Soaring: The Spiritual Journey of Pioneer Surfer Woody Brown
Posted on April 21, 2008 @ 3:48 PM
“As a young kid I was different than most people in that I didn’t associate with gangs of boys and whatnot. I was a loner, sort of a freak kid,” Woody explained. “I wanted to know why I was here, what I’m supposed to do now that I’m here, what the hell is the world here for, and who is God. My father was an agnostic, he didn’t believe in God, so I was raised more or less like an atheist, and everybody else was talkin’ about God, so I wanted to know, well, who IS God? Well, nobody can answer that question. They just say, ‘Oh, he’s the creator, but you’ve gotta just believe — faith. Nobody knows who God is.’ Well, this bugged me, that I couldn’t get any answers from anybody, and I thought, ‘Well, dammit, then we don’t know nothin’!’ and that kinda killed my fright as a young kid. So nature helped me — or the Lord helped me, whatever you want to say — in that I turned to a love of flying. It fascinated me to get up off the ground, away from from everybody and all their heckling and fighting and arguing, and so I became just absolutely phenomenally interested in flying.”
He read everything on the subject he could get ahold of, built models and flew them, and, being an adventurous 15-year-old, determined to experience flight first-hand. He quit school and went out to Curtis Field on Long Island, where he made himself useful, slept nights on the concrete hanger floor, met Lindbergh, Wiley Post, Clarence Chamberlain, and other great aviators, and learned how to fly.
“One man there, he had a Jenny, and he was teaching people for a reasonable price. I talked my family into giving me enough money to take lessons, which of course they didn’t want because flying was so dangerous in those days. Every flight was an experiment; you didn’t know what was gonna happen. But that was romantic and wonderful, you see. I loved it!”
By the time he was in his early 20s, Woody rarely went into the city, but fate has a way of getting us to the right place at the right time. “I didn’t go to parties or anything, but some of my friends talked me into going to one — because we still had all these rich connections — so this party was a lot of those kinds of people there, and this one rich girl, she liked me for some reason, and so she made a big show there, to get me, and this other English girl, she saw this girl doin’ that, and it made her kinda mad, see, so she made a play for me, just to spite the girl with all that money. And so after the party, she said, ‘Well, come on down to my place,’ and so I went down there. Well, one thing leads to another, and first thing you know we were gettin’ along fine.”
Betty Sellon’s father was an underwriter of Lloyd’s of London — “The greatest insurance company in the world, was using him to back them up! Can you imagine?” — with lots of money and homes in England, America, India and elsewhere. He was a Theosophist, a student of Madam H. P. Blavatsky’s Perennial Philosophy of God’s pervasive presence in the universe. While not agnosticism, it stood almost as far from the popular religions. “I studied Theosophy,” Woody told me, “but it didn’t make much more sense than religions did. I was an out-of-door person, and I couldn’t be bothered with that.”
It was customary for Mr. Sellon to take his family on a protracted summer jaunt to some wonderful place like Bermuda. But that year — 1934 — it was a motorcar trip to Nova Scotia, and Betty’s new bo was invited. One afternoon up there, Woody spotted a man with a strange contraption out in a field. Turned out it was a glider from a German expedition to Newfoundland some years before. Woody got to talking with the man (“a farmer — nice, friendly, country-type people”), mentioning he was a flyer himself, and next thing you know he was being towed up into the air.
“Of course, I’d always been interested in gliders rather than airplanes,” Woody told me, “because to me that was more with nature, see what I mean? The motor was just a big, roaring, damn stinky thing, and here you could fly without it. Oh boy! This was one of the old ‘primaries’ — just a frame, and you sat of a seat right in the middle of the air!”
Turned out the farmer had a better glider in his barn that he’d be willing to part with if the price was right. “He took me over there, and here was this beautiful glider that was what we call a secondary; it had the boom tail and all, but it had a little streamlined pod that you sat in, and nice wings, y’know. It was a refined glider. So I said, ‘Do you wanna sell that one?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, but I’ve gotta get a little money for this one because this is a nice one.’” Woody pointed out that the main support between the seat and the wing had been damaged and jury-rigged together. “We bargained, but we finally agreed. He said, ‘All right, but it’s gonna cost you a little money. It’s gonna cost you 25 dollars!’” Woody laughed hysterically. “Can you imagine that? So I went home and built a trailer and went clear back up there, a thousand miles, and brought it back.”
In Rye, Woody fixed the glider, designing an improved pod fuselage for it. Then he and Betty got married; they were naturals for each other. “She didn’t like society and big shops and all that kinda stuff. She hated that, same as me.” He’d been spoiled by a trip to Florida the winter before. “I left that cold snow and went down there, and here were the sunshine and bathing trunks, and I thought, ‘Boy, what am I doin’ livin’ up there in New York?’ So when my wife said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ we took off and went to California to live.”
They hitched the glider to the back of a Chrysler Airflow**** he’d purchased with a small inheritance and headed west, driving cross-country in the midst of a gas war — 15 cents a gallon — making a beeline for La Jolla, where a relative rented them an apartment. They set up house and walked down to the beach, and there were these waves, like nothing Woody’d seen before. In a stroke of primal intuition, he got stuck on the idea of building a vehicle to ride them — at first a spruce plank, then the hollow plywood box, and then the Snowshoe. When his friend Towny Cromwell saw it, he had to have one too, so Woody helped him build it.
“We just laid down riding,” Wood said. “It never occurred to us to stand up, and then one day Towny said, ‘Hey! You know, in Hawaii they stand up!’ And I said, ‘Well, what do they do that for?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ But, so, we started standing up too!” He laughed a big laugh. “Life is amazing, isn’t it? He worked for Scripps in La Jolla; they named the Cromwell Current after him. A humble, nice boy, not arrogant. He was killed in a plane crash in Mexico — so sad.”
Betty and Woody both had small incomes from their respective fathers, “so between the two we were doin’ all right. We weren’t millionaires, but if we were careful we could rent a house and have food and, you know what I mean. In other words, we were the richest people in the WORLD! Right? Not too much, but a little bit — that’s the deal.”
* * * * *
Woody told me about Torrey Pines, the high bluff area just north of La Jolla and Scripps Institute. “When I came over there from New York, the boys were flying gliders down on the beach. The air would hit these cliffs and you could glide along like an inverted waterfall. Well, the trouble was that when the big storms would come, which was the best wind for soaring, it would bring the high tides and the big waves, so we couldn’t go down the beach with a car, so we would miss all the soaring. So I told the boys, I said, “Hey, why don’t we find a place up on top of the cliff, where we can just launch off the cliff no matter what the conditions are? So I got permission from the city, and I got a lease on some land up there, and I built a runway and dragged it myself from the car with a railroad tie, so then we had a nice little airport up there.”
Launching off the bluff presented unique problems, however. “At first I’d shot-cord off like the Germans with huge rubber bands you’d stretch out with a car, but that was a dangerous thing because if anything happened, you’re running down to the edge of the cliff, and if you don’t have enough speed, you’re gonna just fall off the edge. My wife was towing me one time up in a big rain, and it was muddy and the wheels were spinning and she didn’t get the power, and when I got toward the end, I pulled the joy stick back to take off, and nothing happened, and here was the edge looming right up and I’m doin’ about 35 miles an hour, so I just did what you call a ground loop — I stuck the wing tips in the ground and kicked full rudder and the glider turned around there, but when it stopped my tail and one wing were sticking over and I couldn’t even get out of the cockpit. So we decided that wasn’t too safe a way of doin’ it.”
He had a couple of close calls out in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains at a place discovered by Hawley Bowlus. First, a wealthy fellow had bought an untralight glider and wanted Woody’s help figuring out how the new-fangled Kolsman instrument worked. “We told him not to fly his glider out there; it wasn’t built for that, and we wouldn’t help him put it together. But he flew the glider there a couple times, and then he said, ‘Woody, would you just go up with me once to show me how to run this instrument?’ So like a damn fool, I go.” Rising some 200 feet on the tow line, Woody directed him: “‘That’s a thermal, see? It’s lifting this way, so you turn left ’cause the updraft is over there on the left,’ and I said ‘Turn, turn!’ and he couldn’t do it. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Woody, I can’t. The wings have come off!’ He was so polite.” Woody laughed hysterically. “He’s apologizing to me — no wings! So we came down 200 feet with no wings, broke his legs and arms and knocked me out for 8 hours with a brain concussion, but, oh boy, were we lucky.”
Another time he had a mid-air collision with another glider. “I took his wing right off, and it just turned him around. I got back down on the landing field, and his ship was all rolled up in a great big ball of sticks, and I got there, and I look in the sticks — there was a seat but nobody in it! And I thought, ‘Oh God no! The poor guy! He must’ve been knocked out of the ship up in the air, and he’s gone!’ But he did the same thing — he had run around and there was my ship with the nose knocked off and the seat there with nobody in it, and he thought, ‘Oh God, he must’ve been knocked out of the plane!’ We were just lucky on that one too!”
* * * * *
In the late 1930s, in La Jolla, Woody developed a severe abscess of the inner ear, and emergency surgery was required.
“So I had to go and get an operation, and they used chloroform in those days, which is pretty rough. They knocked me out — big! — and when they knocked me out, I rose up from my body — I could see my body laying down there in the bed. I could see the doctors, and I could hear every word they said, and I could look right through the wall and see the nurses preparing the medicine to bring in to the doctor. The wall was no obstruction at all! And then I went right through the walls — cement and concrete and steel — and I went down where my wife and her mother were sitting in the other part of the hospital down there — I didn’t even know where they were, but I went right to them, and I sat there with ’em, and of course they couldn’t see me or hear me, but I heard every word they said, see? So after I came back in my body — through the walls and all — here they were, workin’ on me, and I came back with fire in my ear. Later I told my wife, I said, ‘You and your mother were saying this and that, and you said this, and your mother said that.’ Now what’s science got to say about that? I was there, wasn’t I?”
* * * * *
“Surfing is good because it gets all the boys away from the street corners telling dirty stories! Y’know what I mean?” Woody asked me, and I nod. It’s the next morning, and we’re back on his sofa, and Kahului harbor is still flat. “It gets ’em all with nature! And it’s a clean, healthy sport that builds your body, so I think it’s a very fine thing. It saved my life a couple times.”
It was in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1939. “The conditions were so wonderful,” Woody remembered. “There was a low pressure from the Gulf, tremendous lift in those storm conditions. When I got up there, there was this cloud street — the clouds were lined up in a row, and you can barrel along under them. I rode that cloud street for hours.” He set world and national altitude and distance records — 7,500 feet and 263 miles. The hardest part, he told me, was afterwards, being pushed out on stage in front of the waiting crowd to receive his applause.
Then he raced home to San Diego, where Betty died in childbirth. “When my wife died, I cracked up. I stood it for a year, and then I couldn’t take it anymore, and I told the Lord (of course, I didn’t believe in God, but we all know there’s something greater than us, but I couldn’t accept man’s idea of God), I told the Lord, ‘I can’t take it any more; you gotta get rid of me — just wipe me out, I don’t wanna live any longer.’ So he said, ‘Why don’t you go to the South Seas? You always wanted to go down there. Go!’ Hey, man, I was on the boat the next day! I don’t know what happened to my car, the house full of clothes, everything; I don’t know what happened to any of it. I was gone. So I came to Hawaii here, and they wouldn’t let me get out of the country, so I was stuck here in Hawaii. I couldn’t sleep at night — all night, every night. I’d roam the street. So what I did, I just went out surfing all day, and by the end of the day and it’s gettin’ dark, I’m so exhausted I could fall asleep. So in a way it saved my life.”
* * * * *
Woody talked about surfing in Hawaii in the early 1940s: “When I came to Hawaii, there was a clique of boys that used to go out in big waves. There was only about four or five of ’em that would go out there in these tremendous 20- and 25-foot waves. None of the beachboys would go out there. But I had been riding big waves in La Jolla — we’d gotten up to about 15 feet — so I just automatically joined with these boys, and they took me in.” They nick-named him “Spider” because, “I surf with my arms all out, and I’m half squatting down, and I’m skinny with my long legs, and I guess I look like a big spider riding the board.”
This was the Hot Curl crew, and Woody described how John Kelly had whittled down his slide-ass swastika-style board to a 3-inch vee-tail. “Well, they had evolved the board, and of course I shaped my boards like that, with them there. The only difference was, I could build faster boards to get across those big waves because of my glider-flying experience. In other words, I understood how air flowed around things, and then I read how water is incompressible, so therefore it would have to follow the curve, whereas in an airplane, if the curve gets too steep, the air just breaks away in turbulence if it can’t follow the curve, but in water, because it’s incompressible, the water has to follow the curve, and that’s why, when he rounded the back end, it couldn’t go down sideways, because the water couldn’t go around that curved stern that fast. So I understood all that from my flying, that any kind of curve in the water is gonna slow the board down because the water has a hard time getting around that curve, so I could make my boards much faster, and I could get across these great big waves when nobody else could.”
Woody experimented with eliminating all the curves in the bottom, but that brought things back to the slide-ass problem of the old boards. “So we figured, well, if we put a fin on it, perhaps we could have the flat bottom with no curves for the speed, and yet it wouldn’t slide ass. So we built one that way — Georgie [Downing] and I — and we took it out to Makaha, and Georgie tried it without a keel first to see the difference, because we’d made a slot for the fin, and we could slide it fore and aft, so we could learn something. Okay, so he went out and tried the board without the keel, and he said, ‘Oh Woody, it’s fantastic! It’s much faster than our other boards.’ But then he put the keel in and went out again, and when he came back in, he said, ‘Oh Woody! It’s MUCH better with the keel! It gives it even more speed, because it keeps it from sliding sideways a bit,’ and he said, ‘much better control and everything.’ So that was the beginning of the modern board, and we began building ’em like that. Then I could build ’em with NO curves except up on the sides to hold it in the wave, but as far as the back end was concerned, it was absolutely an out-and-out planing board.” This was in 1953.
* * * * *
Ten years earlier, December 22, 1943. The world is at war. Woody Brown and a kid named Dickie Cross go surfing at Sunset Beach.
“We were building our own surfboards then, and this guy from California left me his board — he was with the Navy, a big, heavy guy over 200 pounds, and the Navy pushed him so damn hard, it literally ran him down and killed him — so I had this big, tremendous board — 12 feet long, it must’ve weighed a hundred pounds — so I whittled it all down, got rid of that redwood on the sides as much as I could, and when I went out with Dickie, that’s the board I had. So the board was cut way down. That’s why when Dickie lost his board, I thought, ‘Oh my God! Two of us on this little cut-down board,’ and I could hardly paddle it. I’d cut it down a little too much, and kneelin’ on it, I had to keep paddling fast or it would sink, so I thought, ‘Oh man.’ But it turned out we didn’t have any board!”
He laughed, remembering that evening. The waves were giant. They’d paddled all the way down to Waimea Bay, and now Dickie was way inside, had lost his board off the rocky point, and Woody had committed to go in after him. Just then an outside set blackened the horizon. The last image he had of Cross was the look of wide-eyed surprise and dread on the man’s face, seeing his approaching doom, then Woody pushed his board away and dove for the bottom. It was dark when he finally crawled ashore at Waimea.
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