The Lucky Eyes

A significant photograph is a convergence of opportunity and framing. It is a coincidence of eye and heart in a dance of circumstance. The work of the great photographers is often a celebration or collision of these forces in defiance of the odds—and even then luck might be the biggest factor. Perhaps this is the essential magic of the camera: that which might almost be missed in passing—and would never have been catchable in life—could be contained, forever, in an image.

This might all be obvious to us now, but when David Darling was first learning the knack and mechanics of making photographs in the 1960s, the world was only midway between the static miracle of 19th century imagery and the almost quantum technology of the emerging future—a future that’s already so much here that it’s become difficult to reach back into the guts of an earlier time and feel what the past is delivering to our senses and intelligences. 

Quite simply, we look at the past with the eyes and minds we have now. Even if we were there, really, we can often hardly remember. But if we were there, we might have photographs. If we do, we might be lucky to remember great moments clearly. But to be touched by greatness first means being touched by opportunity.

The roll of film that became Darling’s breakthrough was not his roll to begin with. “I had my driver’s license, had a tripod, had my lens,” he recalls. “I drove to the North Shore, pulled up at Waimea, and then I realized I didn’t have any film with me. But there was a guy standing up there with a tripod that looked like he knew what he was doing. I thought I’d stand next to him and see what was going on. Then I asked him if he had any spare film. And he said, ‘Well, I’m shooting color right now, but I could probably sell you two or three rolls of black and white.’ That was LeRoy Grannis. And on that first roll he gave me was publishable stuff.”

One of those initial images included a lovely shot of Buzzy Trent in heroic descent. Good timing, luck, and maybe even something of fate—something in the blood, where waves and cameras were waiting for him. Like the immortal Tom Blake—the man who almost mystically crossed paths with returning Olympian Duke Kahanamoku, who was pollinated with the Aloha Spirit, came to Hawaii to reclaim treasures of a plundered past, and emulated and actualized the ocean activity of the future—David Darling’s roots went back to the north country of the American Midwest.

His grandparents, Ralph and Bessie Heath, moved from Illinois to Oahu in 1911, when Darling’s mother, Kathryn, was just three months old. The young family crossed the Pacific on a steamship as part of a wave that would transform this remote archipelago into a 20th century “paradise.” Ralph Smith Heath was an engineer, and took a job working on Pearl Harbor’s Dry Dock No. 1. He later worked on the massive Waiahole Ditch project, designed to transport surface water from the rainy northeastern side of the Ko’olau Range to the dry Ewa Plain in the center of the island. 

Through his work at Pearl Harbor and the huge water project, Ralph Smith Heath helped push Oahu’s island reality out of isolation and into the future. But he looked back, even as he was moving forward, by taking pictures and freezing important moments in time. A part of that documentation was his discovery of surfing. He became friends with Duke Kahanamoku, and many of the iconic images of Duke, his brothers, and the other denizens of Waikiki Beach in the early 1900s were captured by Ralph Smith Heath. Most of those images are now preserved in the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum (designated as the Hawaii State Museum of Natural and Cultural History) in Honolulu.

Later in life, after returning to the mainland, Ralph Heath introduced his daughter to Wilfred “Bill” Delos Darling, who was working under him on a Mississippi River project. “Ralph invited Bill to dinner,” says Darling. “He told my dad, ‘I have three daughters at home that you may want to meet.’ And he ended up with my mom.” Bill visited Hawaii on his way to WWII in the Pacific. After the war, his son, named David, was born on Kahanamoku’s birthday. Eventually the elder Darling became an engineer, like his wife’s father, and returned with Kathryn and David to Hawaii just in time for statehood in 1959.

Timing is everything. David Darling was 11 years old, and his family was now living in Kailua, over the precipitous Ko’olau Range. There, David was baptized into the rituals of the beach and ocean. He learned to surf, a stoked gremmie following the inevitable growth curve from the easy breakers and shorepound thumpers of Castles on the north end of Kailua Bay, to the popular learning spots over the mountains in Town. 

It should be mentioned that Darling’s vision was not good. By the time he was in grade school, he was wearing corrective lenses. By the time he was in high school, he understood that keen vision was important for a surfer. With only the haziest sense of what the horizon was doing at any given moment, he was at a distinct disadvantage when it came to spotting and catching waves. “I always had bad eyes,” he says, “but with a big ol’ 500mm lens, I was in focus.” 

By the time he was attending Kailua High School (“Home of the Surfriders”), his neighborhood paper route was funding his incipient photography bug. He began with a used Calypso, purchased at Anderson’s Camera on Kapiolani Boulevard. Conceived by legendary marine explorer Jacques Cousteau, the Calypso was a precursor to the Nikonos, an innovative waterproof camera that allowed up-close photography with a wide-angle lens and required minimal focusing on the part of the operator.  “My first few water shots were with the Calypso,” Darling recalls, “but somewhere along the way it got lost or stolen, and then I moved up to a Nikonos with a tiny wide-angle lens. I could swim out with it, shoot a roll of film, then swim back in, reload, and swim back out.” 

At his request, his father brought him a Pentax Spotmatic from Japan. “Dad worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and went to Japan occasionally, so I asked him to buy me a camera while he was there. I don’t know when the allure started, but something was there in the bloodstream. I thought that if I got good camera equipment, I’d be on my way.”  

Kailua High, as the motto implied, was a hotbed of talent back in the early 1960s. “It was just overflowing with good surfers: Barry Kanaiaupuni, Mike Turkington, Chris Green, Roy Mesker…we were loaded.” Darling wasn’t likely to make the surf team in such a talented school, but he could take photos—and that gave him access. After another fellow from Kailua taught him the ins and outs of the darkroom, photo processing, and printing, Darling pretty much had the full set of tools. 

He was admitted onto the team, proudly wore the patch with the embroidered word “Photographer” beneath, and went to work. “I had my own darkroom. I rolled my own film, did my own developing and processing and contact sheets, and enlarged and printed out the best shots. I could do it all, and that was the very cheapest way to go.”

To continue his ascent, all Darling needed was an opportunity. Those three rolls of back and white from LeRoy Grannis were the magic break. He fired a package off to John Severson at Surfer magazine in California. Severson liked what he saw and ran a couple of shots. Severson now had a kid on location who could get him publishable shots from Hawaii whenever he needed them. Before long, a couple of Darling’s pristine color images (of Jim Hoffman and Butch Van Artsdalen) were on the cover of Surfer, along with a half dozen of his photos on the inside. “The whole thing was financed by my paper route,” he says.

Things were hopping on the inter-Island competition scene, and there was a move afoot to streamline and organize the various clubs into a coordinated competition scheme, which became the Hawaii Surfing Association, a grouping of amateur contests under a common banner with common rules and standards. The HSA was a visionary advancement for the times—not so surprising when you consider the convergence of talent and responsibility that the organization represented.

“The HSA was quite a political thing,” Darling explains. “You had the old guard, the Waikiki Surf Club guys like Wally Froiseth and George Downing, and the Outrigger Canoe Club guys, and then clubs from places like Kailua and Ewa Beach, the West Side, the Freedom Riders, and the whole thing in Town. Somehow, I got elected president. And that was how I ended up photographing the first state championships at Ala Moana, which then led me to the mainland as an honorary judge of the U.S. National Championships at Huntington Beach.”

While on the West Coast, Darling ticked off a string of requisite surfing achievements, like getting busted and arrested at Trestles, interviewing with Severson for the staff photographer job at Surfer, and blasting down into Mexico on a wave hunting trip. By the time he made it back to Hawaii, he was too late to enroll in the fall semester at the University of Hawaii, so he decided to settle on the North Shore instead. 

Although Severson hired Ron Stoner as staff photographer, Darling was hired to shoot both the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational and the Makaha International for Surfer in 1966 and ’67. Those were plum assignments, arguably the gem photo opportunities of the surfing world in those days. Indeed, Darling was performing very well for an island kid with poor eyesight.

But he had something else going for him, too. He had a kind of magic sensitivity that can be a photographer’s secret weapon. Soon, he was invited to join the Kui-O-Hawaii Club. They so valued his contributions that they made him a full-fledged member—not just the club photographer. “Being in Kui-O-Hawaii really opened doors for me. I met Kiki Spangler and Jock [Sutherland] and [Gerry] Lopez and Kevin Johns, Jackie Eberle and Reno [Abellira], and the extraordinary singer-songwriter Kuiokalani Lee, the head of the club.”

 Darling found a place on the North Shore for $40 a month in Marijuana Alley. He was one of the first members of an extended crew to rent space from the church in Wahiawa, which owned several houses on the same property. “The pastor told me the two front houses were $80 each, the big house was $150, and these two houses in back went for $40 each. And I went, ‘That’s the one I want—the one in the back left corner.’ Jackie Baxter and a bunch of California guys rented the big house up in front, and Brian Livingston and Henry House and Bear rented the house in front of me.” 

Settling in, he shot the Duke contest in December and also returned to school, attending the University of Hawaii on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. “I would never sign up for a class that started before 9 a.m., so I could always do dawn patrol. I had it wired. I could leave somewhere like Chun’s or Haleiwa or even Pupukea at 8 o’clock in the morning, and somehow the traffic worked. I could get all the way to UH and find a parking place and get to class by 9 a.m. with sand all over my feet.”

He was also traveling throughout the islands, following the surf and other likely opportunities as the seasons changed. Landing on Maui in 1968 and Kauai in 1969, he ended up hanging around with Skip Harmon and Dick Brewer, who were making boards in Hanapepe. That rotation put him in the thick of the design and cultural revolutions of the late 60s in Hawaii. “When the Australians came to Lahaina, Brewer was shaping part-time at Lahaina Surf Designs. He told Reno, ‘You want a 9-foot board, but you’re getting a 7-foot board. We just heard there was a whole new thing happening with the Australians.’”

By the spring of ’69 they were back on Oahu with new boards—Brewer and David along with two of Brewer’s hottest test pilots, Abellira and Gerry Lopez. “The surf wasn’t very good, so we took a drive up Mount Tantalus, up Makiki Heights Drive, where Reno spotted this altar-like structure—this blockwork with this little stage sort of thing. It was the Makiki Pumping Station, and Reno picked the spot for photos. So we drove up Tantalus and smoked a couple and came back down, and we took the boards off the car and shot the pictures there. I took 38 shots that day, just to burn up the roll. I didn’t want to just take ten Lotus pictures, then wait a week and take ten more. I had a bunch of the Lotus and the head stand, and a bunch of goofy ones where we were climbing up trees.” 

The resulting suite of images, with their cosmic overtones and Brewer’s teardrop spaceship designs, became an avatar for the countercultural elements present in the Shortboard Revolution. Later that year, Darling was ensconced in his place in Marijuana Alley, not far from the beach at Three Tables, when the surf came up. He was about to pay witness to history. 

It was December 1, 1969—the  swell of the century. “That day had an eerie feel to it,” remembers Darling. “A friend, Perry Newton, asked if he could ride home with me from University of Hawaii to the North Shore, to see if the high surf warnings were really true. The wave trains had an extra long period and were an hour apart. Coming out of Wahiawa at 4:30 p.m., the haze and spray from the four o’clock set blanketed the entire side of the island. It was closed out like I had never seen in eight years of watching the North Shore. I arrived at Waimea and Three Tables for the five o’clock set. We watched the six o’clock set with Brewer, and he took off for dinner at the Seaview in Haleiwa as the sunset faded. Seven o’clock brought an even bigger set, and as Brewer tried to get home at eight o’clock, the road was awash in floating cars, boat wreckage from Haleiwa Harbor, and downed trees. There had already been a fatality—as a serviceman from Schofield was crushed by a floating telephone pole rolling across Kam Highway between Haleiwa and Laniakea.

“Brewer made it home for another talk-story session, wide-eyed and only surviving due to his driving skills— dodging seaweed, boat parts, floating cars, and telephone poles sweeping across the road. The nine o’clock set was even bigger. The idea of sleeping was rapidly going out the window. The tide was still rising when the ten o’clock set obliterated the horizon. The ground shook our flimsy single-wall homes, and we sensed their doom. Helicopters began making low passes along the shoreline just before the eleven o’clock set, flashing their lights to alert everyone to get back from the highway and head for higher ground.

“But surfers being surfers, Brewer, Perry, and I went across Kam Highway to get a close look at the beach at Three Tables. A set of maybe seven waves approached. By the fourth wave, the beach park was gone—with more waves still piling up. Wave five covered all remaining shoreline. We were standing at a new sea level on the road, and the sixth wave filled the ditch at the roadside that normally drains rainwater off the pavement—the only safety we had. Wave seven was eye level—five feet of whitewater rumbling towards us. It was time to run for our lives. Brewer was in the lead, but when he ran into his home just off the road, the wave caught up with him, and lifted the entire structure off the ground, spun it, and broke the power lines. Sparks were flying. Perry and I stopped in our tracks for an instant as the rotating house landed on a car. Brewer had given up his search for valuables, and was hanging from an upper window, looking out at us wide-eyed amazement. Perry ran into my home, waves still in pursuit. I dove through the rear hedge and continued on up the hill.”

There are precious few photos of that swell. Mainland surf photographers wouldn’t arrive in Hawaii until a week after the fact to shoot the winter contests. Ironically, although he was there, Darling was too occupied to document the event. “All my friends on Ke Iki Road had lost everything. I never thought to take even one photo.”

After that winter, Darling’s journey continued in unexpected directions. “December of ’69 kind of shook me to the core,” he admits. “I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to live near the ocean anymore?’ That was my senior year at UH, so I kind of had to buckle down and make sure that the five-year plan didn’t turn into the six-year plan.” 

He looked at the options and found himself taking courses in Business Administration. “No need for a lab science class, no need for foreign language. Accounting classes seemed to make perfect sense to me, so why not just major in accounting?” 

Darling has worked as an enrolled tax agent in the decades since graduation. Along the way, he’s managed to survive a hang gliding career for some 23 years, with its share of mishaps, accidents, injuries, and loss of loved ones. He’s lived up in Kula at the 3,000-foot elevation of Mount Haleakala since the 1970s—learning and then teaching hang gliding, building a home, and doing taxes. 

Time has continued its forward march—from the past into this transmuted future. If not for his work during the 1960s, an important epoch in the evolution of surfing would’ve been missed. Without his perceptive eyes and diligent curiosity, the explorations and manifestations of many of those pioneers, of the many Hawaiian shores, would’ve been lost in the currents of vanishing memories.

[Feature image: Stanley “Savage” Park, Ala Moana, 1966. Stanley was the son of a royal Hawaiian mother. We were the same age, but he took me under his wing. He was my ticket to Makaha, because he was born and raised in Nanakuli. He idolized Nuuhiwa, and it reflected in his style.]