Billy Meng: Surfing's Neal Cassady
An excerpt from Billy Meng's autobiography, Know When To Jump
Billy Meng: Surfing’s Neal Cassady
Introduction by Peter Maguire
What Neal Cassady was to the beat movement and the counter culture, Billy Meng was to “the surfing lifestyle” and California’s waterman culture. Although he never won a world title, starred in a surfing movie, “branded” or “monetized” himself, Meng was one of the most influential surfers of the 20th century. “He was like a character right out of a John Steinbeck novel, real slow and easy going, talked like a down-home boy,” wrote big wave surfing pioneer Greg Noll in his book Da Bull. “He loved people and people loved him.”
Today, the still spry 93-year-old rises with the sun and lives simply, as he always has, surrounded by nature, in a small trailer in the Los Padres National Forest outside of Santa Barbara. A true surfing pioneer, Billy Meng surfed San Onofre, Trestles, and Malibu in the 1940s, Hawaii in the 1950s and finally, Santa Barbara County from the 1950s into the 80s. When he quit surfing at the age of 54, Meng said, “I’d had enough adventure, surfing, and sex to last three lifetimes! Many of the gremmies and surf legends that I was the role model for ended up millionaires. It’s sad that so many of them are dead.” I asked about his status as a “surfing legend,” and Meng scoffed at the very idea. “On my tombstone epitaph I want it to say, ‘Billy was a good person.’ If you call yourself a legend, you are living in the past!” he said. “You can’t live in the past! I did love surfing. I came up to Santa Barbara and had from Ventura to Point Conception all to myself.”
When Billy Meng turned 90, after a lifetime at sea, he said to himself, “‘Billy stop!’ And that’s what I did. It’s a euphoric kind of feeling sitting here, doing nothing. Now, I’m in suspended animation and it’s pure meditation, like an out-of-body experience. When I think back on my life, it brings me peace, and comfort. You’ve only got one life, so don’t hand it over to anybody else. Be good to everybody, be honest, and everything will work out.”
Know When To Jump
by Billy Meng, with Jennifer Harden and Peter Maguire
The first time I surfed was in 1938. I was 8. Nothing changed my life more than my first surfboard. It was a Tom Blake, and it wasn’t shaped like a surfboard.
It was a small, hollow, plywood paddle board with square ends. It had a drain hole with a cork plug on the deck, and when I was done surfing, I’d pull the cork and drain the water out. They didn’t have fiberglass in those days, so we took a GI surplus camouflage canvas and shellacked it to the board. We all shared that board.
With those big boards, there were only a few places you could surf. It had to be a soft, feathering wave where you could go straight, like Long Beach. The breakwater wasn’t built yet, so the South swells got in, and perfect lefts and rights peeled across a big sandbar where the LA River emptied into the ocean. Those big redwoods, you’d put a foot back and lean into it, not like the kids today!
Our moms would load the cars with neighborhood kids and pull their teardrop trailers to “Shanty Town” on Terminal Island where a few fisherman and ladies of ill-repute lived. It was a white sand beach with clear water and you could catch Corbina, White Sea Bass, Halibut, and Perch all day long. We would camp there all summer. You could do anything back then. It was nothing like today. The 1930s were the best years of this country. Everything was in perspective, and everybody had a sense of humor and enjoyed life to the fullest. Those were priceless years.
My simple life ended on the 4th of July, 1939. I was playing outside when my mom came flying out of the house, “Get on your bicycle and go get your sisters! Your dad’s real sick!” By the time I got back, my dad was dead. The first funeral that I ever went to was my dad’s. I was nine years old. As I watched people walk by his coffin, I said, “I’m not goin’ to do that!” The actor Arthur Loft grabbed me and said, “No, you’re not going to walk by that coffin!”
After the funeral, Loft and his wife took me and my sister up to Gladys George’s apartment. She was the blonde actress who starred in The Roaring Twenties (1939), Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
Her husband had just died, and she was crying most of the time. For a week, me and my sister Jackie slept in bed with Gladys while my mom tried to figure out what to do next.
My mom was from Liverpool, England, and now she had to support three daughters and a son all by herself. We had nowhere to live, so we moved into a storage shed in an Italian neighborhood in San Pedro. Our landlord, Mrs. Espondido, evicted the hooker who was living there and moved us in. She told her neighbors, ‘I’ve got to give those poor people a house!”
As if my father’s death wasn’t enough, on Labor Day, the water got so warm that it sucked a hurricane up from Baja. The eye of it came through San Pedro. The surf had to have been 20’ and killed so many people! In those days, there was just the Pedro breakwater. The Navy ships used to moor off of the lighthouse and the lighthouse went out! The wind was blowing 100 knots, the breakwater was totally submerged, and boats were going right over the breakwater. That hurricane sank a lot of boats. It was the worst thing to ever hit this coast.
San Pedro was a working man’s town back then. We lived by the seat of our pants. I remember feeling hungry during the Depression, but those years were the happiest years of our lives. It was a simple life. We were just trying to survive, but that made it fun, because life was a challenge. My mom would say, “Billy we are out of food. Here’s seventy-five cents, twenty-five cents for the ferry and fifty cents to buy the cans.” I’d take the ferry to the tuna cannery, buy forty-eight dented cans of albacore without the labels for twenty-five cents.
Then I’d walk another mile to the Van de Kamp warehouse and buy two more cases of albacore. I’d walk home with two huge sacks on my shoulders. I was a strong kid back then, because I was raised on tuna and sardines.
There was a man who drove an old Model A through our neighborhood with his rumble seat filled full of barracuda on ice. He blew an old boat fog horn. When my mom heard the horn, she’d hand me fifty cents and say, “Now son, go out and get me two big barracudas.” I’d run outside to get in the long line of Italian ladies buying fish. Mom made all kinds of meals with that fish. She mixed barracuda with onions and potatoes. She’d make fish cakes and barracuda soup.
Mrs. Espondido always bought two barracudas, and I’d watch her put them in a pot and boil them. She’d throw all of the bones away and put the liquid through a colander, add Italian spices and tomatoes and make spaghetti sauce. As the sauce boiled, you could smell her delicious cooking through our whole neighborhood. She always invited us over for lunch. We’d throw parmesan cheese on the spaghetti. It was the best spaghetti sauce. Between the canned albacore and the barracuda, we lived off of fish. Barracuda is still my favorite fish. Most people don’t like it. It’s got a flavor all of its own.
I started working at the harbor as a kid. In those days, nothing was automated so when the banana boats came up from South America they would hire people to go down into the hold and unload them. You had to be on your toes when you picked up those big banana stalks, because there were always big spiders and snakes crawling around the hold.
I was sitting on a curb at the harbor in 1941 when Mrs. Adams came running down the street in hysterics, “The Japanese just bombed the Arizona and my nephew was on that ship!” It changed the course of the world. Hitler did more to change the course of the world than anybody, and it wasn’t for the good. He took a big magnifying glass and put it on the Industrial Revolution. They say the most influential man of the century was Einstein, but I say, baloney! Hitler was!
Before Hitler, the quality of life was going up. People were happy, they had a sense of humor, and stuck together. When the aircraft companies moved to Southern California, people followed them for the work, and they never left. Then they started building tract houses, and that was the end. Everything became automated, and things were never the same.
My mom worked as a seamstress in the Harbor area during the war. My three sisters were all good-looking women, and they moved up to LA. They all went to Hollywood, and that was their downfall. Bunny was beautiful, tall with black hair, olive skin and always had a lot of pretty girls staying with her at her apartment in Santa Monica Canyon. My other sister, Jackie, looked like Goldie Hawn, had a knock-out body, and she was trouble! She used to love to bait guys and cause big fights. She was in the fast lane, but did she have a sense of humor and could get you laughing.
When I was thirteen, I used to go up to Santa Monica and stay with Bunny, and I was in total bliss! Her roommate was a beautiful up-and-coming movie star named Junie Blair, who had green eyes like a cat. She was on “The Ozzie and Harriet Show,” became a Playboy Playmate, and then married the actor David Nelson.
We all used to go to Pat Dorian’s [Shane Dorian’s father] Sip N’ Surf bar in Santa Monica Canyon.
The walls were covered with pictures of the surfing at Malibu.
One day, Bunny talked three of her guy friends into taking me surfing at Malibu. They were all 4Fs, unfit for military service. The military wouldn’t take them, so they worked in defense plants and the servicemen hated them! When they came to pick me up, they were all wearing big, baggy, fluorescent pink, green and red trunks made out of parachute cloth. They all had redwood boards, and I had my little Tom Blake. The whole coast was under siege at the time and lined with barbed wire fences and sentry towers. Malibu had one, but the Marine posted there with the machine gun would let us climb under the barbed wire with our boards. We surfed perfect 6’ waves all day long.
Afterwards, we were relaxing on the beach, and a detachment of Marines came marching down the beach. They were getting ready to go down to the South Pacific, and when they saw the 4Fs, they exploded. “You goddamn 4Fs,” one said. “We got to go down there and get killed and here you are laying there in your bathing suits!” The 4Fs could have climbed under their boards, they were so embarrassed.
We ran across the highway to the Malibu Inn. It was a greasy spoon, hot dog stand. “The cook is a little koo-koo,” one of the 4Fs said to me under his breath. “He used to be a famous violinist, but he snapped. Let me do the talking.”
We sat at the counter, and the 4F said, “Oh you play the violin so well, would you play for us?” The guy was cooking and started playing his violin at the same time. He cooked us a big breakfast, hash browns, eggs and ham. “That was beautiful,” the 4F said, then winked and nodded for all of us to do the same. We all told him how pretty his music was, and when we tried to pay him, he said, “Don’t pay me.”
The best surfers in Malibu during the 1940s were Matt Kivlin, Gard Chapin, and Dale Velzy. Kivlin surfed so slow and cool at a time when everyone else was out of control. He was a good-looking guy and also a carpenter who built nice boards. When he but quit surfing to become an architect, I asked him why he didn’t surf anymore and he said, “Oh that’s something that you do when you’re a kid.”
Joe Quigg, Bob Simmons, and Dale Velzy also made great boards for Malibu. I remember one day I was laying in the sand with Velzy, Miki Chapin (Dora) was just a kid, and we were watching him surf. Velzy turned to me and said, “Ya know, Chapin’ is gettin’ pretty good!” We’d surfed together a lot in Malibu during the golden days. When Miki was just a little kid, his stepdad, Gard Chapin, would drive him down to San Onofre and just leave him there for the entire summer. Everyone would take care of him and feed him, but Miki had a screwed-up life. I knew Miki pretty good, he was a con artist, but back then all of the surfers were con artists.
Velzy served in the Merchant Marines during World War II. When he came home to the Port of San Pedro in 1945 on a Liberty Ship, he brought a young Hawaiian kid named George Kapu with him. “I’ve gotta get off the ocean,” Dale said. “I want to start shaping boards.” Dale was born and raised in Manhattan and Hermosa Beach and grew up surfing there and Malibu.
I helped him get the county to let him use the recreation room at Cabrillo Beach as a shaping room. After the war you could get balsa wood from General Veneer, so we’d drive to Anaheim and buy perfect balsa wood from South America that was milled for model airplanes.
His boards were the first short boards. Soon, Velzy had that rec room so full of balsa wood and planer chips that you couldn’t even open the door!
Some big wheel from LA County got wind of Velzy’s shaping room, and the day he showed up to inspect it, George Kapu, a minor, was sitting outside drinking a gallon jug of wine. “Get those goofy kids outta here!” he said and raised hell!
Next, Dale went back to Manhattan Beach, took Kapu with him, and built boards in the alley above the pier in an old real estate office. This was where he made the first short, light board. He and Simmons were the two pioneers who revolutionized surfboard designs. Both of them were great experimenters. Velzy made a board for Kapu called “The Stingray” and that’s what it looked like, because it had a tail like a stingray. By God it worked good, but Kapu was the only one who could ride it.
In the 40s, me and Jerry Lind would surf Paddle Board Cove in Palos Verdes. We’d carry redwood boards, one arm around the nose and one arm around another nose, down a long road. That was the early pioneer days. It broke way out like San Onofre, which was perfect for the big redwoods, because you couldn’t turn the doggone things.
My second board was a 10’ 6” Simmons that I bought for $20. Bob Simmons was a genius. He was a big, tall, classic guy who had worked as an engineer at North American making big money. Then he quit to start making boards. Simmons was always one jump ahead of us. He was a vegetarian and we could always tell when he was ahead of us checking the surf because there was always a stack of orange peels on the ground.
His boards were works of art, beautiful with spliced balsa wood and spooned noses. Mine had a concave stern and two skegs.
We’d buy life rafts for Simmons from war surplus stores, because they were lined with balsa wood. Simmons would make a board with a spoon and kind of splice the wood so that it would get a scoop on the nose. They were always real wide. He was a pioneer, and his boards were beautiful big boards all over ten feet long and twenty-four inches wide. There was a special way to turn those boards, and I had to take a real long stride, because they were hard to turn. I had to put all of my weight on one side.
Simmons lived in a hearse. In those days you could pick up a hearse in beautiful shape for practically nothing. I bought a black hearse and it was like new. There was room for my board and my sleeping bag. I lived in it until I started having nightmares and knew it had to be full of ghosts. I’d wake up about 2 o’clock in the morning, shaking, because I could hear the ghosts talking to me, and I could smell flowers. I ended up just giving it to some kid to get rid of it.
When I turned 18, in 1948, I had to join the service, so I went to the Navy recruiting office and said, “I want to see the world!” The next day I was in San Diego at boot camp. We all had to get up at three in the morning, go down to the mess hall, and help the cooks prepare the meals. They had something that was called “Shit On A Shingle,” which was a piece of toast with ground round with tomatoes. They put sauce over it, like gravy. It smelled good. It looked really bad, but was actually pretty good.
They had these giant, stainless vats as big as your car that were full of bubbling hot gravy. The cooks were giant, hairy guys who all weighed 300 pounds and were covered with tattoos. “You!” one of the chefs yelled at me. “Walk up those stairs, get up on that rack, and stir the gravy.” “Yes, sir!” I said and got up there and took this huge wooden paddle, like a giant oar, and started stirring the bubbling hot gravy. I was trying to lean over and stir this goddamn gravy, but I lost my balance and fell head first into the gravy. I almost drowned. So I’m down inside the vat trying to get out. Luckily, my feet hooked up onto the lip of the vat and a guy looked up and saw my shoes hooked onto the lip. They ran up, pulled me out and I was covered from head to toe with brown gravy. I looked like the gingerbread man. All that you could see was the whites of my eyes. They took off all of my clothes and hauled me on a gurney to the infirmary.
Boot camp wasn’t bad compared to life on a ship. We lived in a small compartment twice the size of a small trailer, but inside were forty guys stacked six high. My bunk was on the bottom underneath a giant black guy. He hung down and I couldn’t even turn over in bed. When you had a bowel movement in the morning, you’d go into another compartment that had two troughs of water running down. There were these slits that you sat on shoulder-to-shoulder with no partitions. The place was packed, and the three-hundred-pound cooks made a big social thing out of it. Some mornings the only toilet available was between two humongous, hairy chefs. They would sit there, smoke cigarettes, and tell stories like they were in a bar. Living in jail would’ve been better.
I did my hitch, got out, and then went to Harbor College. I was playing football and having a great time. One morning, I was shaving when my mom came in the bathroom, handed me a telegram, and said, “Billy, this doesn’t look good.” The telegram said, “Mr. William Meng report for duty this weekend at 7:30 a.m. Ship is bound for Korea.” I was in such shock that I left the water running until it spilled over the sink.
“Mom, I just got out!” I said. “I don’t want to go back in. I hated it! What the hell am I going to do?” My beautiful sister, Bunny, was sharp as a tack. She wrote this real long letter that said I was continuing my education in Santa Barbara. Then the dean at Harbor College wrote a letter that said, “Billy is an excellent athlete, a good student and he’s going to continue his education.” A couple of weeks later, a letter arrived that said, “Mr. Meng, you are deferred on the account of education.” Thank God I did not have to go back in and get back on that rusty old ship!
In 1953, I went to Santa Barbara to go to attend the teacher’s college there. I wanted to be a coach. It was a great college. There were three women to every man. At that time only 20,000 people lived in Santa Barbara. Everything was so green. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. The green grass and blossoms smelled so good.
There were only a few guys in Santa Barbara that surfed. The only place I heard about was Rincon, but nobody surfed it. I brought a new board that Velzy made for me and asked the guys at my fraternity, “Where’s Rincon?” They said, “We don’t know where the heck that is but the best place to surf around here is called “Three Mile.” Rincon didn’t even exist back then. They called it “Three Mile” because it was three miles from Santa Barbara.
101 was just a two-lane road with a ton of potholes and a stop sign. The 101 went right through Carpinteria and Montecito Village. I told myself, “I’m gonna find this place called Three Mile!” I grabbed my board and drove my ’40 Ford through Carpinteria on top of Rincon hill and looked down and said, “Oh my God! Look at those waves!”
I drove down to the beach, parked on the road, grabbed my board, surfed perfect 5’ waves and was the only one out. That was the middle of October and the surf stayed up every day until June. I always had a fire going. I used to pick up a truck tire from the highway and put it on the beach. The sand was hot for a radius of about 30-40,’ and you’d come out of that fifty-two degree water, and all you had was a wool sweater, and lay on that warm sand, and it felt so good! There was lots of driftwood on the beaches in those days.
Me and Dick Metz used to give each other the surf report for free from a telephone booth. Dick would dial “0” for the operator and say, “I want to make a person to person collect call to Billy Meng from Mr. Be Swell.” I would say, “No, I won’t accept the call, but tell him Billy isn’t here right now, but he’ll be back at 6 o’clock.” That meant Rincon was 6 feet. 6:15 meant that it was a little windy and choppy. 6:05 meant it was flat.
I got into the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, which I probably should have never joined. I got kicked off the football team, because I was surfing every day and always getting into trouble of some kind. Finally, they called a big meeting at the fraternity, “Billy, you’re going in the wrong direction. You’d better change your ways, otherwise we are going to kick you outta the fraternity.” I said, “No you’re not goin’ to kick me out, because I quit!” This one guy in the fraternity was a redneck, always riding horses. He wore cowboy boots. He always pissed me off! So I said, “Buddy, why don’t you get the horse shit off of your shoe. You’re tracking it in here.” So here he comes at me and we’re slugging it out. Pretty soon the whole place is brawling, windows are breaking, and everyone was demolishing the place! As my friend, Andy Spawn, was just slugging away, I got my sea bag with my clothes, went out the window, got in my car and drove down to Miramar Beach.
I had no money. All that I had was my surfboard, but it didn’t bother me, because I was young and footloose. I thought, “Well, I’m gonna go down and sleep on the beach.” I went to Fongs, the old Chinaman’s market, and I spent all the money I had on a can of beans. There was a little swell coming in, so I went surfing.
When I got out of the water, I opened the can of beans, started a fire, and put the can of beans on the fire. All of a sudden, I hear this woman’s voice on the balcony out of a Miramar beach house. This beautiful, blonde, Scottish lady, who reminded me of a dancer from a Fred Astaire movie, leaned over the balcony and said, “You look hungry!” “Yes ma’am, I have nowhere to go,” I replied. “You poor thing, come right up here! Bring your surfboard up and put it on my balcony.”
I went up her stairs and walked inside her beautiful home. “My name is Ansel and I’m making curried lamb and rice and you can have all the beer that you want.” I thought, I can’t believe this, I just stepped right off the beach eating beans, and now I’m sitting here in this nice house drinking a beer and having a gourmet meal! Ansel had a beautiful daughter, Karen. I ended up living with them for six months. Then, my birthday came around, and Ansel took me down to Velzy’s and bought me a beautiful new surfboard.
She had a brand new, big, black Chrysler convertible. I would drive it every morning to college. All the guys in the fraternity who kicked me out would always see me pull up.
One day the Dean called me into his office, put his arm around me, and said, “Now Billy, now don’t get me wrong, we all love you, but the system is not going to accept you, you are too much of a free spirit. All you do is surf all day.” “Dean Reynolds, you’re right, the heck with everything, I’m gonna just surf!” Ansel and her daughter wanted me to stay and offered to buy me a fishing boat, but I moved down to Manhattan Beach instead.
I lived under the Manhattan Beach Pier for two years. I didn’t have a job, I got my mail at the Knot Hole Bar, and had love affairs with women twice my age. I was having sex with a politician’s wife. She was 40 years old and I was 20. I had another affair with a policeman’s wife. And then another one with a good-looking married woman who rode horses and lived across the highway. Older gals liked me because I was a young surfer boy and could go for two hours without missing a beat.
I intrigued the gremmies, the young surfers. Dale Velzy called them “gremmies” because they used to hang around his shop like little gremlins! Ten, eleven, twelve years old, and such pains in the ass! Many of them went on to become famous surf legends. Those gremmies thought everything that I did was great, I was their hero, like the Pied Piper, but probably the worst role model in the world! All of their mothers eventually came to hate me.
I drove an old Weber’s bread truck and survived off of the ocean eating fish, abalone, and lobster. I used to drive down the alleys of Manhattan Beach with kids on the roof, the running boards, and the back filled with all of the boards. I could drive from Manhattan Beach to Malibu without stopping. 101 was just a two-lane road back then. When I drove up the coast with my surfboard, I had countless miles of beach all to myself. Hardly anybody surfed, it was so totally different. I slept on the beach in my sleeping bag and lived on fresh seafood that I caught. I ate lobster salads and abalone sandwiches on sourdough bread with mayonnaise and onions. I speared Rockfish, Cabazon and all kinds of fish with my Hawaiian sling. Life was just so simple.
The first time Dewey Weber surfed Malibu was with me. He was eleven and I was twenty-five. I was really good friends with Dewey and all of the gremmies. I introduced them to poor boy sandwiches. I showed them how to take a loaf of French bread, slice it and pull all of the bread out and fill it full of bologna, cheese and pickles.
I used to surf Malibu with the movie star Peter Lawford. Peter was extremely handsome. He’d pull up to the beach in his jeep with a surfboard on top of his rack. We’d be sitting outside at Malibu waiting for the surf, and he would say in an English accent, “Outside!”
Richard Jaeckel, “Jake,” was a good-looking short guy with blonde hair, and he was in a lot of cowboy movies and war pictures. We surfed together a lot and became good friends. His house was around the point of Malibu in the Colony, and one day he was out at the point trying to roll a log to the front of his house, and I ran up to help him. “Billy, I’m having a party tonight,” he said, “you should come!”
That night I went to the party, and when I walked in the door, I could not believe my eyes! Music was playing and there was a daisy chain of naked beach gals and naked guys, and here is Jake at the tail end of it. It was a full-on orgy. I didn’t join in, I just grabbed a beer, sat on the couch and watched. That Hollywood crowd was different.
Trestles was one of my favorite surf spots. We took a trip down to the Trestle, me, Stang, Velzy, Hog Hogan, Eddie Johnson and a couple of other guys. I tapped out a couple of gallons of Mrs. Espondido’s Italian red wine. It was the strongest wine in town. It knocked your socks off! Antoine drove into Compton to buy whiskey barrels from a distillery, because the wood was saturated with alcohol, and it was powerful. His wine was pure black and it would kill you dead with one gulp.
On our way to Trestles I picked up my friend, Dale Atkeson, and I could hear his girlfriend Wanda telling him, “My dad always worked for a living and now you hang out with Billy Meng and he turned into a beach bum!” Dale was a good guy, happy-go-lucky who wanted to laugh and have a good time. He went on to play with the Washington Redskins and made one of the longest runs in Redskin history.
Every Saturday at 5 o’clock sharp, me, Woody Brown, Wally Forsythe, two big wave riders, and a bunch of friends huddled around a little radio at the White Stop Café at the foot of the Manhattan Pier. “BEEEEEWWWW!” It was like a shortwave radio, it would come in and come out, you’d hear static and we’d turn the volume all the way up, and a Hawaiian man would announce, “H A W A I I C A L L S!” All of a sudden, this blast of beautiful Hawaiian music was coming in and going out.
The Hawaiian ladies had the beautiful high falsetto voices. The most famous of the singers was a hero to all of the Hawaiian ladies. She weighed about 400 lbs. We were mesmerized by all the Hawaiian singers strumming their ukuleles and slack key guitars. Everyone wanted to go to the Islands because of the music, but back then few people had gone. I remember the Islands in the early 50’s. They were something special. After months of listening to the Hawaiian station I said, “I’m going to Hawaii!”
In 1954, I started working as a framer in San Pedro with my friend, Antoine, to save enough money for a ticket to Hawaii. I made enough money to get to the Islands, and bought four boards from Velzy. One was a beautiful big wave board. It was 10’3” and very narrow, 18” wide. I told Velzy to put a lot of weight up in the nose, because that big surf is so massive and coming so fast I needed the weight up on the nose to help get me over the edge of the wave.
Nobody from the coast, other than Buzzy Trent, had been to Hawaii. He liked big surf and went over and rode Makaha and Sunset. I knew Buzzy but didn’t hang out with him. I was a loner and hung out by myself, except with Greg and Mike Stange and a few other guys. Greg Noll surfed Manhattan Beach really well. One carefree day, I was sitting on the beach watching the kids surf, and all of a sudden Velzy gets out of the water and starts yelling at Greg, “You do that one more time I’m gonna put this board right up your ass!” He was a skinny, arrogant kid and a lot of people didn’t like him, but he was a good guy once you got to know him.
When I was getting ready to leave, Greg found out and asked if he could go with me. I said, “Oh my god, you’re only sixteen and still in high school!” Greg said, “Come on Billy, please go to my house and ask my mom!” The next day, I put my blue high school graduation suit on and drove up with Greg to meet his parents. I thought, “Oh Jesus! What am I getting myself into?” His dad looked like the actor, Melvin Douglas, and his mom was a real nice gal. “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Noll, I’m going to the islands and Greg and a few other kids want to go with me.” His mother said, “Billy, I trust you, but the only way that he can go is if you are willing to be Greg’s guardian. Whatever he wants to do we will pay his way and his way back.” I said, “Well, okay Mr. and Mrs. Noll, I’ll keep an eye on him.” Greg Noll, Mike Stange and Hog Hogan went with me to the islands. I was twenty-four and the worst influence ever!
My friend had an inside track with Trans Ocean Airlines, we called it “The Rubber Band Airlines,” and our tickets were cheap. We arrived at Burbank Airport, and the pilot helped me load all of my boards in the belly tank of a DC-4.
The plane got half way to Hawaii when smoke started coming out of an engine. We had to turn around. We landed in San Francisco airport and slept on benches while they repaired it.
We landed in Honolulu, and when the beautiful Hawaiian stewardess opened the plane door, I couldn’t believe the sweet tropical scent that filled the cabin. Jerry Lind picked us up in his model A. We drove through Oahu, and I felt like we were in heaven on earth. There were no high rises and the coast was still almost untouched, with lush greenery and tropical flowers everywhere.
Me, Greg, Stange and Hoag rented a Quonset hut in Makaha from a lady whose husband was in the Navy. It was empty, just a refrigerator, and an electric stove. The rent was really cheap. We bought an old pickup truck for $50 and one afternoon drove to the grocery store in Waianae. When we pulled up, two beautiful Filipino-Hawaiian women came up to us. The one wearing purple lipstick asked, “You guys have a pick-up! Will you help us move to our friend’s house?” I said sure, and after we finished helping them move, they said, “We’re gonna have a party for you!”
The next weekend, I loaded the pickup with all of the kids and we went to their house. Hawaiian girls, when they have a party, they have a party! They cooked a turkey, a ham, seafood, there were musicians playing ukuleles, Primo beer, and swipe [Hawaiian moonshine]. The kids ended up screwing their brains out with these older gals. I could almost hear their mothers back home telling me, “We trust you Billy.” I remember saying to myself, “If their mothers could see them now!”
At another party, this beautiful Hawaiian girl was doing the hula, wiggling her hips at me. Then she sat down next to me. Hawaiian girls made no bones about it, when they wanted to have sex, they just did it. I ended up walking her home in the rain. We went into a dark bedroom, and I noticed that there was a balcony, but no back door. On her dresser there was a big cane knife, like a bolo, for whacking sugar cane. “God, this looks sharp!” I thought, and when I ran my finger down the blade, it cut my finger.
We got in bed and were having sex, but that knife was stuck in the back of my mind. I had an enormous amount of Primo beer and after we finished, I fell sound asleep. All of a sudden, the sound of the door getting knocked off the hinges woke me up. It was her husband, a big Filipino-Hawaiian.
“You didn’t tell me that you were married for crying out loud! What do I do? There’s no back door!”
“Jump out the window!”
“It’s two stories high!”
“You better! He’ll kill you!”
“Oh my god, where’s my pants?” Billy, how’d you get into this? I wondered.
I found my pants and went out the window. I planned to hang off the balcony and drop, but she pushed me out of the window. I did a flip in the air, and thank god it poured rain that night and the puddle of water I landed in saved me.
As I was trying to pull my pants up, I hear, “I cut your head off, Haole! I’ll break your head!” And here comes that big ol’ ox waving that sharp cane knife. I was covered in mud, but I was fast and took off, still trying to get my pants up. I tried hurdling the picket fence, but the crotch of my pants got stuck on one of the pickets. The big Hawaiian took a swipe and I could feel the breeze on the back of my neck as that big cane knife went by.
I finally fell over the fence, got up, buttoned my pants and started running down to the highway towards Makaha with him after me. I flagged down a 90-year-old man heading to work, and as we drove away, that big Hawaiian guy was still waving his knife. The next day the woman’s sister told me, “You’d better leave the island, he will kill you!” For a few days, none of us slept inside the hut, we slept on the beach.
We surfed Makaha every day. Greg was supposed to go to Waipahu High School, but he rarely went to class. As Greg Noll’s guardian, the high school principal called me every day because Greg skipped school to surf. At Makaha, there were a lot of things that I had to learn to surf those waves, and it took me a while. I found out the hard way, if you’re out on the point DO NOT take off on a big wall, because you won’t make it. When I first got to Makaha, I took off on this big wave, and fifty yards in front of me it was already breaking. At the blow hole at the end of the ride, that wave jumps up about twice as big from that air going through that hole. You’ve got to take off on the shoulder of the wave, because it develops into a wave that you can ride.
Woody Brown was probably one of the greatest Makaha surfers ever. He was just a skinny old guy, but he could trim a big wave there like nobody. He didn’t weigh more than 120. I always thought Woody Brown was like Paul Bunion or something.
The biggest wave I caught was 22’ in Makaha. 25’ was just too big and massive for me to catch. I had to go straight down, those waves always had a chop on them, not like the California coast, not clean and smooth. The offshore winds always held the waves up.
One morning I woke Greg up and said, “The surf’s up, I can hear it. Let’s go to Sunset Beach!” Greg and I didn’t know where Sunset Beach was. We had only heard about it. We threw our boards into my Model A and drove through Nanakuli and up over Kolekole Pass where the Japanese Zeros flew over when they bombed Pearl Harbor.
I got the radio going, and these girls were singing, “Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream bung, bung, bung, bung….” I turned the volume up, “Greg, I’ve never heard that song before.” That song was stuck in my mind for the rest of the day. When we dropped into Haleiwa, the waves were giant. I said, “Oh my God! Look at that Greg!” That was our first look at big surf. We got to Sunset and it really wasn’t that big, probably 6’-7’.
Me, Greg, Jim Fisher and Mike Stange all paddled out and were having a lot of fun. Then the surf started to get bigger, and break further and further out. I was starting to feel a little scared, because we weren’t used to giant surf being from California.
Greg had long, strong arms, but I was built totally different and had short, powerful arms. You had to be a good swimmer and excellent paddler to get into those waves. If you wiped out, the current would take you to the channel, and the rip will take you out to sea. I told Greg, “I’m starting to feel uneasy.” In the back of my mind I was thinking about Woody Brown and Dickie Cross. Four years earlier, the waves got so big at Sunset that they couldn’t get in, and paddled to Waimea Bay. Cross drowned and Woody damned near died. He ended up in the hospital.
All of a sudden I told Greg, “There is a big set coming!” We were way the hell out, and I just started paddling for the horizon. I paddled up the first giant wave and halfway up it broke, and it threw me and my board over the falls. I had living fear of hitting the board. Here I am, skipping along the water like a rock, finally coming to a stop so hard that it knocked all of the wind out of me, and the wave hadn’t even broken yet! When this humongous wave finally broke, it drove me underwater. I was going down, down, down! I was fighting to get back up to the surface, but still was going down. I thought I was drowning, but the wave passed over me, and I got to the surface gasping for air. That song, “Mr. Sandman, bung, bung, bung, bung…” started going through my mind.
Now I was stuck in the rip and yelled to Greg, “I’m going out to sea, Greg!!!!” “Billy, I’m drowning!” he yelled back. “I am too! I lost my board!!!!” I latched onto Greg’s surfboard, we paddled across the rip and chop and went in through the whitewater and eventually made it to shore. Finally, we were layin’ on the beach, “Greg, I think I’m dyin’!” My board ended up 3 miles down the beach, but I got it back. I surfed sunset again, but my ears and nose never were the same.
I’ve had people tell me, “Billy, you’re like fifteen feet high, a big legend, like Paul Bunyan.” But I’m really not. That’s the past. You don’t live in the past. Friends say that I’m like the Artful Dodger in the movie Oliver because I’ve known how to zig zag in and out of situations. It’s instinct. You’re born with it. It was survival of the fittest. When it’s time to get out of a situation, you have to know when to jump.
Thank you Billy. OUTSIDE !!
Great bio. Was fortunate enough to start surfing and know Billy when he was living at river mouth between Hammonds and Og’s reef. RIP