The Surfers Journal
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“I remember at one point a bunch of us gremmies were at a Bruce Brown movie and when The Beach Boys played at intermission, we threw our popcorn at them. To us they were kooks ’cause surf music was jazz.”
Among Hank Warner’s earliest memories is the slow, steady click of a heavy metallic chain, followed by a chorus of terrified screams. The haunting clamor came from the Giant Dipper roller coaster in Mission Beach as it inched toward its summit then descended into what must have seemed like certain death. Situated a few blocks from the house where Warner grew up, the contraption is a kiddie ride compared to today’s 100-mile-per-hour cannon shots. But in the early 1950s, it was nothing short of a heroic adventure.
At that time Warner was an unattended 7 year old who would hotfoot over the sand, across what was essentially his front yard, to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, he rode his canvas mat for hours in the shadow of the coaster. In 21st century post-paranoid America, his mother Phyllis would be arrested for child neglect. But she was a good parent and, like most at the time, had little reason to fear anything more dangerous than sunburn would afflict her youngest as long as he was home before the streetlights came on.
It’s doubtful any surfer has had a better life than Warner. Since childhood, he’s had free reign of San Diego’s beaches, with some of the best surfers and board builders in the world as friends and mentors. They called him “Gremmie,” as suitable then as it is now. At 68 years old, he continues to possess a youthfulness touched only sparingly by the passage
of time.
A genuine humility has kept him (in the public’s view, anyway) just beyond the skylights of his hall of fame friends, a heavy crew that includes Skip Frye, Mike Hynson, and Butch Van Artsdalen. While Warner never has won a major surf contest or starred in any surf movies, he deserves a ranking among the legends, if only because very few living surfers—with the possible exception of Frye—have witnessed, lived, and helped create more SoCal surf history than he has.
Starting with his first board, a balsawood Velzy, he has transitioned as both a rider and a shaper through flawless Casters, Hynson Red Fins, Frye eggs, twin-fins, Bonzers, Lis fishes, thrusters, Fitzgerald double wingers, Byrne channels, and second generation longboards. Recently, he helped Richard Kenvin transform the Mini Simmons into a five-finned power hull.
Warner doesn’t make a show of avoiding fame, but he cares so little for it that he didn’t return my calls for a month after I proposed this article. “I don’t know what we would talk about,” he said, almost apologetically after finally getting in touch.
“Your perspective on the legendary surfers who influenced you,” I said.
“Okay, that’s cool,” he answered.
Butch, Billy and Laura Caster, Larry Gordon, Gary Keating, Chris O’Rourke—Warner quietly bears the scars of these and other premature losses. Countering the weight of the departed, however, is his 23-year marriage to his wife Shelly, their sons Wyatt (16) and Rhett (13), and a half-century-plus love affair with wave riding. Apparently, he’s been so locked into surfing’s wonderland that he’s never noticed the passing of time, nor realized that his transition from apprentice to teacher was already complete by the late 1970s, when he began mentoring new gremmies like Pipeline underground standout Joe Roper and, later, Joe’s hard-charging son, and Hank’s godson, Jojo.
If this piece tends to drift from its stated subject into the lore of other people, places, and things, realize that it is a reflection of Warner’s humility. I have known him for nearly 50 years and spent quite a bit of time in his pleasant company—entertained by tales of surf safaris, famous/infamous/nameless surfers, and the various types of surfboards he’s made and ridden. I still can’t recall a single instance where he has placed himself in the center of those sagas.
Someone else is always the protagonist. My guess is he still sees himself as a gremmie, recalling the days when he rode shotgun with his heroes.
—C.A.
“America still has the flickering spirit of The Andy Griffith Show in certain pockets if you scratch hard enough. Hank and anyone fortunate enough to be part of his core suffer, in an extremely positive way, from a Mayberry complex despite San Diego being one of the toughest of surfing towns. From street to reef, I saw that he was as close to being the glue of the American surfing experience as anyone can be. He’s that seminal.”
—Derek Hynd
Billy Caster lived just up the beach from us. He was a really good surfer and interested in my sister, Laura, who was four years older than me. By the time they became an item in 1961, I was also a surfer and Billy had his own factory, Olympic Surfboards, by the Midway Drive Inn west of Highway 101.
It was a shed owned by Billy’s uncle, Lloyd Baker. I remember there being a lot of crashed cars around it. Uncle Lloyd, who taught Billy to shape, was probably the first custom shaper in our area back in the 1940s. I think Billy was trying to impress my sister when he shaped, glassed, and painted me a surfboard for $40. It was a lot of money but with two paper routes, I was able to pay for it on my own.
I was 11 years old when I got a job in the Olympic factory. The sander paid me to hand sand the clear spots off the rails and around the fins when he was finished with them. I weighed about 70 pounds then so flipping those 25-pound boards over in the rack was a chore. Still, I got a look at how quality surfboards were made.
By age 12, I had already owned several surfboards and would sometimes go to Baja with Butch [Van Artsdalen] or one of the other older guys who had a license. We’d leave in the morning and be home before the streetlights came on. By then I had become a better surfer and was surfing Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach after school. That area was kind of country then and the best surfers were always there. Gordon & Smith had a factory on Emerald Street nearby and I somehow got in with the owners, Floyd [Smith] and Larry [Gordon].
One day Floyd asked me to hold an 11-foot gun that Mike Hynson had shaped for Tommy Lee. Then I put on a pair of Floyd’s trunks and a t-shirt, which looked like a muumuu on me. Roy Porello snapped a photo that became a Surfer magazine ad with the words, “You don’t have to be a big man to ride a Gordon & Smith.” That was in 1962 and it was only about the ninth Surfer magazine ever, so that got my name out there. I started riding boards from G&S after that and kind of betrayed Billy. When you’re in junior high you go with your group.
That summer, [Skip] Frye would come by my house and ride me on the handlebars of his bike to the beach or take me to breakfast. Once he drove me to Petey Johnson’s house in Oceanside and I met Phil Edwards. He was sanding a plywood and fiberglass boat hull, probably Hobie’s first catamaran prototype. Skip would always include me in things like that. He was my hero then and he still is. To this day he remains my biggest influence.
Mike Hynson, who was already established as a top surfer and shaper, was still in his teens. He shaped me a board and I’ll never forget Skip handing it to me. Skip was also one of the best surfers in town by then. He had replaced Butch as the new sander at G&S, and he’d written on the nose, “Sanded by Skippio for Hanky Kine. No. 1#.”
A while later, Floyd stenciled my back with the G&S logo they used to silkscreen t-shirts. Once again Roy Porello snapped the shot and it became another G&S ad. This one read, “Gordon & Smith, a label proud to wear.”
I remember at one point a bunch of us gremmies were at a Bruce Brown movie and when The Beach Boys played at intermission, we threw our folded popcorn cups at them. To us they were kooks ’cause surf music was jazz.
In 1963, I sold 271 raffle tickets for the WindanSea Surf Club. My prize was a 13-hour ride on a prop plane from Oakland to Hawaii, two meals a day, and three weeks at the Waianae Baptist Church Camp. I was kind of freaked out because, like our mainland gremlin, the Hawaiians had a mythical, tiny troublemaker called a Menehune that I’d heard stories about.
I ended up staying in a room with David Nuuhiwa and Herbie Torrens and some of the other juniors, but there was nothing left to sleep in except a child’s crib. Being small enough to fit in the crib, I climbed into it and laid down. It had bars on it and I told Nuuhiwa, “[The Menehunes] can’t get me in here.” Then he put his hands through the bars and said, “Yes, they can get you.”
I was so scared I grabbed a knife to sleep with. I was just a kid. The very real waves at Makaha for that year’s contest were even scarier than the idea of imaginary little people. It was about 15 feet and I somehow made it out, even though I was crying and praying the entire time. I remember watching Reno Abellira, who was roughly my age, paddle into set waves.
“Back in the 1960s, Hank was the gremmie. I mean, the ‘Gremmie,’ and I was the man. Now that I’ve slid over the hill he’s the man. As far as being a surfer and shaper, he never has received his due. He’s probably the main guy in our area right now.”
—Skip Frye
Back home in Mission Beach, Butch was always nice to us. He would often load up his Hudson Hornet with seven or eight of us gremmies and all of our boards, and drive us to La Jolla Shores to go surfing. He used to say, “Stay high on the wave and you’ll make it.” You never forget those sorts of things.
I was out one day trying to impress Butch by holding my hands the way Hynson said I should, when Butch asked if I wanted to ride along to Dana Point with him and get his new surfboard. It was about 11:20 in the morning and I said I had to be back to do my paper route at 1:00. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back in time.”
I got in his car with Peter “Pope” Kahapea, the Hawaiian surfer who’d recently won the Makaha Juniors. We arrived at the Hobie factory about noon and Butch ran in and got his board. It seemed we would make it on time but then someone offered him a beer and I figured that was it for me. “Nah, I gotta get the gremmie back to do his paper route,” he said, pointing to me in his car. That’s the only time I know of Butch passing up a beer.
Once, after an evening at Hussong’s Cantina in Ensenada, he was too drunk to drive so he turned the controls over to me. I was 15, had never driven before, and could barely see over the steering wheel, but I managed to get us back to San Miguel in one piece.
Mike Hynson was another powerful influence. When I was attending P.B. Junior High I helped build a shaping room for him at Chuck Hasley’s Hobie Surf Shop, near our school. I would squirt glue on the soundproof tiles before Hobie placed them on the walls. For my effort I earned a burger, fries, and a Coke.
One day Hynson sent a postcard to the shop from Cape St. Francis. He said he had caught the first wave there, and he called the place Torpedo Point. A few years later, we were so into those first Mike Hynson Models that we started the short lived Red Fin Surfing Association. I had the shortest Hynson Model ever made at the time, a 9’4″. He would always tell me, “Don’t worry, your time will come but right now it’s mine.”
The WindanSea Surf Club was a prestigious group to belong to and I was one of its youngest members. In order to show the San Diego City Council that surfers were good people and improve our negative image, Billy [Caster] brought Thor Svenson in as an advisor. Thor organized a march in P.B. to protest the closing of San Diego’s surf spots. After 1,000 surfers marched in protest, they voted to keep the beaches open to us.
On the [infamous 1963] WindanSea Club bus ride to the Malibu Invitational, we were supposed to leave in the morning from Maynard’s [the famed bar across from the Crystal Pier]. The day dragged into night and it was after closing by the time [Mike] Diffenderfer, Hasley, Hynson, Mike Pettit, Harold Reed, Del Cannon, and the others found their seats. Johnny Sandera and I were the gremmies on the bus. There’s no way we would even get out of town in that thing today.
There was a keg inside and, before we even arrived in Oceanside and picked up LJ Richards, people were peeing out the windows. The next stop was in Dana Point to get the Patterson brothers, along with Pat Curren, Butch, and two young women named Ruby and Nori, who we called “Ruby and the Romantics.”
By around 4 a.m. there was beer and piss and barf sliding all over the floor. People were trying to pee out the windows but it kept spraying back inside. Every once in awhile someone would run up and put his hands over the driver’s eyes and scream, “Guess who?” Rusty Miller kept the beat on a set of drums the entire time from the back row.
Rusty drew the first heat in the morning but just fell over after standing up. Dave Willingham, who was usually a fantastic surfer, took off and just glided toward shore. Soon, the other clubs were saying that WindanSea was a joke. Then Hynson won his heat, LJ won his, Cabell won his, and Bobby Patterson too.
The most exciting heat I remember was when Hynson cut off Corky Carroll [there was no interference rule at the time]. Corky was behind Hynson and LJ was behind Corky, and when Mike wheeled into a cutback, Corky had to straighten out and LJ came up behind him and rode all the way to shore. WindanSea established a name at that contest after Cabell won it, LJ took second, Hynson took third, and Bobby Patterson took fifth.
“Hank and I walked into a secret spot in San Diego on a glorious autumn day, 4 to 5 feet, glass. One wave, one barrel, one board. That’s all it took. Shaping is degrees of interpretation, the immersion of new, old, radical into individual variation. With true craftsmen like Hank, it would be rude not to accept personal interpretation. In fact it is encouraged as a positive addition to the sum of parts.” —Terry Fitzgerald
In 1971 I moved to Australia for a year. When I came home, I was jacked on performance surfing while most California surfers were still cruising on narrow semi-guns. That motivated me to go to the East Coast and work with Yancy Spencer and BZR [Beezer Turner].
I spent a few years driving a drum of resin and a stack of blanks to the East Coast to make surfboards, start to finish. Once they were done, I’d drive up the coast surfing and selling them to various surf shops.
In 1972, Yancy and I formed a surf company called AGP [Atlantic Gulf Pacific].
I made him a copy of a Frye egg for what was called “The Manufacturer’s Rip-Off Contest,” which was coming up. I believe it was the first man-on-man event ever and it was double elimination, meaning you had to lose twice. Yancy got past all the competitors including David Nuuhiwa, and finally met Dale Dobson in the finals. After defeating Dobson twice, he took the $1,000 first prize.
The money was important to Yancy because the ten Plastic Fantastic Surfboards he had taken on consignment at his tiny shop had been stolen. A lot of people would have let the manufacturers shoulder the loss but not Yancy. He paid them off with his winnings. Later, the police found the boards in the attic of the thief’s house and Yancy got them all back.
By 1977, I had burned out on making complete boards and I went to work shaping for Gordon & Smith. I shaped there from ’77 until 1984. At my peak, I once shaped 1,200 boards in a year. The factory manager, Paul Borderi, helped me along, as did my late night calls to Billy Caster.
It was also in ’77 that I was contacted by Terry Fitzgerald to shape Hot Buttered Surfboards here in the U.S. He sent me a plane ticket to Hawaii and said to meet him at Jack Reeves’ house near Rocky Point. I was shaping Joe Roper’s boards at the time and since he was one of their top team riders, G&S paid his way to Hawaii.
It was his first trip to the Islands. He was only 18, but there was no doubt he was going to charge, which he did. The whole time we were there I was trying to get Joe to meet Butch, since Butch had opened the door to the reefs in La Jolla that Roper grew up riding. But we just couldn’t find him. Then one night Roper and I went to Pupukea Heights for a slideshow. We were hitchhiking home when a little truck pulled over and, in the darkness, I could see the driver clearing off the passenger seat.
When I saw that it was Butch, I said, “Milktoast!” That was the name I sometimes called him because, even though he was the best fighter, the best athlete, and the hardest drinker, he was also really a softy and a sentimental guy at heart. “Hanky Panky!” he said. I introduced him to Roper and he drove us home.
It wasn’t much later that Butch finally went down. I remember Billy Caster saying, “There could never be a 40-year-old Butch Van Artsdalen.” Butch was 38 when he died.
“When Hank was young, my father was a major influence on him. Now Hank influences me and my father’s other children and grandchildren. He’s not only my uncle, he’s also one of the people who have helped keep my father’s legacy alive. He has a photographic memory and his stories light the torch for the younger generation.” —Heidi Caster
I went back to Australia in 1980 and was at Kirra when I asked Allan Byrne for a ride to Burleigh. He had just come out with the six-channel surfboard and he had one of them in his car. I had never seen one before and he told me they were a single-fin answer to twin-fin maneuverability. Back in the States, I started making them for G&S and I ended up shaping 800 of them that year. When I showed Billy those first Deep Six channel bottoms, he got into it and they became a great model for Caster Surfboards.
Caster quality was all Billy. He could patch a board and make it look brand new and he would get rid of all the air bubbles in the glass. His attention to quality was reflected in his being a quality individual. Whenever I’d go to the Caster factory I’d see Billy there working, sometimes on his hands and knees scrubbing the bathroom floors.
Everything had to be just right. He and my sister broke up once and Billy went out with the “Fairest of the Fair,” Andrea LaPointe. After he and Laura got back together I asked him about it and he said, “I want somebody I can spend the rest of my life with.” He and Laura remained married from 1965 until Bily died in 1987. Laura died in 1999.
When Billy got sick in 1984, he told me, “My only chance is to get to this clinic in the Bahamas, but it’s $12,000 and I don’t have the money.” He had always been helpful to everyone and when I told Larry Gordon, he donated $1,000. Peter St. Pierre and Gary McNabb each put in $1,000. Yancy put in $1,000. Bird [Huffman] and Ed Wright and a lot of people that knew Billy came together until they raised $18,000, which left him enough to rent a car.
At the clinic, Billy met a banker who was also getting treated there. When Billy told him how the surfing community had paid for his treatment, the banker replied, “I’m the CEO of a big bank, and I doubt anyone would pay a dollar to help me.” This was an outpatient clinic that provided treatments not approved in the U.S. Still, about a third of the cases deemed terminal by conventional methods had been cured there.
Billy had about three weeks left of his treatments when another patient, who was the relative of a U.S. politician, contracted hepatitis. After that the World Health Organization applied pressure to close down the clinic, something that was enforced by armed members of the Bahaman Army.
Billy was a lot like Frye in a way. When Skip and I became partners at Harrys’ [their surf shop], I’d come in early to find he’d cleaned my shaping room. When I’d thank him for it, he’d say, “Oh, I had some extra room in my trash bag and needed to fill it up.”
At 77, Skip is still in the water all day, and he’ll still stand around and look at his board collection, waiting for one of them to “talk to him.” When it does he’ll wax it, go surfing, and if he gets a little shatter, he’ll remove all the wax, patch it, put it back in the board bag, and put it away. He’s got every style of board in his quiver.
Part of what makes him such an unreal custom shaper is that he’s like a living brochure. If you want a board, he’ll ride that model all day, come back and make your board off the one he just rode. He doesn’t make boards for shops because he wouldn’t make a board if he didn’t have a connection to the person riding it.
Skip’s so content with just surfing that he’d be happy with nothing but a pair of cutoff jeans and a surfboard. He wouldn’t even need wax. When boards went short, a lot of the old surfer/shapers left the industry because they couldn’t adapt. Skip, on the other hand, kept going without letting up. While many of them ventured into other things, he hasn’t been dry the entire time.
When Shelly and I decided to get married in 1996, we wanted to have the ceremony at P.B. Point. At the time, Skip probably had 15 years’ worth of surf calendars where he had logged the conditions, the boards ridden, and who he had surfed with. He probably has almost 40 years of them now. The date of our wedding was five months away but he studied his calendars and gave me the date of March 16, using his logs to predict the weather.
It had been raining all week when the day arrived, but it cleared up that afternoon and turned into a hot, sunny Santa Ana afternoon. When we got down to the Point, there was Skip with a group of guys lifting flat rocks, making a line from the stairs out to the end of the point because he’d heard Shelly’s grandparents were coming. “We gotta make a way for grandma to be there,” he said. We call that path the Fryeway.
He’s always doing things like that. Like, when he goes to San Onofre, the first thing he’ll do is take out his rake, rake the sand, pick up the trash, take out his boards, and gently put them down.
After Skippy returned from Australia in 1967, he made himself his first shortboard, a 6’7″. All he wanted to do then was knee ride, like Greenough. That’s what inspired me to shape my first board, which I made at the Channin/Diffenderfer shop next to the Powerhouse in Del Mar.
My first business venture with Skip began in 1962 when he bought a pair of metal-wheeled roller skates and some wood. With those materials he made two skateboards and we called them “Skanky’s,” for Skip and Hanky. We rode our skateboards to the G&S shop and Eric Slater, the manager of the shop at the time, was on the phone.
He said, “This woman wants to know if we have skateboards. You wanna talk to her?” Skippy talked with her and then drove us to her house. I was sidewalk surfing up and down the driveway while the lady bought Skip’s board for pretty much what he had spent on materials. He broke even and I had a skateboard. That was the end of our first enterprise together, even though “Skanky’s” was later resurrected in 1995.
In 1990, Skip and his wife Donna asked if I wanted to partner with them in a surf shop. Both Skip’s real name and my real name is Harry, so we named the shop Harrys’. We ended up with 3,000 square feet of oceanfront property that didn’t cost us much. We thought we’d be there three years. We lasted ten.
When we still had the shop, I remember picking up Derek Hynd and Steve Wilson at the airport during Derek’s first trip here. I took them to some unmentionable, localized places. Skip Wright, aka O.B. Root [not to be confused with Pipeline pioneer Lauren “Root” Swan], would always sit at the top of the trail near a rope descending to one of the best spots. If he didn’t know you, he wouldn’t let you climb down the rope.
When he saw me with Derek and Steve, however, he said, “Hanky, come on down.” Once we got past him, there were still other hardcore locals to deal with. But when they saw how good Steve and Derek surfed they welcomed them.
At that time, Frye was into his big gliders because of Duke riding a big board at Public Baths all the way to shore. Derek was looking at the big boards on the wall when he noticed that, stacked below them, were Skip’s shorter boards. Derek was always a twin-fin guy, and when he opened one of the board bags he perked up to see this fish that Skip had made himself years earlier at G&S.
He had to have one, so Skip hurried up and shaped it, Roper hurried up and glassed it, and Derek took off to the airport with the resin still going off in a plastic bag. Eventually he ended up with that board at Jeffreys Bay. That’s where Tommy Curren borrowed it and ripped on it in big surf. That was the genesis of the Lis fish hitting worldwide.
I still think about my first board sometimes. Before I learned to surf, I’d catch the closeout bombers on my mat in front of our house on Kennebeck Court. Then one day someone in the lineup lost his board. As it washed in toward me, I put my mat between his board and myself and his fin popped my mat.
A little later, another man approached me. He pulled the cigar he was smoking from his mouth and said, “I saw what happened. You want a surfboard to ride for two weeks? My son’s afraid of the ocean.” It was a balsawood Velzy. It got me hooked on surfing.
[Feature image: Warner in an outtake from a 1962 G&S ad for big-wave guns featuring the tagline, “You don’t have to be a big man to ride a Gordon & Smith.” Photo by Roy Porello.]
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