The First Surfer

About 61 years ago I was a student at Redondo High in Southern California, one of several high schools that had been attended by Charles Lindbergh (not that I knew it) and would eventually be attended by the famous Traci Lords (porn actress). My friends and I were body surfers, but the real Jeff Spicolis in the school were three or four board surfers who were--and who knew this?-- part of a long tradition. The father of California surfing, the half-Hawaiian George Freeth (1883-1919), had brought board surfing to Redondo and Venice, California, in 1907. He was the first. Freeth was a surfing teacher and innovative leader of lifeguards. Today forgotten, he was a huge sensation until his death in 1919 in the Spanish flu epidemic described in Katherine Anne Porter's classic "Pale Horse, Pale Rider." But the city eventually remembered Freeth and erected a bronze statue of him on the Redondo Pier. The statue was stolen by metal thieves in 2008 and replaced in 2010.