TURN! TURN! TURN! WITH LES "BIRDMAN" WILLIAMS

Hey All,

I will fascinate you in a moment with context and analysis and whatnot, but let's not bury the lede: the four-shot screen-grab sequence you see above, of Santa Monica's Les "Birdman" Williams, filmed in 1950 or '51, is the closest we'll ever get to pinpointing the start of high-performance surfing. Not trick riding, which was already in play, or high-and-tight trim, which Hawaiian surfers had been doing for decades, centuries, who knows. And not performance surfing the way Rabbit Kekai was doing it, tail-stomping his slender finless hot curl at Queens Surf. But a banked-over change of direction, on rail, on purpose, with style and form totally recognizable to all of us here in 2024—my surf historian ganglia is a-tingle because this newly found (to me, anyway) footage gives us permission to say, and show, how, where and when that first turn took place, and who was doing it. Next up, historically speaking: first bottom turn, first off-the-top, and all the turns to follow, 75 years' worth of invention and variation, with more to come.

I'll take a breath here up to note that everything would have happened, just as it did, surf-evolution-wise, without Williams. We were already on the way. We were never not going to get to Kelly Slater's carving 360. But credit where it is due—Williams did it before anybody. And doesn't he just know it! Watch the full ride (scroll to 3:53) and you see Les give a friendly push to the guy in front of him, and I am likely reading more into it than I should, but Williams is literally clearing the field in order to change direction—of his line, of the sport itself.

But I promised context, and we've got context up to our molars here, so let's go back to the beginning of the clip and roll tape, start to finish. The bits we'll cover here are not arranged in chronological order, exactly, but rather to show how board design and performance evolved over five or so years, starting in 1947.

First up, the back-to-back rides that begin at 0:42. The red board you see is a square-nosed, square-railed Tom Blake-style hollow, and while not everybody struggled with this design like this poor guy, these were tippy, high-strung, hard-to-ride boards, built from blueprints, with pre-cut wood pieces and a pound or two of flathead brass screws. The other surfers you see in these two shots are all riding Pacific System Homes-style planks, redwood and balsa, with a shallow keel fin but otherwise not much changed from prewar boards. I'll be doing some guesswork in this Joint, starting here: this bit was filmed in '47 or thereabouts, and the stylish black-haired plank-rider in the second shot is young Matt Kivlin. Bob Simmons was on the scene at this point, but we're not yet seeing evidence of his boards. (The opening shots in this edit were taken a few years later and are very much in the Simmons Age; this is confusing for the purpose of today's Joint, I know; apologies.)

But now here comes Simmons, he's the goofyfooter on the extra-long Malibu wave starting at 1:06. After that, we have three shots taken at either Latigo Canyon or Big Dume, and I've included them because you see Bob struggling to catch waves due to his mangled left arm (from a near-fatal cycling accident a decade or so earlier), and because the arm had so much to do not just with how he rode waves but how he thought about design. Board performance, for Simmons, was viewed almost exclusively through a lens of increased speed—he wanted to go fast, made equipment to that purpose, and anything else was getting fancy, so no thanks. That said, it was Simmons who almost single-handedly developed nose-left, bottom contouring, foiled rails, and all-balsa blanks skinned with fiberglass and resin—building blocks that were all soon picked up by Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin, but hang on, we're getting ahead of ourselves. 

Skip ahead to 2:49, for some up-close water shots filmed at San Onofre. We're detouring here simply to make the point, and it cannot be stated often enough, that Malibu surfers were at this time putting a huge amount of distance between themselves and everyone else on the coast. The Sano gang, stiff-legged and arms everywhere, are still riding planks. They angle when they can, but are happy enough riding straight for shore. Same thing for the series of shots beginning at 3:20, except we've moved up the coast to Palos Verdes Cove. (The well-muscled balding surfer who drops to his knees on his way back to the beach, see below, is famed photographer and PV Surf Club founder John "Doc" Ball.)

Now, onto the last and longest bit of the edit, starting with the Les Williams cutback and finishing with another almost identical turn (6:02), just so you know the first one was not a fluke. Again, I think this is 1950 or '51. What happened to pushing things along this far, this fast? The short answer is Quigg and Kivlin, and to a lesser extent Tom Zahn, all much younger than Simmons, all happy to go fast, like Bob, but more interested in widening the performance arc. And the secret ingredient? Hormones. Romance and lust. Girls began turning up at Malibu, and a few of them, in-between flirting and tanning and party-planning, decided they were going to ride waves, too. Quigg, Kivlin, and Zahn met all their needs—all three were handsome; Quigg and Kivlin both shaped boards—and the new lightweight "girl boards" they produced (25 pounds, give or take) were first borrowed by the guy surfers, then copied, and that gets us to the summer of 1950 and Les Williams, who wasn't regarded as the best surfer at Malibu (that would be Kivlin) but was for sure the guy who really wanted to power out his turns. Miki Dora, still a schoolboy but already making an impression in the water, would soon be weaving down the point like a half-and-half mix of Kivlin and Williams. Dora befriended a San Diego County middle school kid named Phil Edwards, who first straight-up copied Miki's style, then later added power and blunt force to create a style of his own, and high-performance surfing at that point is well and truly off to the races. 

Twenty years later, it happened again. We overhauled the equipment, radically, over a five-year-span. Except this time we gave it a name—the Shortboard Revolution—and served it up with a big side of overcooked counterculture hippy mash. The midcentury turn of the wheel, by comparison, was cleaner, more direct, and (last guess of the day, but a safe one) a lot more fun.

I'll leave you with the immortal words of Malibu surfer Vicki Flaxman. When Vicki and her pals rolled up in force at San Onofre one afternoon in the summer of '50, with their new lightweight thin-railed all-balsa boards, the local surfers began laughing. “Oh my God, how do you ride those potato chips? How do you ride the soup?” Vicki said decades later, mimicking the jeers from the Sano crew. "And we said, 'We don't ride the soup; we're in the curl, honey!'”

Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Matt

PS: Steve Pezman's 1997 interview with Joe Quigg gets into all of this and more, and is a wonderful read, start to finish. 

PS: Sorry, I can't leave without a couple more comments on that last segment in the video, click here if you already closed the window and go to 3:50. Directly after that first Williams cutback you see a girl in a black two-piece, and I put that shot there to demonstrate how, once Birdman showed the way, everybody was out there trying the same move. I sent this clip to Vicki (still alive and well at age 92) but she couldn't say if the girl onscreen is her or not. Vicki was the best of those first-gen female Malibu surfers, but Claire Cassidy, Aggie Bane, Robin Grigg, and a couple of others were out there, too. I take back what I just said, I'll do some more guessing here because I'm pretty sure that is indeed Vicki stomping the cutback. Next shot, same girl, plus a pint-sized boy surfer in red trunks who I'm 95% convinced is Mickey Munoz, age 15 or 16. Next shot, Munoz zooms across from way up the point, comes around a section, gets burned, passes the guy, then reaches a hand back and gives the fellow (Kivlin, I think) a slingshot forward. Then more Vicki, and there she is doing the rock dance. We end with two more Williams cutbacks. What a time to be alive! 

[The source film we're talking about today is unattributed but likely shot by longtime Malibu surfer-resident John Larronde, who died in 1990 at age 75. Four-shot sequence at the top of the page shows Les Williams cutting back at Malibu. Unknown rider at Malibu on a red hollow board. Detail from a 1939 Popular Science article on how to build a hollow surfboard. Bob Simmons trimming at Latigo or Big Dume. Two surfers share a wave at San Onofre. Doc Ball heads for shore at Palos Verdes Cove. Vicki Flaxman and Mickey Munoz—I think—riding together at Malibu. Flaxman does the rock dance and gets an assist from a passerby]