OUR LAGUNA

Laguna surfing legend Dick Metz has a way with words.

Dean Williams, who is recording Metz’s oral history, has more than 30 hours of tape.

“And we are only up to 1962,” Williams, a Laguna Beach High School graduate, said.

Metz captivated the audience Monday with his vast store of memories and photographs of the early days of surfing in town, presented in the City Council Chambers by the Laguna Beach Historical Society.

His verbal stroll down memory lane began with the days when surf boards weighed as much and sometimes more than the surfers.

“My first board weight 145 pounds and I weighed 145 pounds,” said Bob Kellogg, a surfing buddy from Metz’s youth.

Metz said the goal of surfers for as long as he could remember was lighter, more maneuverable boards. His collection of surfboards was donated to the Surfing Heritage Foundation, which he created with other surfers and surfing industry leaders to preserve and showcase the history of surfing.

“We don’t know when surfing began,” Metz said. “But when Capt. Cook arrived in Hawaii in 1778, the natives were surfing.”

Surfing came to America in 1865, when two Hawaiian princes were sent to Santa Cruz to be educated. They brought boards with them.

But surfing didn’t catch on strongly even after Duke Kahanamoku, who won swimming medals in the 1912 Olympics, came to America in 1925. He made a couple of surfboards, one owned by Lagunan Loren “Whitey” Harrison.

By the time Metz’s parents opened a restaurant in the 1930s, in a train car parked at Main Beach, a few hardy surfers were in Laguna

“In those days, you could pick abalone without getting your hair wet,” Metz said.

His dad stuck the infant Metz into a play pen in the shade of the guard tower and offered hamburgers to the financially strapped surfers to baby sit.

The dining car was eventually moved to the parcel where French 75 is now located.

But Metz never really left the beach. Even when he went away to college, Metz spent his summers on Laguna’s beaches. He recalled the time he and surfing icon Hobie Alter and other surfers gathered to discuss their futures.

“I said, I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” said Metz, already old enough to tend bar at the Sandpiper during college breaks.

“Hobie said, ‘Let’s list what we don’t want to do.’

“Number one on the list was never to wear a suit or a tie to work. Number two was don’t ever want to put on a pair of leather shoes. Number three was, for sure, don’t want to work on the other side of the highway.

“Money never entered the picture.”

Metz credited Alter with the evolution of surfboards from wood to fiberglassed foam.

Early boards were made of redwood, weighing as much as 150 pounds. Then balsa wood was discovered in Ecuador and it became the favored material, reducing the weight of the boards to about 70 pounds. Fiberglass paved the way for five- or six-pound foam boards used today.

Metz would love to have in his collection some of the estimated 80 to 90 unidentified boards that Alter shaped as a high school student in the garage of his family’s summer home on Gaviota or on Laguna’s beaches. Numbering began after Alter’s dad moved the operation to Dana Point, where Alter continued to experiment with better materials and designs.

Metz showed a photograph Tuesday night of surfers including Tom Morey, Bing Boka, Alter and himself with fiberglassed foam boards at the first surfing competition at Brooks Street in 1955. Red Guyer was the head starter.

About then, Metz was put to work in a liquor store his father owned in Huntington Beach. At first it was great gig. Metz surfed all day, even making liquor sales: People, such as the late Terry Neptune, would go to the beach to pick up orders. Unfortunately the day-to-day operation was left to less-than-diligent employees who were robbed blind by local kids.

Metz spent a year recouping.

“I told my dad, ‘I have to get out of here,’” Metz said.

With $2,200 in his pocket, he began hitchhiking around the world by land and, of course, by sea, surfing on beaches in South America, Asia, South Africa and Europe.

Metz’s odyssey inspired Bruce Brown’s classic 1960s surfing movie, “Endless Summer.”

When Metz finally came home, his apartment on Brooks Street, for which he paid $60 a month, including utilities, and his old job bartending at the Sandpiper, were waiting.

But Alter’s ambition to expand his business led to a joint trip to Hawaii where he and Metz opened the first retail surfboard shop in the world.

“I sold the first shipment of 17 boards before I even got them into the store,” Metz said. Metz opened a chain of stores across the United States. He hired Lagunan Corky Smith to work at the Daytona Beach store.

Metz also pioneered surfing duds, but that came later.

Eventually Metz got out of the retail end of surfing.

The last Hobie Sports stores Metz sold were the ones here in town and in Dana Point.

Laguna native Mark Christy bought them.

Like Christy, Metz grew up in Laguna. His mother, Edna May Metz, was a teacher at the K-12 school located on the site of Laguna Beach High School.

Metz included photographs in Monday’s show of kindergarten and elementary school class pictures and one of Robert Shive, whose two older brothers were among those killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Longtime Lagunans in the audience: Madeleine Visca, Liza Interlandi Stewart and a contingent of surfers, including Smith, brothers Ron and Tracy Sizemore, Louie Tarter, Bob Foes, Frank Carri and Lionel Mytinger.

“Lionel and I were worked for the Kawaratani’s [Laguna Nursery] in the 1960s,” historical society board member Eric Jessen said. “We were the first non-Asians that were hired.”

Also in the audience: Ryen Caenn, Johanna Felder, Carolyn and Andrew Wood, John Keith, Eric Spitaleri and historical society board members John Hoover and Ed Perry.

For more information on Metz’s foundation, go to www.surfingheritage.org or call (949) 388-0313. For more information about the Laguna Beach Historical Society, go to www.lagunahistory.org or call (949) 497-4525.