The first time I ever saw somebody riding a surfboard was at the Manhattan Pier in 1953. As much time as I’d spent at the beach, you’d think I would have at least seen one surfer before then. But there were only a few dozen surfers in all of California at that time and, like surfers today, they were out at dawn surfing the morning glass. By the time the crowds arrived, they were gone.

But this one morning I took the first bus to the beach, walked out onto the Manhattan Pier, looked down and saw these bronzed gods, all in incredibly good shape, happier and healthier than anybody I’d ever seen.

They sat astride their boards, laughing with each other; at the first swell they swung their long boards around, dropped to their stomachs, and began paddling towards shore. From my viewpoint, it was almost as if I were on the board myself, paddling for the swell, sliding into the wave, coming to my feet, and angling the board down that long wall of green water. It was almost as if I already knew that feeling in my bones. From that day on, I knew that surfing was for me.

There were several surfers out that day. Greg Noll was just a kid then, about sixteen years old, but he was hot. On one wave he turned around backward on his board, showing off a bit for the people watching from the pier. I was just dazzled.

Once I’d discovered there was such a thing as surfing, I began plotting my chance to try it. I used to stand out in the surf and wait until one of the surfers lost his board. The boards then were eleven feet long, twenty-four inches wide and weighed fifty or sixty pounds. When they washed in broadside, they would hit me in the legs and knock me over. I would jump back up, scramble the board around, hop on, and paddle it ten feet before the owner snatched it back – ‘Thanks, kid’ – and paddled away.

Most surfers at that time were riding either hollow paddle-boards (a wooden framework with a plywood shell), or solid redwood slabs, some of them twelve feet long. The much lighter and much better balsa wood boards were just starting to appear.

One day in 1954, when I was thirteen, I was down at Manhattan Pier watching a guy ride a huge old-fashioned paddle-board – what we used to call a kook box. It was hollow, made of mahogany, about fourteen feet long, maybe sixty-five pounds and had no fin. It was the kind of paddle-board lifeguards used for rescues; they worked fine for that purpose, but for surfing they were unbelievably awkward. When the guy came out of the water, dragging the board behind him, I asked if I could borrow it for a while. He looked at me like ‘Get lost, kid.’ But when he sat down on the beach, I pestered him until he finally shrugged and nodded toward the board.

I’d watched enough surfing by then to have a pretty clear idea of the technique involved. I dragged the board into the water and flopped on top of it. After a while I managed to paddle

the thing out beyond the shore break and got it turned around. To my surprise, after a few awkward tries, I managed to get that big, clumsy thing going left on a three foot wave. I came to my feet, right foot forward, just like riding a scooter. I had no way of turning the

board but for a few brief seconds, I was gliding over the water.

As the wave started to break behind me, I looked back, then completely panicked. I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet! My first impulse was to bail out, so I jumped out in front of the board, spread-eagled. I washed up on the beach, dragged myself onto the dry sand, and lay there groaning.