When the economic crash happened in 1929, the unemployment rate in America skyrocketed to more than 25 percent. Almost daily, someone knocked on the back door and said, “I will do anything for a sandwich of any kind, please because I haven’t eaten in two days.”
My father was one of those 25 percent out of work and the family lived in Topanga Canyon in a $5 a month, tarpaper shack, which luckily for me was located within walking distance of the beach.
My good luck continued because a family migrated to live in Topanga Canyon from Hawaii. They made a living fishing and, during the lobster season, they caught them in homemade wooden traps that they made during the winter from scraps of lumber that would float up on the beach.
One day while I was swimming, I watched my dad catch a wave body surfing and ride almost to the dry sand. It took me 20 or 30 tries before I was able to catch one wave and ride it at least 25 feet toward shore.
That first ride sealed my fate forever and I spent a good portion of my life riding waves.
There was a great lagoon between our house and the ocean and I spent many days playing in that lagoon. I built rafts from driftwood and pretended to be on a battleship torpedoing German warships. Sometimes I was a pirate and captured ships with trunks full of gold and diamond jewelry.
In those days, there were several villages between Santa Monica and Malibu with names such as Castle La Mar, Las Tunes and Las Flores.
We lived in Topanga during prohibition and the beach was a good place for rumrunners, as they were called, to unload their whiskey onto the beach from their boats and then a quick transfer to a truck on the nearby highway. One rainy night in January 1930, I woke up when my father and two of his friends came into our cottage, each carrying a gunnysack full of whiskey bottles. Sleepily, I watched them pull the coverings off the walls and stash the many bottles of whiskey between the studs. I have no idea how long that whiskey lasted my father, but it wasn’t long.
The oceanfront was owned by the State of California and leased by the Los Angeles Athletic Club for 99 years. They, in turn, leased it to people to build waterfront homes. In the middle of this waterfront village was the Topanga Yacht Club. The Club consisted of several buoys offshore where members could tie up their sailboats and race each other on weekends.
The big deal for us kids was to swim out and hang onto one of the buoys to rest for the return trip. The Commodore of the yacht club would get on her megaphone shouting at us, “Get off that buoy!”
Beachcombing on Saturday and Sunday afternoon was my only source of income. A bottle of Coca-Cola cost 5 cents with a 2-cent deposit on the bottle. Once I found six empty bottles and that $.12 bought me a lot of penny candy.
In 1934, they widened the Pacific Coast Highway and deposited a lot of the dirt between the lagoon and the ocean and raised the highway about 75 vertical feet. As a result of that, all of the cottages in the canyon lost their views of the ocean and the use of the lagoon, which changed the village forever.
Surfboards did not appear in Southern California until about 1933 or so and it took a long time for surfers to recognize Topanga was as good as Malibu to surf when the swell came from the right direction.
Today, tens of thousands of people pass both ways on the Pacific Coast Highway with no knowledge about how wonderful the lifestyle was back then when there were only about a million people in the Los Angeles basin.
The second summer we lived in Topanga, I learned how to launch a rowboat through the surf and with the help of my Hawaiian friend, learned to fish. He used what is called a setline probably 200- or 300-feet long with a hook every 10 or 15 feet. I would row while he fed the line out and later retrieved it with whatever fish we had caught that day.
In 1937, in junior high school, I built my first surfboard and since Topanga Canyon I have never had a bad day in or around the ocean. Well, perhaps the night that our ship sunk in a typhoon in the South Pacific during World War II. But, that’s another story.
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.
