Soaring: The Spiritual Journey of Pioneer Surfer Woody Brown
Posted on April 21, 2008 @ 3:48 PM
Words by: Drew Kampion
Photos by: Ron Dahlquist
For a long time, altitude was the big thing in Woody Brown’s life. Now it’s all about attitude — an attitude with plenty of altitude.
Flying from the Mainland to Honolulu and then from Oahu to Maui for my first meeting with Woody Brown in January of this year, I boned up for the interview by reading two very good profiles of the man, which left me intimidated: what was left to say? Ben Marcus’ 1993 portrait in Surfer magazine was a tight, well-crafted, perceptive piece on Woody’s incredible life. And Malcolm Gault-Williams’ 11,000-word encyclopedic story in the Fall 1996 edition of The Surfer’s Journal seemed to include every conceivable aspect of the great surfer’s monumental life. What was left for me to say?
This is what my research told me: Woodbridge Parker Brown was born in New York City on the fifth of January, 1912. His family was blue-blood, prominent on the high-society short list called the New York 400. But Brown was not impressed; rather, he was much more impressed with the young flyers out at Curtis Field on Long Island. That’s where he met aviator Charles Lindbergh in the months before the Lone Eagle’s historic trans-Atlantic solo flight in 1927. Inspired by Lindbergh, Woody learned to fly in a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny,” an obsolete single-engine trainer used by the U.S. Army Air Service in World War I. It was said at the time, “If you can fly a Jenny, you can fly anything.”
After a while, he transitioned to gliders, preferring silence and the rush of wind to the racket of the barnstorming machine. He soon met an elegant Englishwoman with an adventurous spirit that loved (but did not match) his own, and away they went out West to San Diego in 1935.
The young couple lived at La Jolla, where Woody got into bodysurfing, then surfing. He built his own board, a hollow plywood “box” that would float him so he could catch waves at Windansea, Bird Rock, and Pacific Beach. His second board — the “snowshoe” — was more refined. He adapted some of the the aerodynamic wisdom he’d acquired to the much denser medium of water. The outline was traced from the fuselage of his glider; it featured a vee bottom and a small skeg. He did all this in complete ignorance of Tom Blake’s parallel innovations in the Hawaiian Islands.
At nearby Torrey Pines, he was the first to launch a glider from the high bluffs into the vaulting updraft of the onshore breeze. He survived a couple of near-death experiences there and a couple of crashes riding the inland thermals. He became a soaring champion, winning meets around the state and country.
In the midst of “the happiest years of my life,” in 1938, Woody headed off to Wichita Falls, Texas with his “Thunderbird,” a B-100 Baby Albatross kit sailplane designed by soaring pioneer Hawley Bowlus, and blew away existing records for distance, altitude, and duration all in one day on a monumental 263-mile glide to Wichita, Kansas.*
Woody returned to the coast on top of the world, only to be brought crashing to earth when Betty died laboring to deliver their first son. He was devastated, gave the boy over to her family to raise, roamed around aimlessly, gave up flying, and finally headed off to lose himself in the South Pacific. He got as far as Hawaii, and they wouldn’t let him leave. War was imminent and passports and visas weren’t being issued; he was stuck in the Sandwich Isles, depressed and out of his mind with loss. He wandered the islands — Oahu, Maui, Kauai, the Big Island — on foot or bicycle, without direction, a lean, spaced-out haole with nowhere to call home, and the Hawaiians took him in, welcomed him into their homes, and won over his heart.
Not long afterwards, he met and married a Hawaiian woman, a wonderful hotel entertainer named Rachel, and that seemed to ease the pain. They settled on Waikiki, in a small apartment right on the beach above the Waikiki Tavern. “Ma” Brown stayed home with the babies when Woody, a conscientious objector, performed his national service as a government surveyor, a job that took him to Christmas Island, where he got his first ride on an outrigger canoe, a craft so swift and responsive that it inspired him to research, design and build the first modern catamaran based on traditional Polynesian multihulls.**
Throughout these years, Woody continued to surf, gradually ratcheting up to the big waves. In Hawaii he hooked up with the young Hot Curl boys — John Kelly, Fran Heath, George Downing, Rus Takaki, Wally Froiseth, and Rabbit Kekai — and became a fixture at Makaha and on pioneering expeditions to the North Shore. It was there that his most notorious surf session occurred, three days before Christmas of 1943, when he and Dickie Cross paddled out at Sunset Beach on a rising swell. Caught outside, they eventually paddled down to Waimea Bay where they figured they had a chance of getting to the beach. Woody survived, Dickie was never found. The cloud of that event — the killer reputation of the North Shore — remained intact for some 14 years until Waimea was finally “conquered” in November of 1957. By then the Browns had moved to Maui, where Woody supported Ma Brown and his two children by farming. In 1971, Woody apparently came down off the slopes long enough to fly over to Oahu and pilot a glider to a personal altitude record far above 20,000 feet — without oxygen.
Toward the end of that decade, apparently converted to Christianity, Woody authored a book titled The Gospel of Love: A Revelation of the Second Coming, in which he interpreted key sections of the Bible in his own way. Then, in 1986, Ma Brown died, and within the year Woody flew off to the Philippines, where he met and married his third wife, a young woman named Macrene. They now live in Kahului, on Maui, with their son, Woodbridge Parker Brown, Jr., age 15.
That was the outline — the skeleton of 90 years of life, fleshed out with a consistent array of details and anecdotes from the existing literature, as well as David L. Brown’s excellent 1999 documentary, Surfing For Life, which showcases Woody amongst eight or ten other over-65 surfers. Given all the biographical data and imagery, I wasn’t sure what else was left to say about Woody Brown.
* * * * *
The road into Kahului — the Hana Hwy. turning into Ka’ahumanu Ave. — used to be pretty low-key, parts of it downright rural. Now it’s a divided four-lane affair with turning lanes and signals at every corner, large malls left and right. Even the surf and windsurf shops look like malls. It’s easy to get lost and forget where you are, on this is so-called “Outer Island.” Swing right on Kahului Beach Rd. and you curve along the harbor, a natural bay pinched almost shut by two long, low breakwalls. Incredibly, since the opening is scarcely a short city-block long, big swells squeeze through and fan out towards the harbor beach, peaking and spilling over a couple of reefs, producing excellent, fun small-wave surf and a third spot that’s okay for bodyboarders.
Across the road from Kahului Harbor is the Harbor Lights condominium complex, a lone, large building surrounded by heavily-regulated parking lots. A block long and stacked high, its half-dozen rows of identical windows face out on the harbor. Woody Brown’s is three stories up and about 20 across. We stood at his window looking out on the harbor. Although the opening in the jetties is scarcely a short city-block long, big swells squeeze through and fan out towards the harbor beach, peaking and spilling over on several reefs, producing excellent, fun small-wave surf. It was flat, but Woody pointed out the spots anyway. The peak to the west was his favorite.
In his article in Surfer, Ben Marcus had warned that the famous Maui wind whistled though his apartment making the hallway door hard to open, but it’s late afternoon, and it’s calm. Ben also warned me about Pacific hoodlums lurking in stairwells, but all I’d seen was young families and an assortment of good-humored residents. True, the building was sterile and industrial — the kind of functional concrete-shoebox architecture designed to deliver maximum income from minimum investment — but it didn’t feel threatening, and Woody seemed quite relaxed here.
I’d seen his wife Macrene briefly when I’d come in — young, jet-haired, bright-eyed — but she had taken Woody Junior (a handsome 15-year-old) off to town, so that Woody and I could sit on the big leatherette sofa and talk. Woody wore his short-sleeved shirt, mostly unbuttoned and a pair of beach shorts. His rubber thongs were parked by the doorway. His old Ole surfboard leaned against the wall under the big window. Another one — the blue Angulo — was propped under the bedroom window. Otherwise, I saw few visible artifacts of his surfing life. This was partially explained by a small disaster.
“Oh, I had pictures, but I had a tragedy here,” he told me. “I lost my picture album! The worst! You couldn’t buy it — not for any money! I had pictures of the old Curtis Field with the Jennies lined up. Y’see, there was no airplanes but Jennies. They were the old World War trainer, so that’s what everybody had. Well, that was a big biplane with wires and struts, y’know — I guess you’ve seen pictures — well, that’s all it was; that’s what I learned to fly in!”
“What happened to the photo album?” I asked.
“When we moved here, it disappeared, and what I think happened was, y’know when you’re unpacking, you have rubbish all over, and you put the rubbish in a bag or something, and I think the album must’ve been in the bottom of one of the bags, and we put the rubbish in, and never saw it. ’Cause it disappeared.*** A real tragedy, because I had all the pictures from my youth, growing up, my mother and father and everybody. Luckily my girl [his daughter Mary Sue Gannon] swiped some things from out of the album — I’m glad she did now — so we have a few left.”
Over the next two days, listening to Woody, recording eight sides of tape of that wonderful, wise, and emotional voice, all the while his blue eyes sparking with life, I came to realize more and more what the loss of that picture album represented. The only salvation was in the clarity of the man’s mind, which seemed to be related to the purity of his heart.
What I learned about Woody Brown is that he has lived the picaresque life of a Parsifal — the Holy Fool of Arthurian legend, who blundered innocently, nonetheless heroically, into selfless risk after selfless risk. Or maybe in Woody’s case it wasn’t always so selfless; maybe his pursuit of freedom, adventure, and discovery was initially based solidly in the realm of the senses and the ego, but it’s certain that the man’s fate was carrying him along in spite of — not because of — some sense of self. He’s gone way beyond that now. If you were looking for a word to describe this 89-year-old surfer today, “saint” would come to mind.
* * * * *
He was a loner, not a leader, but he led. He wasn’t like other kids. He felt like an alien in high-society New York. Riding the subway to Carpenter School to join the privileged kids, he felt nothing like he knew they felt. He lived in the Gramercy Park house of a successful man who had died prematurely, leaving his son with three women (a step-ladder of generations) and little more than a basement full of books by the Great Agnostic, Robert G. Ingersoll, the boy’s great-uncle. The same Ingersoll who wrote in 1896:
I believe that with infinite arms Nature embraces the all — that there is no interference — no chance — that behind every event are the necessary and countless causes, and that beyond every event will be and must be the necessary and countless effects.
Man must protect himself. He cannot depend upon the supernatural — upon an imaginary father in the skies. He must protect himself by finding the facts in Nature, by developing his brain, to the end that he may overcome the obstructions and take advantage of the forces of Nature.
Is there a God?
I do not know.
Is man immortal?
I do not know.
One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief, nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it must be.
We wait and hope.
His family had a home in Rye, about 25 miles outside of the city on the north shore of the Sound. There on a late winter afternoon the boy strolled through a shoreline park with a friend. Noting the rental canoes loaded upside-down on their racks, the loner looked out across the water and suggested a paddle over to Long Island. His friend said, “Sure, okay.”
They found two paddles and set one of the canoes in the water (nothing was locked in those days). It was an Indian canoe, lightweight and fragile — no flotation, no way to bail it out if a hole opened in the hull. They shoved off as the sun lowered in the west. Big boats and small bergs of ice drifted between the paddling boys and the island. It was ten miles across. The night came on with surprising speed. Soon all was blackness and the flickering of distant lights. One twinkling cluster was closer, approaching swiftly — a large boat plowing towards their frail canoe. They aimed to pass across her stern, but when they did they felt a sudden scraping and a jolt. With a start the boy realized — it was a tugboat and it was towing a huge barge — they’d just lurched across a mighty cable that could have sliced their flimsy canoe in half and left them to the icy water and certain death. But they were lucky.
A couple of hours later, they made the far beach. It was deserted. They found a road, hiked a ways, and came upon a restaurant. Famished, they went in. Heads turned, eyes studied them — two kids dripping wet, wearing shorts and looking scruffy in the middle of winter? Very weird. The guy up front rang the police as the boys slipped back out into the cold night and made a beeline for the beach, followed the shoreline back to the canoe as a siren whooped alarm up on the highway. They got back in the canoe, pushed off, and put their backs into it. They made Rye the next morning, racked the canoe, returned the paddles, and beat it home, where the young man slept for two whole days, back in 1926.
* * * * *
His father, Herbert Brown, had been a great athlete at Columbia College; a statue of him still stands in the lobby, the institution’s greatest all-around athlete. In the early 1900s he formed a Wall Street brokerage with his brother — Brown Brothers. But the athlete’s lungs were no match for the smoke-filled dens of capitalism; Herbert contracted tuberculosis.
“The only chance in those days was to get in the dry place,” Woody said, “so he went out to Arizona, and then he died all alone out there, which is very sad. Boy, I’ll tell ya, life is filled with tragedy, isn’t it?”
Woody was about five at the time; his mother, Eva Farrell Brown, took it hard, turned to drinking. “We’d hide the bottle from her, all this kind of stuff, but she was very good about it,” Woody remembered. “She’d go in her room and close the door and be just like knocked out for 24 hours or so. She wouldn’t raise hell or anything like that, but it was sad. Well, I understand it; I lost two of ’em [spouses]. I know what it is!”
After the war ended in 1919, the custom was to let rooms to returning soldiers, and a young man named Sydney Gaskins — “Gas” for short — came to live with them, and eventually Eva married him, which was fortunate because Herbert’s brother defrauded the family out of its share of the brokerage business.
It was a most unusual household. Woody’s grandmother, Sue Farrell, was a social activist. “She started that anti-vivisection investigation league,” Woody told me. “She got laws passed before Congress to keep doctors from experimenting on live animals. You see, that hurt her — she was a lovely, kind person, and she was vegetarian; my mother was not. So I had the balance of the two.”
Woody had no appreciation for social hierarchies or wealth or status. He disliked his school, the spoiled-rotten rich kids that barged through life without self-awareness, the soulless urban competition to get ahead. “I hated cities,” he said. “I loved the trees and the ocean, the clouds ... I loved nature!”
Then Woody told a story: “They sent me up to the country for the summer, to a friend’s way up above New York. Well, they had a shotgun, see? And I’d never seen a gun before in my life, y’know. So I said, ‘Jeeze, can I go use the gun?’ They said, ‘Sure, but be careful; it’s dangerous, you can get hurt.’ I mean, I’d never seen a gun, but they explained it to me. So I went out in the fields and bushes — ‘Ah! Gonna go hunt!’ — and so this chipmunk came up above his hole lookin’ around, and I got a bead on him, and BOOM! I got him! And I run over there, and I’ve blown his guts out all over the ground, see? But the poor little guy was lookin’ up at me with his little beady eyes — I still see it! [Woody choked up] — and he’s lookin’ up at me like I’m God, sayin’, ‘Well what are you gonna do now?’ Well, I can’t leave him there like that, and I had to shoot him right in the face, while he’s lookin’ up at me with those little eyes. Man, I never killed anything after that! That was it, man! Oh! I can still see it, y’know? Terrible! So that’s how I became a vegetarian — completely!”
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