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18.01.2022 GEORGE GREENOUGH The view from the shoulders of a giant I got my first view of surfing in 1951 when American TV show host Arthur Godfrey returned from post-war ...Hawaii with an ukulele and footage of women doing the hula and men and women riding surfboards. I think I watched his show religiously forever afterwards hoping upon hope for another glimpse. When we visited my Gramma in Santa Maria, California the following year, I actually stood at the edge of wet sand at Pismo Beach as icy, foaming, white-water swept in and around my knees which was a thrill but then came the tugging at my calves that threatened to drag me to where I wasn’t at all sure I belonged. I wanted to get out of the water and wondered at the same what it’d be like to tame and ride one of those wild forces. What kind of super man or woman did it take to cast off from the safety of land and throw oneself into the path of such an unfathomable and immutable force of nature? Would he be built like Tarzan and strong as Superman? I would be further titillated by unexpected images appearing in newsreels at the Saturday matinees that I attended with a sister in each hand. And then came Adventures In Paradise television serious with Adam Troy, a charter yacht captain plying the South Pacific and surfing where ever he went in 1959 and I was gone. Unfortunately, I’d been born with a suppressed immune system which had the doctor, quite fortuitously for me it turns out, instructing my mother to Get that boy me to a warmer, climate or forget about his next birthday cake! in 1960. I moved from six foot of driven snow in Shawnee Mission, Kansas to the sun-drenched Mediterranean climate of Santa Barbara, California in the winter of ’61-’62. For a barely fourteen-year old kid, the harbor was the heart of all things interesting. There was always something interesting happening there crabs to be hunted, fish to be caught and the comings and goings of water craft of all sorts. My first memory of George is from those first weeks in a brand new world fraught with awe and wonder. My brand new friends Norman and Richard Grant were chasing crabs on the rocks of the breakwater when this older, barefooted kid with a Prince Valiant haircut, cut-off jeans and a faded sweatshirt smelling of fish guts and two-stroke oil spotted us with a, What’ve ya got! immediately dropping what he was doing on the dock to join the pursuit. A big crab, we yelled back, hopping from rock to slippery rock with our jerry-built harpoons, that consisted of an old broom-stick with a nail driven in the end and the head removed and then filed sharp, in hot pursuit. In a second he’d joined us as we tried to spear this crab that would’ve barely been legal even then and would probably have been safe were it not for his assistance. You got him. Nice one! he cackled to Norma slapping him on the back and then he scrambled over the rocks between us and the chain-link gang-plank like some kind of blond spider and returned to the project we’d disturbed him from. The very next day, Norman’s Pop took me and $70 to Yater’s where I purchases my very own surfboard, a ten foot Hobie. I learned to surf at Ledbetter Beach after school but when the weekends came we’d pack our lunch and head for sand bar which was a few hundred yards further south and located at the end of the Santa Barbara Marina break-wall. And while we thought we were so cool having our own surfboards and a whole day with perfect waves to be ridden that peeled off like little zippers the kid I’d soon know as George come out get longer rides on his mat or balsa bellyboard. When I got my first ding, it was George who told me how to fix it and where to get the materials. When I broke the fin out of my board, he suggested that I move it an inch or two further forward and the board would turn even easier. And it did too! I always liked George. What wasn’t there to like about the elfish, even Peter Panish, waterfront fixture whose gnarled bare feet hung-out of ragged and fish-blood stained Levis that always reeked of bait and two-stroke? As soon as you’d sight the longish (way before the Beetles) sun-streaked Prince Valiant haircut that framed his industrial-strength tanned face, you’d know it was George climbing on or off of somebody’s boat or surfing perfect late afternoon peelers at the Sandbar on his surf mat or belly-board. And George knew stuff too, cool stuff The kind of stuff that if I was ever been shipwrecked on a desert island he’s the kind of guy I’d like to be stuck there with kind of stuff. His plain, smiling but always thoughtful or even contemplative face couldn’t hope to express or telegraph the ideas bouncing around behind those inquisitive, intuitive blue eyes. Even though I was only young when I first met George; I instantly recognized him as a kindred spirit figuring him to be a year or two at most older because of his humility and keen ‘How does this work?’ interest in the same things that intrigued me. Only he knew where to go to find out the answers to those impenetrable and immutable mysteries. When he spoke, his speech was measured, tempered with a kind of authority that was more befitting his real age and he could spout ratios and fundamental laws of physics and envision devices to achieve a certain specific result. Looking back, I imagined him as a six year-old kid thumbing through a Popular Mechanix Magazine while the other kids his age were ogling Superman, Dick Tracy or Archie comic books and still stumbling over the simplest of words. Everything he seemed to look at appeared to him to be something that could be ‘souped-up’, ‘maxed-out’ or somehow improved upon. His souped-up go-cart powered with the outboard motor and cooled by an inner-tube filled with water that the driver sat upon and acted as water pump by bouncing up and down on as you steered was so terrifyingly fast that I don’t remember anyone staying in the driver’s seat long enough to get the seat anywhere near uncomfortably warm Frightening but very cool. Because his interests were so similar to us younger guys, it never occurred to me how much older George, in reality, was until John Eichert (owner of IKE surfboards) told me how he and George had cut a hole in the cyclone fence behind the bushes their school so they could get home through the woods quicker and sneak out to play in the woods at recess. George and John had been in the same class at Montecito Union School and John was the owner of his own surfboard factory, married with kids and I was just about to start high school. I guess that makes him a lot older than the three or four years I’d always assumed Makes him kinda ageless then doesn’t it? And George talked straight too What he said is what he meant. He made statements and they were verifiably certain to be correct because he’d already researched it and seemed to be reciting it off verbatim. You can run into George and he’ll continue the conversation that you were having five, ten, fifteen years from the present. And if there were going to be a problem with a particular thing, George was on it. I remember George’s interest in fins from the IKE shop on Cota St. John Eichert had those cavitation reducing cutaway fins in a sexy dark blue, glass fins they were too, so the light shone through them in the foiled bits. (Skegs prior to this period had been wooden and then wooden with glass beads. These were solid fibreglass cloth which made the fin design viable where it hadn’t been with the weaker medium prior.) George used to come around every day and be messing around with something cool and he had no problem sharing what he’d just learned and believe me, there was always something. But back to the fin thing It wasn’t long before someone thought of changeable skegs. George didn’t do skegs George did fins, with foiled shapes and beautiful curves. George took surfing from the skeg or rudder to make sure the back was always slower than the front and evolved it into the fin, foiled, tapered and efficient; which in turn loosened up those old turkey’s and turned kids into hotdoggers because now you didn’t have to be a giant to rip. The thing was though, to mould those fins out of plastic meant that they had to be tough and because George’s fins were so much better shaped it made them even more delicate. Case in point: I ran into George at the bottom of the trail at Rincon early one morning with a box of nylon fins he’d made down at Morey’s. It was winter and it was cold. I squatted down next to him and he hand’s me a nylon looking fin. Watch this, he grins and Frisbees it onto a corner on the granite rocks in the corner. The fin shatters into three distinct pieces. Now you, he says and I do the same with the one I had and it too, broke into three distinct pieces. We did it again and again until there were eight or ten of them in separate little piles of three distinctly similar pieces. George had just discovered that the cold made these fin blanks more brittle than in the summer months and the formula or material was going to have to change. George show’d me a photo of a red Greenough Stage 4 or something on a bottom turn, (I don’t know who it was of though) taken from under water and the bend or deflection on that fin tip was nearly three inches. The fins seemed to perform best in the autumn when the water temperature was not too warm to make them soft and not so stiff they’d twist off on a bottom turn. George was thinking substance memory way back then. Astounding! The coolest thing about George was he’d show you how to do something and you’d better never ask him to do it for you again because he’d already shown you and you were supposed to know that. Most of the other surf people would rather have you as a customer, dependent on them for that kind of stuff and managed to make living out of it and that’s cool but George’s role wasn’t to be a shop keeper but as a teacher who loved to pass it on and then move on to the next project. We’ve all been enriched by his knowledge. We were surfing two to three foot low-tide Sandbar late one winter afternoon when George appeared on the end of the breakwater in his wetsuit, with a fully inflated inner-tube under his arm, carrying a coil of rope with a length of chain and immediately jumped off the end of the breakwater about fifteen feet away. What’re you doing? I asked. Fishing, he replied flatly. For what? Shark, he grinned, producing the biggest stainless steel hook I’d ever seen, big as a ‘gaff’, threaded through a whole cow’s liver and who’s barely protruding barb glistened in the Westering sun. Yeah, right! I shot, taunting him in disbelief. Resting the bloody liver in his lap, he slowly paddled his inner-tube into the main channel, a hundred or so feet away. It was just past dusk and when I finished a wave way down past the pilings and heard a delighted giggle coming from the dim haze beyond. I scanned the immediate vicinity for its source but it wasn’t until, I spotted movement and then the silhouette of George on his inner tube; bouncing out of the harbor at a great rate of knots in the reflected glimmer of the lights on Stearn’s Wharf. Just then Norman Grant, appeared at my side, mouth ajar. George, I whispered in awe. You’re kidding! he gasped. By that time he’d cleared the end of Stearn’s Wharf and disappeared into the night we were just shaking our heads as we dressed for the mile and a half walk back home to the Mesa. I ran into George a week or so later working on a small dinghy in the marina when I remembered him being dragged out to sea. Well? I asked suddenly out of the blue. As is George’s way, he knew exactly what I was referring to and because George’s favorite subject has always been what George is engaged in, he began without preamble. The shark had followed the trail of blood’n guts the deckies had been hosing off the sorting and cleaning tables on The All-day boat. Then it just settled into the depths when they rounded the marker and headed towards the slips Big one too Ten foot easy! So I jumped on my bike and rode to that little butcher shop on Castillo Street and bought a nickel’s worth of liver. I’d been planning this for a long time, he enthused, his eyes twinkling. After I saw you, I sat out there for the longest time and wondered if I’d missed him or whether I’d get run down by the rest of the fishing fleet that were now passing regularly with coming of night. I’d just paddled to the marker when all of a sudden there was this big bump on the rope. I set the hook and just hung on. He was huge! We watched you until you disappeared out beyond the reflections at the end of the pier. What happened after that? Dropped my knife. Knife? I blurted. You weren’t gonna jump in and stab it were you, picturing our little George, knife in teeth, doing some Tarzan thing. No. But after an hour or so when he didn’t seem to be tiring, and the lights at the end of the pier were getting pretty far away I decided it was time to go home. That’s when I discovered that I’d either lost or forgot my knife. What’d you do next? I slipped out of the tube... Weren’t you afraid to be in the water? I had to get out of the tube in order to untie it. NO WAY! George just looked at me, with that exasperated George expression and said, As long as that rope was tight, I had a pretty good idea where he was. If the rope had gone slack That worried’ve me. I still shudder at the thought. I ended up with my first legitimate surf industry job when Doc Bittlston’s son Kent, decided that he’d rather spend his Saturday mornings surfing with his dad instead of sweeping out John Eichert’s tiny little ‘IKE’ surfboard factory on Cota Street. I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about fiberglass and it’s relatively new application to so many things and couldn’t get enough of it. Besides, John, his brother Dave and their much younger brother Sammy; Steve Vukas and George were almost daily visitors to the shop Steve to do the odd favor for John, and George building something weird and wonderful so it all seemed like a magical boy’s club house. At a guess, I’d hazard that Renny Yater’s factory was too busy for the kind of craziness that Eichert’s factory and retinue seemed to thrive on. We molded motorcycle tanks, fairings made fiberglass skateboard decks and bullet-seat back mud- guard combos for the very new dirt bike market. It was a total trip. That was when George decided that stand up surfing wasn’t for him and that he preferred to ride waves on his belly. Within months, he was honing the inside of Rincon’s hollowest tubes and it’s a wonder that his hooting wasn’t heard echoing from those caverns all the way to Ventura. Nothing was sacred with George You could line-up every one of your sacred cows and within seconds he made them sound fanciful or frivolous; utilizing a blunt and matter-of-fact sounding scientific law or logic. When I was about fifteen, my best friends’ Norman and Richard Grant’s father, ‘Pop’ owned a G&G machine shop which was located across the intersection of State and Cabrillo Boulevard where State Street continues out onto Stearn’s Wharf. He was also president of the Santa Barbara Camera Club. We were, as usual, when there was no surf or work at the surf shop, building or repairing something in the yard outside of his workshop. Pop had just called us in for milk and cookies when the phone rang: Yes, this is Ian Grant. Yes, I’m the president of the Santa Barbara Camera Club. Century lenses in Los Angeles, you say? followed by a long pause as he rolled his eyes and listened patiently. George who? After a minute or so Pop smiled, Of course I know him and his father Hamilton. Haven’t you heard of the Greenoughs of Boston They re part of the original founding families of this country. Let him use the lens grinding machine to grind whatever he wants to If he breaks it he’ll buy you a new one. Pop listened for a minute or two finishing finally with, Your Welcome. Any time. Goodbye. That George is really something, he grinned, turning to us. He wants to grind a super- fish eye to film what its like to be in the tube. Of course we’d seen George on his belly boards, laden with a heavy and super high speed bombsight camera he’d spent weeks modifying to reduce its weight; strapped to his back and even seen some of his fuzzy footage looking back into the tube Very cool. But now it seemed he wanted to shoot forward from inside the tube and wanted to make it appear to the viewer that he was way back in there, deeper than it was possible to ever do successfully. The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun was the resulting footage Grainy and dark by today’s high-tech, digitally enhanced standards but absolutely, startlingly, ground- breaking at the time. The real feat is that someone thought it all out and how to do it. George Greenough with ‘Baby Board’ in the mid sixIes in front of his ’55 Ford staIon wagon. It’d be his white one and my blue one occupying the first two parking spaces on the seawall at Rincon on most days. We were keen. When George went to Australia in 1965, all of these tales about this American, George Greenough, who’d so impressed the Australians came filtering back. For some reason, we thought it must’ve been someone else, but never for one minute considered it to be, our George. But it was And we were pretty stoked to have one of our own recognized as such a brilliant innovator. Although we’d never taken George totally for granted, I at least, thought that every beach had one somewhere. Surfing seemed to be like that back then. And for the most part, that’s true, only with George: It was way more so. Rube Goldberg was my Gramp’s term for guys like George. Some of George’s early renditions of his inspirations were almost comical to look at. Bubble gum and bailing wire appeared to attach bits of flattened metal with a piece of wood with a roughly drilled hole in it to act as the axle boss was what most of it started out as. Then he’d engineer it Always had to know everything about it. Remember the wind generator on Morning Light, the yacht he built for Crystal Voyager? It’s rumored, the blades were from a Yield sign he’d pilfered from a post near his home in Montecito. That’s just a rumor, mind you. As we got older, had our own cars and driver’s licenses; his single-mindedness became exasperating and boring compared with the chasing and catching beautiful girls or debating the advantages of a Holley four-barrel, twin-float, centre-pivot, diaphragm pump carburetor over a Carter with its piston accelerator pump on the latest 1300 cc Volkswagon or some such other meaningless, fanciful teenage, bullshit on Friday or Saturday nights. But that didn’t mean that George ceased to exist Far from it. We still ran into him on a daily basis and he had no qualms about regaling us with his latest invention, discovery or adventure. One afternoon at Rincon, visiting Hawaiian surfer, Wicker Lindsay came in, laid his board next to the fire and blurted, Who’s that guy out there at Indicator, just ripping On a ‘Paipo’ board. Photo Courtesy Tucker Stevens ‘Paipo’? What the hell’s a Paipo? we asked. He It was George who brought all of the Australians to Rincon where they all had their own individual ‘Skunk-works’ surfboard or fin they were developing or experimenting with George on Picking his brain more like. Nat won the 1966 World Contest after spending a few days surfing Rincon where George fine-tuned the fin (Note the evolution from skeg to fin) on his winning board. That’s the demarcation point. I saw him cry once. I was jogging out to the creek mouth late in the spring and the water was miserably cold, been a lot of rain but it was four foot, lowtide Rincon and he was sitting on the rocks at the edge of the water with his flat surf mat. He seemed to be sobbing so I dropped down next to him, You OK? Tears were streaming down his cheeks and he was sniffling. I’ve just had my wisdom teeth out and I can’t blow this fucker up! he sobbed. I’d had mine out a few months earlier and I couldn’t do the cold anything for weeks unless I had cotton in my ears and a stocking cap cover them for the pain. George had often sat with me on those afternoons while I watched Tony Bellinger, Kevin Sears and Jeff Boyd and the boys surfing the crap out of it. But George had only had his done that morning! I blew up his mat for him, but when I was running back out for my second wave he was on the beach getting dressed trying to cover his ears. Bloody wisdom teeth! I ran back to my jacket and gave him my retired navy watch cap. I still run into George every now an again, at Broken Head, in Northern New South Wales, where he’s lived for the past nearly forty-five some odd years. He’s really into his fishing and photography and little else seems to be able to get or hold his attention. By all accounts he’s the ‘Gun’ Jew-fisherman and doesn’t surf any of the ‘A- Grade’ surf spots anymore because of the crowds. I’ll never forget the time, one of the kids on my surf team wanted to accompany me on a surfboard delivery run to Queensland, so that he could photograph some of the iconic surf characters for his university art degree project. We’d just gotten out of the water after a pathetically small surf at Broken Head late one afternoon and I’d just sat down with a cup of coffee from the kiosk there when George showed up, attired in his usual, blood- stained sweatshirt, ragged jeans, with one leg chewed off just below the knee and the other frayed above his gnarly feet and held up by a rope through the belt loops. He started explaining how he’d surpassed the World Record for a mono-hull sailcraft that one of my sailboarders had held for two straight years. He even went as far as to show me a photo he’d shot from a mast mounted camera of the LED speedometer of over thirty knots or something. It didn’t really matter one way or the other to me, but I explained how the speed had to be sustained for over an accredited one kilometer course for it to stand and that in order for that speed to recorded it was in fact the average speed over that kilometer and that I had no doubt that he’d managed to achieve that speed on his oversized ‘Spoon’. But can you sustain, that speed for a thousand meters? We bantered back and forth about ‘centres of pressure’ and ‘fin foils’ and ‘stall angles’ until it got dark and I had to say, Goodbye, certain that we’d continue this conversation at some time in the future as if we’d never parted. Back in the car, I asked the kid why he hadn’t bothered to take a photo of ‘THE’ George Greenough. Isn’t he iconic enough? I’d asked. Him? I thought you were kidding me. That hippy, beachcomber’s George Greenough? No Quiksilver or Billabong? No way! I just shook my head as he fiddled and diddled with the settings on his brand new camera. It was then that I first began to wonder who’d be the one that’d eventually lead surfing into the next era, when clearly, the only thing the kids of today were interested in was: Who looked and dressed like a sponsored manikin and the greatest thing anyone could hope to achieve would be to be mistaken for someone else. And yeah, it’s hard to even imagine what surfing’d be if it hadn’t been for the Santa Barbara/Rincon brain trust with George Greenough as head of the board. So, boardshorts’n wetsuits my ass, the real surf industry heroes are the ones who turned the desire to ride a wave from that inimitable dance in the chaos into an art form. Hat’s off to George, the man whose unique view of surfing from his ‘Spoon’ became the one we’d all spend the rest of our lives aspiring to. So George, take a deep bow and feel our radiating love, respect and awe. You’re as important an innovator as Tom Blake, Bob Simmons, Dale Velzy, Reynolds Yater or any of them we could ever mention but there are very considerable number of greats who’ve had their first view of what could be from your shoulders. Thanks mate. For those who’ve known and loved him, I hope I’ve done him justice. For those about to meet him Sit down, shut up, buckle-up and hang on. George Greenought Portrait: Wardie Ward available at Society6.com/Wardie3 See more

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08.01.2022 Another surfer on my raw power list is Michael Peterson he was a buccaneer free-spirited rebel who tore through the seventies like a hurricane. Terry Richardson... and I drove to Pambula in 1981 after Richo had got third at Bells and Simon won on a Thruster ///Mick was living in Pambula with Tommy his brother and Richo went to get Hawaiin guns shaped by Mick ..I ended up sleeping in Micks board cover the first night it was winter and next day we went surfing down at Leonards with Richo, well ..what a session MP was 28 and retired,, terry was on the world tour and a blazing goofy footer and I was a 23 old surfboard maker.It was insane 6ft bigger ones and those two going hammer and tong ..best memory ever of surfing except with surfing alone with Australian Indigenous surfer Nick Carter at solid Gland years later ..Mp stayed on singles said thrusters flew out of the water he was too powerful he needed those little fins he religiously foiled right on the tail...Marion ,Conieand baby Keone stayed out on the farm with him and Paul Winter on the road to Bombala ..wild country I would get up before dawn with Mick and off we would go blasting down dirt roads fishtailing music blaring into the dawn to surf ..alone then go make boards in an old dairy shed on the back waters of the Pambula River on a hill on the road to Eden it was Wintersun surfboards and as soul roots as th north shore shaping bays // RIP MP See more

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