The quotes below are excerpted from "More Than My Share: Bev Morgan Stories and Photos," which ran in the February 2007 issue of Surfer's Journal. Morgan was 74.


I started surfing in Santa Monica, just bodysurfing. Tom Zahn was the lifeguard, Tom and Pete Peterson. They took turns at the tower where I hung out. I got pretty good at bodysurfing and they recommended I buy a surfboard. It turns out that my playing ukulele during the day underneath their tower was driving them crazy, and they would do anything to get rid of me. So I bought a 12-foot Tom Blake hollow board, painted green, with a pointed back end so really it was a paddleboard. That was the deal. If they cut the pointed end off to square it, it wasn't a paddleboard, it was a “kook box,” which was meant for surfing. Anyway, I drove up to Malibu and went straight off a couple of times, and Les Williams ran me off. “You kook! Get outta' here! Go back to State Beach!” So I went to San Onofre. I figured I was banished from Malibu. At San Onofre, the folks were a lot kinder. If you went straight off, it was okay, they’d still talk to you and didn’t get mad. If you missed a wave, you missed a wave. They’d give you pointers and help you out. Burrhead, Hammerhead, Eddie McBride—there was a whole raft of people down there with a whole different culture. Real laid back, have a beer, nobody's uptight.


You could drive a car when you were 14 in those days. I had a car and a night job so I could surf all day and afford gasoline, which was 17-cents a gallon. I started with a ’39 Oldsmobile but stepped up into a '49 Chevy, brand new, and of course I couldn’t leave it alone. Put in a McGurk engine, a Carson top, channeled it, louvered it—all the right stuff. So there I was at San Onofre with my East L.A. cruiser, chopped and channeled, and here comes a car down the dirt road there, full of loud obnoxious guys with these strange Simmons boards on top. They got out and started ripping—they were very good surfers, real young, as opposed to the typical San Onofre deal. I was out talking to them and they tell me, "You’ve got the wrong board. Why don’t ya come up to Manhattan Beach? Got a car?"

I had a car, a driver’s license, and could afford gasoline. I was their new buddy. They were 11 and 12 years old and couldn’t drive yet. They made me a deal. They’d teach me to surf if I’d cart them around. I said I’d look into it. I pulled up to Manhattan Pier a couple of days later, and they were all there. The first thing Greg Noll does, he sells me a board, an eight-foot Quigg spoon. With my new board I fit right in, and from that point forward I surfed two years without missing a day. I was hungry for surf, and they were hungry too. So we’d drive the coast from Santa Cruz to Tijuana Sloughs, living out of my car. We’d be surfing Malibu, load the car up, go to Sunset Cliffs for the next morning. And if it wasn't good there we'd load it back up and head somewhere else. That was the summer of ’51. In Fall, of course, the boys had to go to school. It was Bob Hogan, Greg Noll, Bing Copeland, and myself, just enjoying the heck out of the whole thing.


I clearly remember one day sitting on my board at Manhattan Pier with Bing [Copeland], Greg [Noll], Bob Hogan, Velzy, and Barney Briggs. We in smooth, glassy water next to the pier, going for the six-footers, all of us getting into the perfect spot and hollering for joy. What a day! Between waves, Velzy pointed up the hill to the morning traffic and all the souls on their way to work. “Look at those suckers, chained to their routine,” he said. “They don't know what we've got. They don’t know this even exists. Morgan, never forget what you're seeing here. Don’t just do what everyone says ya gotta do. You don’t have to! Live life the way you want. Figure out how to do it—don't follow bumper-to-bumper traffic to the work camps.” This became a guide for me.


We were all wearing these cutoff Navy whites because the Simmons boards were so wide that when you’d do a kick-stroke to catch a wave the board would rub against your legs and it would hurt. I think that's where the long baggies came from. Back then, the typical deal for swimming or going to the beach were real short-shorts. We wore Navy whites instead to protect our thighs. It was right after the war, and the surplus stores were full of them, 25-cents a pair. We'd run down, buy a dozen, cut them off. You'd lose them all the time— hang a pair up to dry, and somebody would snag 'em. The gals were wearing one-piece suits then, no bikinis. Of course, in those days, the formfitting one-piece was shocking.


I wasn’t around when Simmons was making the sandwich boards with Quigg and Kivlin, and I think that was his most productive time. I got to know him a little later. I remember Kivlin took me to Simmons’ garage shop and I gave him a $20 deposit for a new board, which put me 13th on the list. I go back a couple months later, and I was 25th on the list, so I ask Simmons what the fucking deal was, and he takes $20 out of his wallet, throws it on the floor and says, “Take your fuckin’ money and get outta’ here. You’re off the list.” That’s when I got my pointy-tailed paddleboard I was talking about earlier, which wasn’t nearly as good as the Simmons, but I wasn’t going to wait forever. Later on when I hanging out with the Manhattan guys, Simmons would come around to see who was surfing good. People wanted to make boards for the good guys. He ended up making me a 9'6" slot board. It got stolen off the top of my car, never to be seen again. It was probably cut down into another board.


Velzy would come down to Manhattan Pier, have a cigarette, go out, surf two waves, come in, smoke another cigarette with a cup of coffee, go back out, ride two more waves, come in, have a cigarette. I mean, he was classic. He didn’t surf all day like the rest of us. He’d just come down to make a presence. Boy, we all thought he was hot stuff. And he was good. He was as good as you got in those days.

Before Velzy had his shop, he was riding a Simmons with a plywood deck and balsa rails. He painted a pair of black feet on the very front of his board. I remember being out with him one day, and I asked him if he thought he could put his feet on the footprints. He said, “Naw, you’d pearl." Then he tried it, and he came back out all excited. “I put my feet right up there at the nose and something held me up!” So he did it again and got one foot over the nose. “Hey, I hung five toes over!” That was the beginning of that whole deal. Bruce Brown used those feet for the logo for his first film, 

. Later, Duke Boyd picked them up for Hang Ten.


Kivlin was the most graceful surfer, and you can’t be graceful on a surfboard, even today, without having a lot of skill. Of course, Kivlin had that repetitive wave at Malibu, and he’d get back real deep and trim out of it—cock his knees together and just go—and boy, it was beautiful to see. Joe Quigg was equally good. Right in that period, guys started stalling their board, breaking trim, to get deeper in the curl. Then Leslie Williams started actually turning back to let the wave catch up. This was the start of today’s style of surfing. It was all Malibu-inspired stuff, and then of course it started migrating up and down the coast. But Malibu was best, and Kivlin and Quigg were at the top of the class there. Simmons was riding Malibu too, except he was all out for speed. He didn’t care how far on the shoulder he went. Everything was speed with Simmons. If he was behind you on the wave, he’d get down low and just out-glide you, and he could pass you every time. He’d loved doing it to Joe. Come up from behind and force him off the wave. Then he'd cackle, real loud, in this high-pitched voice, “Hahahaha, gotcha!" You could hear him from the beach.


Quigg and Kivlin were really methodical. They'd make a board, go out and surf it, come in, and critique each other on the beach. Then they’d sell the board and go make some little change in the next one. They did more than anybody to bring along the shapes in an intelligent, thought-out way. I’d even call it engineering. Then Velzy got into it, and he tried the wildest things you could come up with, mainly to promote sales (laughing). Velzy's deal was, if you could convince a customer that it was good for him and the customer walks away happy, what’s the harm? So he would build the most horrendous asymmetrical board, and the buyer would be happy for six months, then come back and want something better. And somehow it all worked out.


Hobie started his business about that time, but he got into it in a more conservative way. His shapes were a combination of everything he could find that made sense to him. The thing with Hobie was, he was methodical and continuous. He was dependable. And because of that, he was more successful than any of those guys. Hobie paid his taxes and kept building on what he had. He was by far the best businessman of the group.


Velzy started making boards out of this little shop next to Manhattan Pier. He and I went to a military surplus store, bought a balsa life raft, hacked it up and made a couple of boards. He shaped, I glassed. I’d been working with Simmons on glassing, so I knew the routine. I glassed for Velzy for about six months. I could see that surfboards were evolving from a hobby kind of deal, where you had just a couple of guys like Simmons and Quigg making boards, into a little industry. Everybody who got into the surfboard business either personally knew Simmons, or Quigg, or Kivlin, or had at least watched them make boards. So the whole deal was passed on from those three. Pretty soon Velzy was making boards, then Bing [Copeland] and Greg [Noll] were making boards. Even Hobie, down in Laguna, was influenced by Walter Hoffman, who learned from Simmons. They were the start of the surfboard industry.

Once you see a board get made, it takes the mystery out of it. That’s what made me realize, much later, when I was in the dive helmet business, that I needed to keep my process a secret. How many guys are in the dive helmet business now? Zilch. I didn’t let anybody in the shop. I also determined that I’d get enough money for my product to make a real profit, which none of the surfboard guys did. That’s still dragging the business down, even today. A surfboard should sell for a couple grand if you put the right margins in, and justly so. I sell my diving helmets for $7,000 each, which I couldn’t do if everybody else knew how to build them.


Velzy finally got somebody who could glass better than me, and that's when I got into diving, about '52, and started Dive N’ Surf. I was hanging out a lot with Hap Jacobs, who was a carpenter at UCLA. He quit that job because they had him working in this refrigeration room where they hung cadavers. He worked all day with dead people staring at him and couldn’t take it anymore. We decided to go into the surfboard business. Hap would shape, and since I'd been Velzy’s glasser I'd do the glassing. I was diving a lot by then, and down at Scripps one day I’d read about this new thing called a wetsuit. So I said to Hap, This will be great, we'll rent a little shop, you shape boards, I'll glass them, and over in the corner I’ll make wetsuits. It worked out pretty good except the fiberglass dust got in the wetsuits. [Laughter] All our wetsuit customers were itching and scratching.

After a while, it became obvious that Hap and I would separate. I’m glassing, but not liking it because I’m making a lot more money over in the wetsuit corner. The wetsuit business started out just like the surfboard business. You build a wetsuit for cheap and hope you make ten bucks a suit, but I got pretty good at it and was building 10 to 15 suits a day. I couldn’t glass 10 to 15 boards a day, and I was making about the same for each task. So I told Hap I didn’t want to glass anymore and that I didn’t think it was a good deal to have the shops together anyway because of the itch. But Hap didn’t want to move and was dragging his feet. What changed things was, he and I went over to General Veneer when a new shipment of balsa came in. We walked in and bought it all. Jacobs’ dad had a couple of bucks, and he helped finance us. Velzy heard about it and went ballistic, but too late, we had all the wood. Then I went to Velzy and told him, "You know, Hap’s really become a hell of a shaper and a good businessman, and he’s got all the wood. Why don’t you go partners with him?" Velzy thought that was a pretty good idea, so then I went to Hap and told him he needed help. He was so far behind on his board orders, and besides, we’d bought too much balsa. We were going to end up eating it and owing money. Hap thought it was a pretty good idea, too.

There was a meeting with me, Velzy, Jacobs and Bill Meistrell, who was going to buy out Hap’s side of our partnership, so he and I could run Dive N’ Surf. That's what Hap and I had called our dive-suit and surfboard business. I’ve got a picture of us standing out in front of the shop, closing the deal. We brought our trucks to the meeting, and afterwards we took all of Hap's stuff over to Velzy’s shop up in Venice. So, off go Velzy and Jacobs, and I wished them well. A couple years later, Dewey ended up screwing Dale out of that shop, and that made me uptight, because up till then I'd liked Dewey. But that's a different story.


After I sold Dive N’ Surf in 1957 and got out of the business, some friends of mine and I bought a sailboat and sailed to the South Pacific for two years. Just for the adventure. One of the guys, Lowell, who had more money than the rest of us, bought the boat. It was a 61-foot ketch. The crew was Ron Church, Plazi Miller, Ramsey Parks, Jack Russell, Bruce Meyers, and me. Some of the guys fell out during the trip. Jack wrote 

 just before we left; Sinatra and the Rat Pack ended up making the movie after we got back. Plazi was just a surfer kid. He was the only one who had already been to the South Seas and of course he was glorifying how wonderful it was. Lots of fun, women, everyone kind of wild and loose, like we were. We were mostly in our 20s. Lowell, the money guy who bought the boat, was maybe 35.

We had a bunch of dive gear and movie gear—the idea was to make a film but we weren't good enough to pull it off—and we went down the Mexican coast. Before we left, we went down to Acres of Books in Long Beach and bought all the books we could find on each place we were going to visit, and put them all into the boat’s library. We'd leave one place, and on the way to the next location everybody would read up on what that place was going to be like.

For Cocos Island, this one book said that when they dropped anchor it felt like they were dragging chain, but when they looked down it turned out to be sharks chewing on the chain. They almost didn’t make it rowing ashore because the sharks ate the end of the oars. We'd made this deal where we going to collect fish for Scripps Insitute because nobody had ever done that for the Cocos Island. Now we knew why! Still, on the way there, we were thinking, “Naw, no way, it can't be that bad.” But sure enough, we dropped the hook into the beautiful clear water of this bay and 

 We look over at all these white-tipped sharks, six-footers or so, chewing on the anchor chain, and freely losing teeth.

We’d had sharks chase us all down through Mexico, so we were pretty comfortable with them in the water. I had a shark come in at Tres Marias and bite the end of my spear gun, but I still was able to shot into its nose and scared it away. We learned from that to start poking them in the nose. But how were we going to dive this place? We figured out a way. We’d go down three at a time, two guys back-to-back with shark billys, and one guy collecting fish on the bottom. Shark billys were made of ironwood, which would sink instead of floating, so if it got knocked out of your hand it would just fall next to you and you could pick it back up. We’d bash the sharks in the nose, and they’d leave us alone. That worked fine until one day we had the three-man team going and the guy in the middle, Lowell, froze up staring off into the blue. The other fella and myself are looking at Lowell and then each other, then we see two great big sharks coming right at us, then they split. One went one way, the other went the other way, and that's cause there was a 

 shark right behind them. He slowly swam toward Lowell and opened his mouth. He was going to eat him, there was no doubt about it. Ramsey and I swam forward and both poked the big guy in the nose. He didn’t like that at all. He shut his mouth, turned around, swam off. But we knew he was just circling. We grabbed Lowell and he was still frozen when we threw him over the gunnel into the boat, tank and all, and jumped in after him. Then all three sharks came back and started chewing on the bottom of this 14' skiff. The big guy’s mouth was almost fitting around the entire bottom of the boat. I mean, it was a really big shark. Back on the ketch, we decided we weren’t going to press our luck. We pulled the hook and sailed for the Galapagos.


We were only the second post-war private yacht to land on Easter Island. Everybody, including the local priest, told us that the population was suffering from genetic inbreeding due to their isolation and the small size of their population. They didn't have enough fresh genes to keep everyone healthy. The people were beginning to exhibit noticeably adverse effects. So they formally requested that we contribute to their gene pool. They had 40 or 50 gals picked out for us to mate with. There were just five of us, but we were all healthy, strapping young lads. Honest to God. We thought about it for a short while and finally agreed it was our moral duty. We worked hard, and our effort was well received.


When I came back from the South Seas, I got into abalone and commercial diving, and then, just to keep the thread going—this is 1962—I looked around and noticed that surfers would not wear a wetsuit. A few wore tops with beavertails hanging off in the back, and they were put down endlessly as being pussies. It didn't make sense to me. The turning point came one afternoon as I drove by Rincon and counted 150 surfers in the water. Ramsey, the guy I was with, noticed that just one or two of the surfers were wearing wetsuits; the rest were all naked animals enduring the cold. "Tough guys," I said.

"I'll bet you I can cover every one of those guys with a black suit."

Ramsey shakes his head. "No way. Psychologically they’re against it.”

I came up with a plan. I figured that if every wetsuit had a surfboard maker’s decal on it they would sell in large quantities. So I called Hobie and Bing and Con, everybody I could think of, all the big board manufacturers. I made a rubber decal of each of the their logos and started to make what I called a "short john.” Hobie and Munoz helped with the design. The short john had thigh-length legs and no sleeves so they didn’t restrict paddling. They cost $10 to make, and I sold them for $15. The boardmakers sold them for $25. Still, I was having a hard time until I won over the first five or six shop owners. I offered to pay their rent if they didn't make money off the suits. They all went for that, but I didn’t have to pay any rent. Everybody made money right away. Pretty soon I had 1,000 orders on my desk, then 2,500. It was too much for me to do alone, so I loaded everything in the back of my truck, sewing machine, rubber, glue, and I went to Billy and Bob Meistrell and said, “Pay me what these materials are worth, $1,800, and you’re in the surf-suit business.” At that point they were just making dive suits. They gave me the money and took everything, the equipment, the patterns, the decals, and the accounts I'd set up. A couple of months later they called me and said, “You won't believe this! We’re making $5,000 a day each!" They were churning 2,000 suits a day. That eventually turned into Body Glove.


I drove straight from that deal with the Meistrell brothers down to see [SURFER magazine founder] John Severson, and told him I wanted a job. He was kind of taken aback. “Okay, so you want to sit at a desk all day?”

“Naw, I don’t, but I want to work.”

John hired me, and that's where I really renewed my acquaintance with surfers. Now, I’ve got to tell you, Phil Edwards can be different to deal with. He and Joe Quigg are so similar you can’t even believe it. Both hate being taken advantage of. Both hate anyone doing anything that’s promotional on their time. They don’t want anything to do with that. They just live their lives and hole up. Actually, Phil and I got along fine. I think he may have felt that I was not as crassly commercial as a lot of people in the industry, which is probably true.

Anyway, I shot photos of Phil a couple of times. At that point everybody was into telephoto lenses, but I wanted to get in the water and get closer to the action. Phil was game. At times, like I say, he could be a little hard to work with, but he was real cooperative and getting some good waves, riding right at me then banking off. This was at Oceanside Pier, in winter, and he didn't have a wetsuit on. It was colder than hell. I sure had one on. All the time we're out there, I’m going, “Phil, you’ve got to put on a wetsuit.” And he tells me, “Shut up, I’m happy.” It turned out to be a good session. One of the shots became a SURFER cover.


There’s just a few ways to bullshit in surfing. "You should have been here an hour ago, it was ten-foot!" That’s livable bullshit. Most guys do that. But you can’t claim you’re going over to Hawaii and ride Waimea and then not do it. There’s a limit to how much you can bullshit in surfing. After a while, everybody knows where you fit. No matter how much you talk, you can’t get away with continuous bullshit. This transfers over into your day-to-day living. If you bullshit too much, you’ll get called on it. In the end, you have to be able to look in the mirror and say, "I can ride this wave or I can’t." (Laughing) Right now, today, I can’t! That’s okay. I’ve had more than my share.

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