Monuments of Nonconformity

Listed in this treatise is a small but representative sample of the numerous indelibly colorful individuals who, to me, stand as monuments to surfing’s nonconformity, creativity, and wildly diverse life paths. 

Laguna Beach’s George “Peanuts” Larson constructed handmade leaf-and-twig gilders and launched them off bluffs. His aircraft looped and soared, totally spellbinding onlookers. One day, Peanuts left his mother’s cottage for a loaf of bread but instead vaporized into the South Pacific. He returned unexpectedly a few years later, announcing, “Mom, I’m home with the bread,” as he walked in the door. 

Brennan “Hevs” McClelland was a huge, gregarious, irrepressible lifeguard, surf-event impresario, and liquor-store owner. He’s characterized by the stunt where a Hevs look-alike waved at beachgoers from a small aircraft buzzing the coast. On the next pass, a Hevs-garbed dummy was dropped from the plane’s door, creating a splash as it hit the ocean. Moments later, Hevs himself came swimming around the point from where he had been hiding in the kelp, wearing the same clothing as the dummy, joining the guys and gals on the sand. He collected bets from those who disbelieved his claim of being able to jump from a plane with no parachute. 

Hobie Alter, fascinated with inventing fun things and the process of producing them, opened and established one of California’s first manufacturing and retail surfboard endeavors in Dana Point. He then instigated the first significant production-line manufacturing system, outputting as many as 250 handcrafted boards a week, shaped, glassed, sanded, glossed, and polished by a celebrated cast of craftsmen drawn from all over the culture, including Phil Edwards, Ralph Parker, Terry Martin, John Gray, Bobby and Ronald Patterson, Mickey Muñoz, and Danny Brawner, plus a flow of visiting guest talents overseen by Jim Galloon. 

Lastly for this tirade, let’s talk about Dale Velzy, the surfing cowboy—a role model for surfing’s don’t-give-a-shit outlaw persona and an influential early board builder. Besides being a flamboyant host, merchant seaman, hot-rodder, barbecue chef, and the world’s finest bullshitter, he was infamous for manipulating the tape measure to pawn off whatever boards happened to be in his racks to naive customers having long awaited their past-due orders. He was also instrumental in luring Hawaiian surfers to the mainland with board-building jobs, thus intermixing those surfing cultures. At the end of that run, he was finally and rather predictably shuttered for non-payment of taxes. Early one morning post-WWII, while sitting on his board off the south side of Manhattan Beach Pier and watching a procession of suit-and-tie robots driving off to office jobs, he asked no one in particular, “Who’s got it right? Us or them?”

[Photo by Don James]