A museum atop this bluff would be an appropriate commemoration. Photo: James Katsipis
Surfing has always been more. Call it a fresh breath from a vestigial lung, or gill more likely, rare air that allows passage through crushing banality – through life with an unbending, terrestrial mindset – toward something more.
That first wave on a borrowed Velzy was such a breath. You can feel the takeoff 50 years later. Did you have “fun?” The word doesn’t come close. Too small to include the ocean’s smell, its taste, your skin – tight from sun and salt – and how does “fun” describe the wave’s lift and push as from a powerful hand – like God displaying a secret; that the wave is the Earth’s pulse. You were riding a beat of the Earth’s heart. “Revelation” is the word.
So, when you learned that the East Hampton Town Board, reacting to a few minor episodes of “vandalism” the previous summer, declared its intent to ban surfing in Montauk before the start of the 1967 season – well, it was as if you had taken your introductory lungful of Acapulco Gold, and suddenly someone cuts the cheese, at which point you and your mates melt in spasms of unbridled mirth.
Weird comparison? Not so much given the era and the demographic. Like the unwelcome gust, a ban on surfing seemed, to the small but growing tribe of adolescent and draft-age surfers, nothing more than a mindless declaration trumpeted from an irrational source — like so many of society’s rules. A surfing ban? Impossible. Hilarious.
Some context here lest you think this an odd way to open an important chapter in Montauk’s surfing history, to introduce the work of the new Montauk Surf Museum due to open its doors in early summer, 2015.
Support the Montauk Surf Museum’s Kickstarter (they’re really really close to the goal).
The story of how a small band of young surfers, presumed guilty of an as-yet-unnamed subversion and required to register with local government in order to ride Nature’s heartbeat, is a tale shared by countless coastal towns back in the day with its nervous mix of angst and euphoria. It’s a story that has matured and continues to evolve, but now with a greater understanding of the sea by way of surfing and its ties to an ancient, healthy, and ultimately liberating culture.
The summer of ‘67 became known as the “summer of love,” a desperate stretch given the events of that year. The Marine Corps and South Vietnamese troops launching Operation Deckhouse on the Mekong Delta, Lester Maddox, segregation’s mascot, sworn in as Governor of Georgia, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys indicted for draft evasion, the Rolling Stones scare the hell out of parents on the Ed Sullivan Show, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. test and retest their atomic bombs, Jimi Hendrix records “Purple Haze and burns his guitar on stage at the Monterrey Pop festival, Aretha Franklin asks for little “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” The “Sergeant Pepper” album flys high with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Muhammad is Ali stripped of his title for refusing the draft and sentenced to five years, The Doors’ “Light my Fire,” fans underground flames, the U.S. sends 45,000 more troops to Vietnam, thousands of anti-war protesters storm the Pentagon, college Administration buildings are taken over by students protesting the war and institutionalized racism. Timothy Leary tells 30,000 hippies attending a San Francisco Be-In to “Turn on, Tune in, and Drop Out.”
And, it was against this rebellious, drop-out backdrop that the Town of East Hampton decided to draw a line in the sand, but against what exactly?
For 300 years, Montauk, Long Island’s easternmost hamlet slept within the township of East Hampton. For most of its history its rolling, grass-covered hills served as pasturage for East Hampton cattlemen. It was home to the Montaukett Indians before they were systematically tricked off their land. “Montauk,” the Algonquian name of the their place, meant “high fortress land to the east.” Its elevated headlands were a natural defense against the tribe’s enemies, particularly the Pequots from Southern New England.
Defensiveness was, and to a degree, remains woven into the greater Montauk personality. The Montauk Lighthouse, authorized by President George Washington in 1792, protected coastal trade. A rocky point of land on the eastern shore of Fort Pond Bay is named Culloden for the British war ship that ran aground while chasing French blockade runners during The Revolution. Most all of Montauk became the Army’s Camp Wikoff to 40,000 soldiers returning from the Cuban campaign of the Spanish American War recuperated. Montauk was home to a naval air station during World War One. Enterprising fishermen used their boats to land bootlegged booze during Prohibition. Sixteen-inch, Naval guns were positioned at Camp Hero during World War Two, their fire directed from a series of bunkers disguised as cottages dotting Montauk’s south-facing coast. Torpedoes were tested in Montauk’s Fort Pond Bay.
Notwithstanding the historical fabric of Montauk’s defenses, its natural beauty and small-town cohesiveness understandably engendered a protective instinct. The small fishing village was as idyllic as one has a right to expect in a community. In the ‘50s, a popular marina’s dock jutted into Fort Pond Bay. Toward it with abandon, blue-collar types from New York City raced across the tracks at the Long Island Rail Road’s Montauk terminus to board the boats that would take them fishing — to complete their escape — to something more. The marina was named Fishangri-La.
It’s equivalent within the nascent surf community of the late ‘60s, was the trailer park at Ditch Plain, a “plain because it’s a flat area on Montauk’s south-facing coast, “ditch” because one existed there when Lake Montauk overflowed into the ocean at the place the Indians called Choppaughshapaugausuck, or “where freshwater meets saltwater.”
The ditch still exists. It carries storm surge to the lake during big storms, but the lake ceased overflowing its banks in 1927 when its north end was dynamited open to Block Island Sound by developer Carl Fisher. Several years earlier he’d created Miami Beach, Fla., and vowed to turn Montauk into the Miami of the North. The Depression dashed that dream; although 90 years on, parts of our crowded downtown have taken on a South Beach feel during the summer months.
In stages, Ditch Plains has become one the most popular surfing, and resort beaches on the East Coast. These days, when Web sites inform them of an approaching swell, hundreds if not thousands of surfers descend on “Ditch” and Montauk’s other point and beach breaks. By contrast, during the summer of love, a crowd at Ditch meant perhaps 15 surfers in the water at any one time most of them domiciled at the Ditch Plains trailer park.
Each of the park’s rented plots had a power pole to plug lights, and record players into. The park featured separate communal bathrooms and showers for men and women. The west side, inhabited by fishermen primarily, had actual mobile homes, a few wooden cabins, and several former railroad cabooses to live in (although the sun turned these steel rail cars into virtual ovens during the daylight hours).
The small community of hippy surfers lived in tents on the east side. Park denizens, of all stripes, lived in harmony for the most part, cops and firemen on vacation with their families not really understanding the hippies, and vice versa, and yet coexisting in an oceanfront haven apart from worldly trepidations.
Montauk’s other breaks were relatively unexplored except for the beach break downtown in front of the Atlantic Terrace Hotel, and at the “Air Force Base,” home to the 773rd Radar Squadron that operated and guarded the giant NORAD installation built during the Cold War at the Army’s former Camp Hero just west of the lighthouse. Technically, surfers were not welcome at the base, although a few of the armed guards turned a blind eye, took a turn around their guard house, when a car bearing surfboards approached.
It was at the “Air Base” back when it was still in the Army’s hands that a young soldier named Richard Liewsinski rode Montauk waves for the first time (unless proven otherwise) using a kookbox type surfboard he constructed in his garage in New Jersey using plans from Popular Mechanics Magazine. The year was 1949 when the surfer/soldier loaded his board into his Cadillac convertible and drove to Camp Hero. His comrades in arms allowed him to store his board there to ease his weekly commute to Montauk from where he was stationed near the city. He later founded Matador Surfboards in New Jersey.
For the next 20 years, Montauk remained the quiet, insular fishing village it had been for the previous century although its downtown, once located on the banks of Fort Pond Bay, was moved south following the village’s near-annihilation by the ’38 hurricane.
As in the rest of the nation, the 1960s brought changes, some huge, others seemingly small, but all of a piece. Hard to imagine viewing the migration of summer surfers “from away” beginning in 1965, as revolutionary or threatening, but such were the times.
Sam Cox, who owned the East Deck Motel in front of which the surf broke best, called the surfing migrants “beach rats and troublemakers” who had trespassed on his property, stolen beach chairs, insulted his guests, and perhaps most disturbing of all, slept on the beach.
“But the main problem is that these kids keep falling off their boards and the boards come flying in toward the beach and hit the swimmers … I won’t rent a room anymore to a surfer. I can recognize them over the phone. They have that truculent approach to everything,” Cox told the town board members in May of ’67. He had the support of the United Taxpayers of Montauk, a small conservative group whose president charged that Montauk residents were being “subjected to loud snide remarks from surfers that makes any man want to take a gun to them.”
The East Hampton Town Board had deliberated the issue during winter of ’67, and while the upshot was a compromise, a plan to control surfers via mandatory registration, the times that were a’changin,’ were not changin’ all that fast.
The effort to avoid an out-and-out ban, and to assure the town that surfing was a healthy activity, and that out-of-town surfers — “groups of LSD hippies,” as one woman called them during a town board meeting — could be shown the light, was led by Perry B. “Chip” Duryea III.
At the time, Chip was a senior at East Hampton High School, the “son” in the Perry B. Duryea and Son lobster business of Montauk, and a surfer. His grandfather had served as East Hampton Town Supervisor, his father as a New York State Assemblyman.
Enter Rev. Howard Friend, 28, a recent graduate of the Princeton University Seminary, pastor of the Montauk Community Church, and as portrayed in a Newsday profile in August of ’67, “blond and crewcut, and something of a swinger, a surfer [who] drives around Montauk in a snappy red convertible, and digs way-out movies like ‘Blow-up.’ He held Sunday evening hootenanny folk vesper services, and had a great interest in the growing civil rights movement. Rev. Friend preached that it was unrealistic to assume that there was no “Negro problem” in Montauk because no Negroes live there.
“The kinds of attitudes that breed prejudice exist whether there are Negroes in a community or not. It’s easy to assume that New York City is a thousand miles from Montauk but it’s not. Riverhead has a racial problem, East Hampton has a ghetto, and Bridgehampton has a large Negro population.”
The Presbyterian pastor recognized the need to keep the kids of Montauk, more and more of whom were joining the surf crowd, heading down the straight and narrow (not easy in a convoluted, mind-expanding time). He advocated giving surfers from here and away a place to hang, and he wanted to introduce kids from depressed areas of New York City to a different sort of life.
He helped form Montauk Youth Inc. with its club called the Cola Copa located in a converted barn, a healthy hangout with pool tables and a stage where “surfers and small-town teeny boppers with the summer look,” according to a August ’67 Newsday story, danced to the surf music of a band called The Scandals.
Also at the Copa that particular night was a group of “negroes,” young inner-city men whom Rev. Friend had brought to Montauk as part of a “work-study” program devised by him and Assemblyman Duryea. The nine, high school sophomores, were staying for part of the summer of ‘67 at the long-defunct Montauk Manor made habitable by community volunteers.
While most of the Montauk community accepted Howard Friend’s good intensions, especially given the support of Perry Duryea, their native son, not everyone welcomed the changes sweeping toward Montauk from the rest of the country.
One member of the United Taxpayers vented her feelings in a letter: “Dear Reverend Friend:”
“If there never was a Cola Copa it could not happen too soon. The kind of disturbing rowdyism to which we have been exposed by this example of present day, undisciplined, immoral young citizens is a disgrace…[it] is a detriment to our neighborhood and in our opinion morally undermines the youth population of Montauk and our young guests. Exposure to youth imported or idly gravitating from other areas whose morals are questionable — and in all probability many of whom have experienced drugs in one degree or another — is dangerous to say the least.”
Her “youth imported or idly gravitating from other areas whose morals are questionable,” put surfers and the black students in the same basket, in her view. Of course, she was right about the drugs if not the immorality, at least among those “gravitating from other areas” with surfboards. It was the summer of love when “turning on and tuning in” meant smoking a joint and going surfing to a growing number of kids.
The rest of the letter to Rev. Friend exposed the lingering shadow of a worldview that the war won two decades earlier had been fought to expunge:
“Furthermore, the integration aspect of this program is extremely undesirable as so well described in newspaper articles last summer. In this it may seem we are taking a very strong stand. However, in example – when God created the earth he made many different species of animals including a great variety of human beings. Obviously, with the help of today’s liberalism in our churches (by communistic influence perhaps) the human being is the only one bent on losing his identity from what he was meant to be, i.e, Negro, Indian, Chinese, Caucasion, etc. etc. When a blackbird mates with a robin, a chicken with a duck, a shark with a whale, a horse with a deer, with etceteras unlimited, we will go along with integration. There can be respect of one’s fellow man and understanding of his needs, acknowledgement of his abilities, and his way of life, whether white, yellow or black; kindliness, neighborliness, and charity for all. These and other virtues of life are one thing, social integration is another. What the law requires us to do, we do, but our own social contacts, thank God, still remain a matter of choice … We are sure these are the feelings of many of our neighbors.”
Whether that was true about her neighbors is beyond knowing, but the letter-writing real estate agent had unknowingly suggested a truth in her twisted-Darwinian diatribe to Rev. Friend. Right before her eyes, a new, semi-aquatic “species” of human was evolving among the “great variety of human beings. Call it Homo aquaticus, the common surfer.
Fortunately, this sub-species had no qualms about mating with other varieties of humans, so today a surprising number of the surfers, local, and those who gravitated here from other areas, have multiplied. Many are among our community’s most active citizens. Meanwhile, Ditch Plains waves continue to sprout generations of young surfers, as well as the experienced watermen and women who make up the town’s frontline defense against accidental drowning.
Last February, the Montauk Historical Society agreed it was time to acknowledge the history and influence that surfing has had on the Montauk Community. Formally known as the Oceans Institute of the Montauk Historical Society, the “Surf Museum” aims to present exhibitions that explain the oceanography, weather, currents, and coastal features – the natural forces — behind surfing’s seaward draw.
For this purpose, a building located directly beside the Montauk Lighthouse constructed in 1896 to house the light’s fog siren has been cleared out and painted. We are in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign that will give us the funds to restore windows, doors, and a skylight to their original condition.
Just prior to the summer of ’67, Chip Duryea, Rev. Friend and few others formed MAPS, the Montauk Association for the Preservation of Surfing. With it came the Association’s promise to keep the beach clean, and free of sleeping hippies. And, it included an agreement that surfers would register with the town clerk, and, to prove their fealty, wear a quarter-size, metal “medallion,” with a hole in their center on their board shorts, or on a thong around their necks, Duryea complained, but surfers were stuck with an 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. surfing window. No early morning paddle-outs – at least on paper.
Most of this democracy in action, having taken place during the winter months, was unknown to the “hippy surfers” – most of them draft age, a few years older than the MAPS crowd. They only learned of the rules as they arrived with their tents and boards that summer.
The rules were impossible to enforce, of course. Once a surfer paddled out, how would the authorities know if he or she was wearing a tag? Call them in? Good luck.
However, Chip Duryea’s civic exercise paid off in a more important way by introducing the surfing community to Montauk and the greater Township of East Hampton. In so doing, the Montauk Association for the Preservation of Surfing helped to dispel concerns about pot-smoking, commie-inspired, hippy wave riders.
Today, surfers, with their knowledge of waves and currents make up a good share of the town’s lifeguard force, as well as the advanced Ocean Rescue response team. In the ‘90s, the rescue team replaced the town’s Dory Rescue Squad made up of baymen, a community of fishermen that had responded to near-shore emergencies as long as anyone could remember. Many of them could not swim.
Montauk surfers host such community events as the Rell Sunn contest to benefit members of the community with health and financial problems. Local surfers also support Surfer’s Healing, an opportunity for young people with autism to ride a wave, to escape to something more.
The MAPS surfing medallions have become as scarce as hen’s teeth. The Museum will display one or two with the story that goes along with them.
