reef and the bottom going by through the clear water—I was being propelled by the natural force of the ocean.”

Natural. For Kemp, that was the key word. That force was smoother than a pole vault, more organic than a dirt bike, more graceful than a hot rod.

What also appealed to Kemp was surfing's uniqueness and newness as a cultural phenomenon. “It took me beyond being just another kid in school,” he says. “It was so different, such a different thing to do, and then when I finally focused on it and was able to do it a little bit, the fun and the thrill went way beyond any sport I had ever done before.”

That fun and that thrill would become the driving passion of Kemp's life for two decades. First, though, he had to actually learn how to surf. That came from his now-famous power of sheer determination, but also from hanging around Malibu with Tubesteak during the summers of ’56 and ’57. Those two summers were formative for both Kemp and the Malibu surf mythology. Tubesteak set up his bunker at Malibu with a card table, couch and cooler, and surrounded it with razor wire. He slept there at night, held court during the day, rode some waves himself now and then, and created a scene that was later dramatized in 

, with Tubesteak as the Big Kahuna. At that time, just three surfers attended University High; Jack Lameroux, Kemp Aaberg, and Kathy Kohner, the little girl who Tubesteak had dubbed “Gidget.” Malibu provided Kemp a place to surf, but also, a family—lots of brothers, and even a few father figures, Tubesteak chief among them.

“I said, ‘Tubesteak, what’s the barbed wire for?’ And he looks at me and says, ‘To keep out the riff-raff.’ If you were allowed into Tube’s compound, you were in the select group. He had all these dignitaries, Freddy Pfahler and Dewey Weber, Mickey Muñoz and Bobby Patterson. Tubesteak liked to feel as though he was the Messiah, the Chosen One, the one who everyone would come to with their problems and questions. He treated me like I was his protege.”

The first thing Tubesteak did was to literally turn Kemp around. The kid was a born goofyfoot. “I said to him, you know what you oughta do if you wanna be successful in surfing?” Tubesteak remembers. “Lose that stance.” And that's how Aaberg became a regularfooter.

In the summer of ’58, fresh out of high school, Kemp moved south to San Clemente and began sanding boards for Velzy, surfing Trestles, and crashing in the back of the shop in a sleeping bag, with balsa shavings as a mattress. That summer, Bruce Brown chose Kemp—along with Del Cannon, Henry Ford, Freddy Pfahler and Dick Thomas—to fly to Hawaii and shoot 

. Actually, “chose” is probably too strong a word. Nothing about that movie, or that time and place, was as calculated as that.

As the story goes, Kemp was hanging around Velzy’s shop one day when Bruce happened to wander in. “It was important to have good guys in the movies because if the surf didn't really happen they could make bad waves look better,” Brown remembers. “So I saw Kemp and I asked him, ‘Do you want to go?’ and he said, ‘Okay.’”

Kemp left on a $75, 12-hour flight on a prop plane from Burbank to Honolulu and stayed on after shooting through the fall and winter. Reluctantly, he flew back to Los Angeles in the spring of ’59 and enrolled at Santa Monica Community College. After the freedom of Hawaii, though, Kemp found that sitting in a classroom “was like being jailed.”

Luckily, L.A. County hired him as a county lifeguard for the summer. Even though the lifeguard administrators knew that Kemp was a card-carrying member of the rowdiest Malibu crowd of all time, they stationed him right on Surfrider Beach. Their logic? Malibu was an easy station, and that gave Kemp more energy to devote to the lifeguard paddling team. Aaberg unwittingly found himself in the role of Big Kahuna.

“The lifeguards up at headquarters had gone really hard-nosed on us—Mickey Dora and Lance and so forth,” Tubesteak says. “They even made us take down the shack. But Kemp at least had the courtesy to let us keep our beer cooler in his guard shack. He didn’t even drink, but he left the door open for us so we could help ourselves. In a way he was the best part of Malibu—because of his surfing, but also because he was just a really good guy. There weren’t too many super-good guys around. Doyle was insane, Lance was loud, Fain was out of control. But Kemp was cool.”

That summer, Steve Aaberg, not knowing what he was about to unleash, took younger brother Kemp to meet a Malibu flamenco player named Peter Evans. For Kemp, it was not unlike discovering surfing. In retrospect, it’s not hard to understand why. Most guys picking up guitars at that time wanted to chunk out “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Johnny B. Goode.” But for Kemp, who always veered away from the mainstream, flamenco was perfect. Like surfing, it was hard to learn, took a mixture of artistry and devotion to perfect, and it was exotic and strange—at least to West Coast surf cats. “I also thought it would be a great way to impress my girlfriend,” Kemp recalls. “But I got so into practicing that the relationship went belly-up!”

The sight of Kemp Aaberg playing scales in the lifeguard stand at Sunset Beach has become another of surfing’s most enduring images. It was recreated, in fact, in 

, a story of hero worship and camaraderie by Kemp’s brother Denny, in which the character of Jack Barlow, played by actor William Katt, was based on Kemp.

Kemp tried college again in the fall, this time at UC Santa Barbara which just happened to offer a classic right pointbreak within a few board lengths of algebra class. He rented a room with a bunch of surfers—including Bob Cooper and Mike Doyle—in a big old house on Butterfly Lane, just up the beach from another classic break, Hammond’s Reef. “It was a house of pure fun,” Kemp remembers. “There were people sliding down the banister with nothing on but soap suds. I had a parrot named Horatio that I brought up from Mazatlán, which would scream curse words during parties. There were lots of laughs, lots of friends, and to this day I still run into people who went to parties at the Butterfly Lane establishment. Radical parties.”

After the guys were not surprisingly evicted, Kemp’s second stab at higher education was scuttled for another couple of years of surfing.

After a summer lifeguard gig at Malibu, he took off for Florida with Bruce Brown to shoot scenes for 

. To the chagrin of his fellow travelers—Brown, Robert August and Mike Haley—who crossed the United States together in a brand new 1961 Chevy van, Kemp also brought his guitar. “He drove us crazy, because he'd sit back there and play scales, over and over," Brown remembers. "Every time we would stop for gas, Robert or Mike would go into the restroom and put the guitar in the trash.”

After Florida, Kemp again flew off to the North Shore. He rented a house at Sunset Point with Jose Angel, a championship-level wrestler of Filipino descent who a few years earlier had moved from San Jose to become a big-wave rider.

Jose, in fact, was on the cover of the first 

 magazine, dropping down a terrifying wave at Sunset. “He pulled me into riding big surf,” Kemp says. “I would tell him that I'd never go out when it got bone-crushing, people-killer style, and he'd just say, ‘Come on, Kemp, you got it, no problem. All you do is hold your breath.’ He talked me into paddling over the edge at Waimea.”

The following spring, 1962, Kemp enrolled again at UC Santa Barbara, this time as a physical education major, because that’s what Jose Angel had done in Hawaii. Again, though, the fates could not quite tolerate the sight of Kemp Aaberg rotting in a classroom. Again, he dropped out.

After lifeguarding for the summer, Kemp faced the draft and was forced to join the Air National Guard or get shipped to Vietnam. He was stationed in Wichita Falls, Texas. Ten months. No ocean. “That’s when I took up distance swimming and running,” Kemp says. “I would go out on 30-mile runs because I was so bored.”

After being discharged, to make up for lost time, Kemp moved back to the North Shore in late ’63 and got a place on the beach near Pipeline. “After a year in Texas, being back in Hawaii was like being shot to the moon, it was so elating,” he says.

Like clockwork, Kemp again left Hawaii in the spring to take another stab at higher education, this time a social studies major, again at UCSB. It is telling, though, that what he remembers most about this period is that he was dating Mary Sturdevant, a billboard model for Pepsi-Cola. “That ruined my schoolwork for the year, but good,” he remembers.

This time, when Kemp fled school, instead of going back to Hawaii, he flew to Madrid, Spain, to pursue his study of flamenco guitar and the Spanish language. The veteran of a thousand 15-foot faces now faced a newer kind of frontier; that of a hot, passionate country and its lovely, equally passionate music. The blond surfer flew over with a gut-stringed guitar in his lap, rented a tiny apartment, ate beans, practiced in a basement and embraced the bohemian life.

In December, homesick for both the California sunshine and the Pepsi girl, Kemp saved his money for a flight to New York City then hopped a Greyhound that was headed in the general direction of Southern California. It was a six-day trip, and the lonely traveling only made Kemp miss his girl that much more. But not just because he hadn’t seen her in six months. “In every town in America there was a billboard of her lying on the beach, looking great, holding a can of Pepsi,” he remembers. A few days after Kemp rolled into Pacific Palisades, Pepsi Girl, who had been taking bit parts in the beach party movies, agreed to take him back. “It was an absolute miracle,” he says.

In the fall of 1965, Kemp re-entered UCSB for the fourth and last time. All those units added up to a degree in Social Studies, and he graduated in the spring of 1966. To the state of California, Kemp was now a Bachelor of Arts. But to Kemp, he was still just a bachelor and a surfer. He moved back to Malibu and continued to surf, but with a new twist. The ’60s were turning psychedelic, and Kemp embraced the idea by renting a cabin on a hippie farm in the mountains, with a trip-inspiring view of the coastline and a neighbor who owned a paraphernalia shop known as The Head Quarters.

Again, Kemp worked for the L.A. County Lifeguard Service, saving his money for a final, four-and-a-half-year sojourn. It was part vision quest, part fulfillment of his personal destiny, part embodiment of everything that surfing had stood for when Kemp first watched the ocean bottom sliding underneath him at Point Dume. The journey began on New Year’s Day, 1970. Kemp flew out of LAX for Hawaii where he lived on the North Shore, worked construction, and played flamenco at night in a Mexican restaurant named the Red Pepper. Six months later, he got a $300 ticket aboard an ocean liner for Australia, and after eight days at sea he stepped off in Sydney, bought a Morris Minivan, and cruised the coast of New South Wales. He took a job as a school PE teacher in a town called, of all things, Kempsey. “It was my destiny to be there, because I was a physical education teacher, just like Jose Angel had been, the town had my name, and there were waves nearby, at Crescent Head.”

For the year, Kemp drove the east and west coasts of Australia. In late ’71, he boarded a ship for Singapore, where he ran into a group of Aussies he’d known in Sydney. They invited him to tour Malaysia, where they explored islands, surfed, and listened to classic American blues tapes along the way.

Europe was next. Kemp hung scaffolds in Hanover, Germany; bought an old bread truck and drove through Switzerland; surfed in Biarritz; picked grapes in Bordeaux; spent Christmas in Copenhagen; kicked around Stonehenge; and played flamenco on the streets of Pamplona where, yes, he ran with the bulls. It is important to know that Kemp worked as he traveled—he was not on a trust fund that allowed him to be what he calls, with more than a hint of disgust, a “surf bum.” He made it all happen himself, with wits and hard work. “I wasn’t earning a living, or anything. I was just paying my way, facilitating the adventure.”

Being in Spain ignited Kemp’s passion to play flamenco again, and he moved to Santiago de Compostela, in the north, where the world’s greatest players come to learn and perform.

He began taking lessons under the master José Tomás, who had once been Segovia’s top assistant. “I would sit upstairs in this ancient cathedral that had been turned into a four-star hotel, where classes were held in a big stateroom, and listen to the most beautiful guitar music in the world,” he says. After six months, Kemp returned to surf Biarritz and Guethary. He met a girl there who took him to Paris, where he played music in cafes and learned about designer espresso drinks twenty years before Starbucks.

In the middle of 1974, Kemp decided, at last, to return to the United States. “My desire to travel had run its course,” he says. He ended up in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he had a chance meeting with Mike Doyle, which Doyle later chronicled in his book 

. “Doyle and his friends looked at me like I had definitely missed the boat,” Kemp says. “They would wonder, ‘Whatever happened to Aaberg? He's gone.’”

It was true. Kemp had gone where few, if any, of his fellow surf legends had gone, and after all that he’d done and seen he wasn’t so sure about coming back to Southern California—which had completely changed in the years he had been away.

When Kemp did finally make his way back, he found that he had nowhere to live and in general was out of step. “I was truly future-shocked,” Kemp says. “I understood the party was over, and I could see that nobody was going to give me a nickel for every wave I rode.”

Finding no work in Los Angeles or San Diego, he ventured back to Santa Barbara and drove to a bluff at Isla Vista looking out to sea. An old friend saw Kemp standing there, and offered him a room in a house. Frederick Herzog, aka Mr. Zog, of Sex Wax fame, happened to be working in the garage of that house. It provided another reminder of how others had turned surfing into their livelihood, something Kemp never had the inclination to do. Now he wondered—should he have done the same?

No matter. Kemp remembered someone saying something to him about how United Parcel Service drivers made pretty good money. On a whim, he called UPS, and in a stroke of luck got through to a supervisor who said the application period was just ending, but if Kemp hurried down to the office, he could make it. “I looked through my worldly goods, found a clean T-shirt, and went down there,” he says.

Kemp has been driving a UPS truck for 24 years. In the mid-’80s, he worked half-time while he pursued the rigorous training schedule of a triathlete. As always, he excelled, competing in the exclusive Hawaiian Ironman event twice and winning many a trophy in California. “I found the challenge of triathlons comparable to riding big surf. You would really get the butterflies. Before a race is like going to Sunset Beach on a big day and wondering if you can handle it.”

He married a lovely and lighthearted blond named Ella Hettmannsperger. They have a Boston Terrier named Willy and a home in a desirable Santa Barbara neighborhood about 500 yards from the beach. Kemp still has the body of a 30-year-old, runs regularly competes on occasion, maintains perfect posture, surfs occasionally, and practices guitar daily. With just one year before retirement, Kemp seems unbelievably vibrant, still curious and upbeat, almost childlike in his ability to get excited about the simplest things, and as wonderfully atypical as he was at age 16, when he first wanted to do that crazy thing called surfing.

“I could have been a lot smarter in terms of gaining a livelihood from surfing, I guess, but I really had no interest in that,” Kemp says. “My role was really that of the participant. I led the life of a gypsy surfer all the way, and deferred all practical matters until later. But that was okay. It all worked out. I feel as though you have to do things when you are stoked on them, or you might never be excited about them again, and the opportunity might never be so perfect."

[Photos: Bud Browne, John Severson, Don James, Dick Metz]

“KEMP AABERG: GRACE AND CHARM AND ART AND BEAUTY,” PROFILE BY RUSS SPENCER (1999)

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos

Contests