Inside the Green Room!

Shedding Light on the S.B. Native Who Inspired a Surfing Revolution

by Kerry Blankenship Allen
Raw Footage:
If George Greenough's feet could talk, they'd tell stories of innovation,
invention, travel, and trailblazing. They've only been confined by shoes
but a few times in their 63-year lifetime, so they've seen everything
Greenough's seen. They started their journey in Santa Barbara, where
George first fell in love with all things ocean. Those feet were there when
Greenough used the hull of a 16-foot Boston Whaler to fashion a
homemade boat; they were there when he taught himself how to build
an underwater camera housing; they were there when he designed and
shaped the world's first kneeboard; and they were there when he took
his ideas to Australia, where Greenough lives today.

'When I took my designs to Australia, the reaction was huge, in fact

bigger than here. All the Australian surfers immediately started making
and riding shortboards, and then the movement came to the States.'

I had heard his name long before I came to know what a surf icon
George Greenough truly was. The revolutionary surfboard designer,
gifted filmmaker, and all-around renaissance eccentric pioneered many of
his famous innovations in the waters off Hammond's Beach near his
parents' Montecito estate. Growing up during the '50s and '60s, the
golden days of Santa Barbara surfing, Greenough embraced the laid-
back lifestyle while pursuing, with an obsessional focus, any method,
however strange, that would enhance his experience of the waves.
Eventually his experiments spawned a surfboard design movement that
has turned Greenough into a living legend.

As an early member of the Santa Barbara County Surf Club, Greenough

was able to test his radical designs in the challenging waves of Hollister
Ranch, then still owned by the

Hollister family. Except for this privileged handful of Santa Barbara

surfers, no one was allowed access to the beach, which was often
patrolled by gun-toting cowboys.

Many other surf icons came out of that early club, but probably not one
was as unique as Greenough.

"George was the club's only non-surfing member," said Arlen Knight,
founder of the Santa Barbara County Surf Club. "He never stood up on
his board, he never cut or even combed his hair, and always was a bit
disheveled, but he was a very inventive guy, and certainly a great
waterman."
'I surf with dolphins a lot, and they are always in the water.
Greenough is widely credited with convincing an entire generation to
abandon their longboards and join the shortboard revolution. Now at 63,
Greenough, who continues to live a reclusive and eccentric life - in three
decades he's never held a job and has rarely worn shoes - is being
honored with a traveling exhibition, which is at the Santa Barbara
Maritime Museum this summer. The exhibit displays many of
Greenough's board and fin designs, artwork, and is screening his films,
including his most recent, Dolphin Glide, which debuted at this year's
S.B. International Film Festival. All this solidifies Greenough's place in
history.

The Designer

By his early teens, Greenough (pronounced green·o) himself had already

abandoned traditional surfing in place of kneeboarding and soft mat-
riding, two sports few others were participating in at that time. "I really
never liked the longboard, it had no flexibility or spontaneity," recalled
Greenough from his home near Byron Bay, Australia. "You couldn't really
do anything with it, and the boards were heavy and hard to handle. So, I
made what I needed to help me fit tighter into the pocket of the wave."

Greenough's parents' expansive Romero Canyon home and lawns

provided him with the space - as well as financial and family support - to
fulfill his creative drive, and to produce a board to fit his unique style.
His experimentation and love affair with the water led him to create
boards that challenged riders and were, in fact, more fun to ride. During
this time, most surfers were using cumbersome longboards (9¢6≤ in
length, weighing 25 pounds), which lacked flexibility and allowed a surfer
to do little more than ride straight down the face of a wave.

While in wood shop at Santa Barbara High School, Greenough completed

a rough kneeboard design made from balsa wood, launching the "spoon"
kneeboard. "I needed a project for wood shop, and everyone else was
making birdhouses and such," said Greenough. "I needed a board that
would fit deeper into the wave's tube, so I created the spoon. It was a
great project, and the teacher gave me an A."

The spoon was a short board - just under 5 feet and weighing only 6
pounds - made of an all-fiberglass kneeling area with foam on the nose
and sides. "A few versions later, I shaped a spoon with a fin design that I
borrowed from a tuna. It made the board easy to maneuver in the
water," added Greenough.

For surfers, the difference between the spoon and the longboard was
immediate. Both the spoon and Greenough's ultra-modern fin design
were groundbreaking movements in the evolution of surfing. With the
spoon's intuitive steering attributes, and some good surf, Greenough was
not only able to turn, but to completely change direction with his board,
float on the whitewater, and perform other maneuvers considered
progressive - maneuvers that had never before been done.

Eventually, Greenough's fins moved from home experiment to retail item

when Morey-Pope Surfboards, a San Diego shop spearheaded by Boogie
Board creator Tom Morey, started manufacturing Greenough's fins. The
most popular design, and Greenough's favorite, was the Greenough
Stage IV, shaped for power turning, and now readily available to every
surfer, not just Greenough's friends.

In 1962 Greenough shaped the Baby, a 7¢8≤ board designed for

shortboard surfing. It boasted technical attributes never before seen in
board design: It was short, its deck was slightly curved, its sides - or
rails - were thick and round, and it had one of Greenough's innovative
fins, all of which gave it more responsiveness and maneuverability. Now
surfers could carve up the face of a wave standing on a surfboard rather
than kneeling on a spoon or other kneeboard. What added to the board's
distinctiveness was that Greenough borrowed a pint of color from fellow
Surf Club member and surfboard shaping genius Renny Yater, and tinted
his Baby the color of the sky. "I hardly ever rode that board," Greenough
said. "My friends loved it, so they'd take it out at Rincon and have a lot
of fun."

By the time the 1966 World Surfing Championship rolled around, the
event's champion, Australian Nat Young, won the contest by riding his
winning wave on a surfboard featuring a Greenough-shaped fin, and
later credited Greenough for his success.

"When I took my designs to Australia, the reaction was huge, in fact

bigger than here," said Greenough. "All the Australian surfers
immediately started making and riding shortboards, and then the
movement came to the States."

While others in Santa Barbara and Australia, where Greenough now calls
home, rode his boards, he continued his passion and devotion to
kneeboarding, leading the kneeboard craze in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Still, what really turns on Greenough is a truly obscure obsession -
inflatable mat-riding.

"I love mat-riding. The mats are very easy to transport, and you don't
need high-quality surf to catch waves and have fun. And with mats, it's
all about the fun," said Greenough. "The mats let you get closer to a
wave than a board does. You're laying flat, right on the water, and you
can feel every movement of the wave."
Greenough's experimentation and design didn't stop at surfboards and
kneeboards. There was also his homemade boat, The Coupe de Ville,
fashioned from fiberglass and the hull of a 16-foot Boston Whaler. Its
crowning glory: a rear window lifted from a 1957 Plymouth that
functioned as its windshield.

"The Coupe was a great boat to take out to the [Channel] islands," said
Greenough. "Hardly anyone went out there at that time, but we'd go out
there as often as we could." The boat was featured in a documentary
(eponymously titled The Coupe) Greenough made about a trip to Santa
Rosa Island on what appears to be a quintessential California day: glassy
waters, head-high surf, abalone hunting, and wreck scavenging.

The Filmmaker

Greenough also broke boundaries in surf filmmaking. His only full-length

feature film, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (which opened in 1969 at
the Lobero Theatre), offers a nostalgic look at Santa Barbara during the
late 1960s with familiar scenes from Montecito to the Channel Islands,
including Greenough shaping boards in his parents' backyard. But the
film's surf sequences laid the groundwork for generations of surf
filmmakers. To capture tube shots from in the water, Greenough outfitted
himself with a shoulder-mounted waterproof camera that weighed 28
pounds, donned a diver's full-length wetsuit, and waited patiently. He
had begun developing this cinematic technique for still photography
several years earlier when he was the first person to shoot a surfer
inside the wave's tube.

In Echoes, a 23-minute short filmed in 1972, Greenough fine-tuned his

water photography skills by primarily focusing on underwater "in-tube"
shots. His 1971 short film Rubber Duck Riders was his tribute to mat-
riders, by then a vanishing sport. His expert filmmaking and intuitive eye
landed him several assignments on feature films including Big
Wednesday and Rip Girls. In 1973, Greenough himself was a subject of
documentary short Crystal Voyager, filmed entirely in Santa Barbara to
record the making of The Coupe.

Greenough's latest project, Dolphin Glide, is a 35-millimeter, 24-minute

short film that vividly portrays inner ocean travel from a dolphin's-eye
view. "What started as pieces of film spliced together to show at parties
around Santa Barbara turned into this film. It all started to change when
I modified a camera to look like a baby dolphin, and then took it into the
surf with me," said Greenough. In Dolphin Glide, Greenough looked to
mimic the dolphin's movement in the water by rigging an underwater
camera to himself, to surfboards, and to the side of his boat. "I surf with
dolphins a lot, and they are always in the water," said Greenough. "I
wanted everyone to have the chance to experience that feeling, the
feeling of surfing with a dolphin." The result is a hypnotic, if not
mystifying, combination of underwater scenes of dolphins swimming,
playing, and eating.

Today Greenough can be found where I found him: at his home on

Australia's east coast. His filmmaking, surfing, and beach lifestyle keep
him busy, with little time for pontificating about the past. "I'm busy with
two more films that document the making of Dolphin Glide, and I have to
get into the water every day," said Greenough. "But someday, I need to
get back to Santa Barbara. The surf is crowded there, but I have a lot of
friends that I'd love to see. Y'know sometimes I miss the place."

Beyond Surfing

It is hard to put your finger on why George Greenough is a living surf

legend. Some say it is his innovative surfboard, kneeboard, and fin
designs. Others claim it's his intuitive love of the ocean and the films he
makes that portray that relationship. And finally, many attribute it to his
mysterious and eccentric lifestyle. The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum
offers the chance to decide for yourself with its current exhibition,
George Greenough: Beyond Surfing.

Beyond Surfing peeks into Greenough's experimentation and design

work. The exhibit includes Greenough's original model of the modern
high-aspect ratio fin, and several of Greenough's negative-buoyancy
spoon kneeboards, the design of which allowed riders to stay longer in
the wave's tube than was possible with other surfing devices. Carbon-
fiber surfboards and sailboards constructed by Greenough, as well as the
first carbon-fiber windsurfing mast and Greenough's hand-cut surfboard
templates, are also on display.

Beyond Surfing also includes paintings by area artists based on

Greenough and his life's work, and a surf film series to run the duration
of show. (Call museum for lineup and show times.) The exhibit hangs
through October 31 at the S.B. Maritime Museum, 113 Harbor Way, 10
a.m.-5 p.m. daily, closed Wednesdays. Call 962-8404, ext. 100; fax 962-
7634, email [email protected], or visit www.sbmm.org.

For information about the S.B. Maritime's surf exhibit and the screenings
of Greenough's Innermost Limits of Pure Fun and Echoes at the
museum's Munger Theater, visit www.sbmm.org or call 962-8404, ext.
100.'