In 1949, Frederick Kohner, his wife and young daughter, Kathy, signed up for my beginner ski school class in Sun Valley on Dollar Mountain. This was their first ski vacation since Frederick and his wife escaped the German invasion of Austria during World War II.
The second day at lunch, I spun some stories about surfing at Malibu, which was only 10 or 12 miles from where they lived.
When they got home, they packed a picnic lunch, parked their car at the surfing beach at Malibu, and before they knew it, Kathy loved surfing so much that the parents were soon just dropping Kathy off in the morning and picking her up in the afternoon.
Kathy was able to borrow a small surfboard and learned how to ride it. Because of her small size, the local surfers quickly named her Gidget.
Kathy’s father wrote a book about his daughter and had a great agent who quickly sold the story “Gidget” to a major Hollywood film company. Soon, an entire staff was hired to produce it and I even got a phone call from them to participate in the production of the movie. My job took two weeks and I took the director to every beach from Tijuana to Ventura so he could make his own evaluation on which beach had the best potential to produce the movie.
“Gidget” was arguably the first Hollywood feature film about surfing, beach party music and dancing.
It was interesting to me to see how Hollywood portrayed surfing to the public. I thought it was pretty unrealistic after having surfed for a decade and having produced surfing sequences for my first four or five feature-length ski films. The leading man in “Gidget” was filmed standing on a surfboard in a soundstage and was anything but believable.
However, when you’re young with some experience, it’s easy to convince yourself that you are a semi-expert, when in reality you are not.
“Gidget” was released several years before Bruce Brown’s “Endless Summer” became the definitive surf movie of all time. In that one incredible movie, Brown made enough money to retire before he was 30-years-old.
Last week, a copy of the book “Gidget” autographed to me by Frederick Kohner was returned to me by an old friend and it’s amazing to me how much has happened in my life since Gidget rode a surfboard at Malibu.
Soon after “Gidget” appeared on the silver screen, the wetsuit was invented so that the below 50°F, winter Southern California beaches were more hospitable to the human body.
I was lucky because I already had 11 years of surfing behind the Kohners’ appearance in my ski school class. I had probably built eight or 10 of my own surfboards in those early years in the length of 5’ to 11’ and from 100 lbs. to the lightest at 12 lbs.
Mr. and Mrs. Kohner certainly pointed Gidget in a proper direction because more than 25 years later, when Gidget was still making turns on Baldy at Sun Valley every winter, she was still signing autographs. I lost track of Gidget when Laurie and I started skiing in Colorado and then later Montana, but think she is doing well.
I think you can get a copy of the movie on Netflix. Take a look at it for fun and to see the old days.
There certainly were unanticipated consequences when I told the Kohner family about surfing at Malibu. And, in a couple of summers a crowded day at Malibu jumped from only a half a dozen surfers to where you could hardly find a place to park your car within walking distance of the surfing beach.
At about the same time, Bob Simmons, who lived in Pasadena, started creating lightweight surfboards in his mother’s garage. Bob had a bad elbow and had trouble paddling a heavy surfboard. To the best of my knowledge, he was the first person to experiment with lightweight foam and fiberglass that fueled the surfing revolution. For several years, Bob was the only person making light boards and the wait to get a surfboard from Bob stimulated several other young people to start making the same product, the most famous and successful of those was Hobie Alter.
Lightweight boards turned quicker and were faster than the heavyweight board I was riding and because of that you could now ride at beaches where waves had been impossible to ride on a heavy board. It used to take a couple of summers to learn, but was now reduced to a couple of weekends.
I am lucky enough to be one of the people who knew what it was like to surf Malibu when I was the only person there.
I had to slide my surfboard through a small hole in the 8-foot-high wire fence and hope that it had not been wired shut while I was enjoying the crystal clear water. Today, when the surf is good there will be several hundred surfboards on the beach and in the water.
Much of its popularity can, of course, be blamed on “Gidget” and the following surfing culture, which grew over those early years.
Maybe even a little bit of it from my conversation with her father at Sun Valley in the spring of 1949.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
