How surfing came to the Jersey Shore

Long Beach Island recently hosted the 18^th annual Coquina Jam at Brant Beach, an all-women surfing event that raises funds for the David’s Dream & Believe Cancer Foundation and the Jetty Rock Foundation. With summer in full swing, there are many opportunities to catch waves down the shore: for example, on Aug. 22, people ages 5 to 60 can compete at Ocean City’s 7^th street at the Eastern Surfing Association competition. Kids and adults alike can book a lesson up and down the shore.

Surfing might be a part of the shore experience today, but it was not always a staple of the East Coast. In fact, surfing was once seen as the domain of the countercultural West Coast. But during the 1960s, fanatics brought their boards to New Jersey in the hope of disassociating surfing with its rebellious and countercultural image—and instead promote it as a purposeful pursuit and competitive sport. Positioning surfing as no different than playing basketball, baseball, and football helped entrench it in New Jersey seaside life, while also reinforcing ideas about conformity and respectability.

Surfing’s image has evolved greatly over the years, with its roots tracing back to Hawaii. Since about the 12^th century, Hawaiians of all classes and genders took to the waves. They steered large, finless, wooden boards known as alaia and olo boards.

However, by the late 19^th century, an influx of American Christian missionaries into the islands pushed the “lustful” sport to the margins, casting it as incompatible with the aims of settlers and businesses. Nevertheless, Hawaiians continued to find ways to surf, and soon white settlers began to appropriate Indigenous beach culture for their own purposes.

In the early 20^th century, tourism-minded opportunists including Alexander Ford Hume, Tom Blake, and writer Jack London promoted surfing to draw white American settlers and vacationers to the pristine warm waters of Hawaii. In his book chapter “A Royal Sport,” published in 1907 and 1911, London remarked, “I was chiefly conscious of ecstatic bliss at having caught the wave.” Local surfing legends Duke Kahanamoku and George Freeth then spread surfing to the mainland United States. Freeth brought lifeguarding and beach culture to Southern California, while Kahanamoku traveled the globe, showcasing his Olympic-level swimming and extraordinary surfing skills.

In 1912, after the Stockholm Olympics where he won the gold in the 100-meter freestyle event, Kahanamoku visited Atlantic City, exposing the shore resort to “the sport of kings” for the first time. In the early 1930s, Tom Blake, an innovator who manufactured surfboards for U.S surfers in the first half of the 20^th century, introduced his 13-foot wooden longboards to Ocean City. But despite these early exposures, surfing did not catch on in the Garden State until the 1960s.

Movies and music were instrumental to surfing fever at the Jersey Shore. Viewers were drawn to Gidget’s (1959) Cliff Robertson as “the Big Kahuna,” a youthful nonconforming rebel who valued the hedonism of the beach and consistent access to surf over responsibilities. Young people were captivated by the carefree lifestyle found in the Beach Party (1963) franchise. These movies were fictional but spoke to growing white affluence and greater access to leisure in real-life postwar America. Teenagers flocked to local theaters to watch the globe-trotting adventures of surfers Robert August and Mike Hynson in 1966’s The Endless Summer.

Some New Jersey teenagers embraced the fad, perhaps hoping to foster the freedom and youthful expression associated with surfing in their own waters.

Soon, surf shops popped up and down the coast, sponsoring new surf teams and providing locals with access to equipment. Ron Jon Surf Shop was founded in Ship Bottom in 1961, while Surfer Supplies in Ocean City, and Heritage Surf Shop in Sea Isle both opened in 1962. The New Jersey Hobie team was hosted by the Manatee Surf Shop, founded in Belmar in the early 1960s.

Yet as surfing proliferated along the shore, initial community reactions were sour. Young surfers were seen as troublesome, an unpredictable hazard on crowded beaches. Police, concerned parents, and hotel owners all spoke out against surfers, viewing them as vandals with unkempt, long hair, huge unwieldy surfboards, and worst of all, they used profanity and disobeyed authority figures. The presence of surfers threatened to disrupt the peace of beachside resort towns, places for respectable families who followed the rules.

In 1966, for example, authorities in Bradley Beach curtailed surfers’ access to the Kent Avenue Beach, with Police Chief Harvey Gaunt reporting that surfing was a safety hazard. He claimed that surfers “set fires in trash barrels, illegally exchanged beach badges, are often injured, are often poor swimmers, leave their boards where bathers may walk into them, use foul language, create a danger when they carry their boards, and use the beach instead of a toilet.” The litany of charges revealed an almost visceral disgust at people who surfed, evoking an ongoing moral panic about juvenile delinquency and the erosion of middle-class norms.

To overcome such associations and convince the broader community that surfing deserved a place down the shore, surfers organized, hoping to show how surfing might channel young people’s energy and coexist with other popular shore activities and sports. They formed surfing associations and clubs.

In 1963, Cecil Lear, a schoolteacher from Belmar, along with eight other members, founded the Jersey Surfing Association (JSA), aiming to garner respect for surfing as a growing American sport. In his fight to establish designated surfing beaches in New Jersey, the schoolteacher touted the positive health benefits of surfing: it provided quality exercise, and what’s more, morning surfing sessions could promote earlier bedtimes—keeping young surfers out of late-night trouble. The association hosted successful competitions during the 1960s, such as the Greater Point Pleasant Jaycee Contest and the Jersey State Open State Surfing Championships in Belmar.

In 1965, John “Bull” Carey, a real estate developer and former lifeguard and surfer, and Don Pileggi, Ocean City’s Recreational Director, founded the Ocean City Surfing Association (OCSA). They instituted a yearlong tournament schedule that operated around school breaks.

The summer season featured contests every Tuesday, where bronze, silver, and gold medals were awarded, culminating in early September with a final event, the Ocean City Open Surfing Championship. During the school year, a contest was held each school break: the Turkey Trot over Thanksgiving, the Polar Bear over winter break, and the Spring Fling over spring break.

By the middle of the decade, the surfing association was strengthening relationships with the city and local businesses. For example, in preparing for the Polar Bear Championship on Dec. 28, 1966, the OCSA worked closely with the city, the Port-O-Call Hotel, and Bob Harbaugh’s oceanside restaurant, providing free hot showers and changing rooms for frozen contestants, drum fires along the contest beaches at 14^th and 15^th streets, hot coffee and soup on standby, and a catered lunch for the winners.

Treating surfing as a competitive sport and potential money-maker for local businesses helped reposition surfing as a purposeful pursuit, not just teenage trouble.

However, this reframing also solidified a surfing demographic that was solidly middle class, mostly white, and mostly male—thereby marginalizing people of other identities who wished to surf. In this small way, surfing culture reinforced a history of segregation at the Jersey Shore, fortifying the beach and the ocean as mostly white spaces. Events like the Coquina Jam, an all-women surfing competition, may be eroding such boundaries today—but due to the history of how surfing came to the Jersey Shore, there is still a long way to go.

Thomas DiGiovanni is a graduate student at Rutgers-Camden interested in the intersections of race and class within sporting cultures, with a concentration on surfing history.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.