Kemp Aaberg
and the Rise of California Surfing: Continued (Part 2)

Kemp's exploits were detailed further when his younger brother Denny co-wrote 1978's "Big Wednesday" with John Milius . "Big Wednesday", another Hollywood effort to glorify Malibu's "Golden Era" has become a cult classic. According to a 2004 Surfline.com reader poll, "Big Wednesday" is considered the most accurate portrayal of surfers Hollywood has ever made. William Katt plays the "straight-up" character in the movie's triage - a flamenco playing surfer / lifeguard who voluntarily enlists in the military during the Viet Nam War - a character clearly based on Denny's older brother Kemp.

INTERVIEW Part 2:

"I thought Malibu was like that all the time, that's how naive I was. I thought gee! well this is great, look at the fun those guys are having."

WC: What was the biggest surf you ever saw at Malibu?

KA: Actually one of the biggest swells I ever saw was when I was just learning to surf and really didn't have the ability to surf it. '56 ... the summer of '56. I was more of an onlooker and looking at good, big, clean, huge 10' walls...stacked up like corduroy on the horizon coming off that point. And the guys that were ripping it were Matt Kevlin, Mickey Dora and Dewey Weber was just ripping it to pieces and he was doing these round house beautiful turns. And I really didn't know what surfing was all about then ... I could body surf, I could work a skimboard and I was just learning to come along with surfing. I thought Malibu was like that all the time, that's how naive I was. I thought gee! well this is great, look at the fun those guys are having. There was a guy named Richard Jaeckle who was a contemporary of Peter Lawford. The movie star guys were riding. I'm not kidding, surf stories are surf stories but I swear off the point these big walls would just rise up, ruler edged wall on em and I would see guys streaking off the point on these long, sharp railed wood boards and pulling out at the pier. And I remember going out and sitting on the inside by pier and kind of like a little washing machine going, "where was that little 2 footer?" ... seeing watching Dewey Weber just coming around on these beautiful turns and really, really looking good. A lot of energy in it.

WC: Bruce Brown's son made a movie called "Endless Summer Revisited". It contains a sequence of you and Dewey Weber at Velzyland. You and Dewey are supposedly having a contest and he (Bruce Brown) goes. "Wait a minute, Dewey Weber is not competing fairly, he's surfing in slow motion" because Bruce slowed the film down showing (Dewey Weber) making this beautiful turn and then runs up to the nose"

KA: That was an excerpt from his movie "Slippery When Wet" done in 1958, and I don't know how they edited it but that was a balsa period, the foam board hadn't been seen.

WC: That's balsa? Wow, really ... cause his (Weber's) style on that wave is classic, I mean, you can't do much better than that.

KA: You know Dewey was a champion wrestler. During that time, this was 1958, we were all living on the North Shore while Bruce was making his first movie and Dewey lived next door and when things would get boring in the Islands, he would come over an visit our house and put people in head locks and crunch ribs ... like he would grab you like with some wrestling thing and then you'd hear a few ribs snap and you'd go, "Dewey! you asshole get out of here!" He was like wound up like a top. He was so strong and energetic, I think he was hyperactive. The thing I see with him a lot, is that he would come off of that charge to the nose and walk back fast and as he walked back, he'd whip a cutback ... just incredible. Then coming around in the soup again and charging, his elbows pumping, charges up into the curl, and stomps his way up to the nose like an angry young man like, "God dang it - rip -rip-rip" That's where ripping started. He was good though. I used to surf in the South Bay on 22nd St. and I'd see Dewey out there and say, "What are you doing Dewey?" and he says, "TRAINING!" ...."Training for what?" He would just be like pumping it all the time.

"... he (Dewey Weber) would come off of that, charge to the nose and walk back fast and as he walked back, he'd whip a cutback ... just incredible. Then coming around in the soup again and charging, his elbows pumping, charges up into the curl, and stomps his way up to the nose like an angry young man like, "God dang it - rip -rip-rip" That's where ripping started. "

WC: I heard about some incident where somebody drowned at Malibu in the fifties ... hit the pier - a black guy.

KA: Oh that's an old story. Just in big surf that some guy hit the pier and drowned but that was before my time That was in '52 or something like that. You don't shoot the Malibu Pier. The answer here is ... do not shoot the Malibu Pier as you do the Huntington Beach Pier.

WC: Have waves ever broken past the end of the Pier?

KA: I don't think so...unless the tide was so damn low...no I don't think so. In fact on a 10' day if you got the ride all the way to about the middle of the pier...and you pull out. And 10' days are very, very rare. When it comes up, its probably 5,6,7'. 8' is really, really big. The 10' stuff is like.....epic. Like, "I can remember when...." I've seen 10' waves there though.

WC: I saw the summer of '68 and there was all this erosion all the way down to the wall.

KA: Seen it ... love it ... that's when coins were sticking out. I would run along that wall. There was a berm that was built up by the water coming into the cove and carving out the sand that had built up over the summer. And what is wonderful about that is that it would expose all of these coins that had been lost in the sand and they would just all be sticking like strata, they were layers and layers, you could just reach up and go, "fifty cents!" and it was all the public, the general public over many, many years had lost all these coins in the sand out of whatever. And there were actually some old coins there that were from the early 1900's.

DD: So what was the origin of that wall?

KA: That wall to do with that nice Spanish style Ringe Estate, it was part of the Rancho and has been unchanged, unmodified. It just kind of sits there like an old road. Its right by the old road. The old road is right there behind it. It was fenced off for years, it had barbed wire.

WC: I heard that it was private. That nobody could go there. They had guards going up the beach with rifles and then Sam Reid supposedly was the first guy to surf it. Tom Blake and Sam Reid in the '20's.

"When it comes up, its probably 5,6,7'. 8' is really, really big. The 10' stuff is like.....epic. Like, "I can remember when...." I've seen 10' waves there though."

WC: I wanted to talk about "Big Wednesday". I know your brother's not here. But one of the characters in it is a lifeguard and obviously must be modeled on you.

KA: Well... what they did was come up with an idea for a script and Milius while he was going to school out in Northridge, studying cinematography or film studies, hung around Malibu in the early sixties and he became stimulated to make a movie and they synthesized a script that probably could have been a lot more interesting and since my brother Denny worked on it and Milius worked on it, they reached out to people that they knew and created characters out of real people that they knew and they did what they call "faction" a synthesis of fact and fiction. So these characters have nothing to do with really accurate reality and vice versa.

WC: I was wondering if you inspired that character?

KA: Oh yes, William Katt's character of the guy who joined the military and be a straight laced guy and surfed after my particular behavior. But I never had any input of like, "Hey, why don't you take this guy and do that.." I never had anything to do with it myself. But my younger brother was more of an observer and he said, "well let's make this guy like Lance Carson, lets make this guy Ray Koontz, lets make this guy like Kemp...me you know. And they put together a story and God...people were so hurtin to see surf stuff I guess it went well.

WC: It's a cult classic.

KA: I think it came out about '78 and what can you say. "Things do what they're gonna do." I think its just admirable to get something out there out of the garage and out to the public you know what I mean? I could sit and shoot my mouth off as an authority 'til the cows come home and it doesn't mean diddle-d-squat because about as far as what I did was ... I used to write surf articles once a month for the Santa Barbara News Press. That's about what I came up with. You can always say things could have been better, different or if it wasn't like that ... you know what I mean?

"We used to drive right go over a bump across the lawn and park right at the break. The Hammond Estate. And I met the young guy - Hammonds. He would come down, cause he knew my girlfriend at the time...We'd be parked right there surfing and he'd come down and say hello."

DD: You were part of that crew that surfed "The Ranch" ... the Hollister Ranch Surfing Association.

KA: Before that. When you would drive up there and just drive in....none of it was paved. And just ride along the dirt road until you saw the break you liked. And get out. I think I went up there in the real early sixties. Because I used to live right here. Of course surfing led me to come up to college up here. Because, God the University by the sea? So Severson used to come up to our house here, we lived on Butterfly Lane by the Biltmore ... big two story house. I remember Severson taking us up there and shooting film. You know, open up a barbed wire gate, close it and keep on driving. No problem until more people created more complications and started chasing the cattle around. And then they started saying, "Hey, we're gonna have to NOT let you guys in." And by not letting any surfers in then a surf club of sorts ... people that were screened to go in there started. And I left by then, I was gone. You know where the problem arises, one or two guys, the same thing at Hammonds. We used to drive right go over a bump across the lawn and park right at the break. The Hammond Estate. And I met the young guy - Hammonds. He would come down, cause he knew my girlfriend at the time ... We'd be parked right there surfing and he'd come down and say hello. He didn't surf at all. Me and this gal, Sally Bromfield, my girlfriend at the time, so they could talk. He'd have on a blue blazer and an ascot. And he'd say that "The waves were positively wonderful today... smashing waves!" My younger brother Denny and I were surfing out there a couple of days ago ... and as we were sitting there waiting for waves, we were making jokes about these cottages and I said, "Which one are you staying in?" And he'd go, "The one right there, it's closest to the beach...." Here are these multi-million dollar, slate roofed cottages that you couldn't touch if you had to and someone is dialed into them. Boy, the grip of materialism is right there ... The naive thing about kids is you think, that's the way it is, its gonna be like that forever and you can never even think of getting one because its off the scale and someone owns it and they must be some rich businessman that's somewhere. That's the attitude, that's naive, because at that time back at City College when you guys were enrolling, you could drive right up onto the Mesa there, and any of those tract homes up there were all under $100K. They were like $40K, $65K.

WC: When I moved to Santa Cruz in '75, you could buy those little cottages for $40K.

"It used to be fun to rent places because it was a token payment for a temporary residence. Now it's like, can I scrape it together from month to month just to survive. It is scary."

KA: When "Big Wednesday" was being made, I lived out in Goleta, I had just started working for United Parcel, that's how I kept myself out of hot water. The houses that I bought were $70K ... could you do that now? Jesus Christ, I can't even believe it. I got a house on the Mesa now that I thought I paid a fortune for, and the $300K at the time ... and now its doubled. What is going to happen to all the young kids today that do not have a parents money to facilitate their life? In the old days, you could live in the back of your car til you got tired of it and then go pay cheap rent somewhere because you were paying cheap rent and then if you got sick of that you could work in a supermarket stocking shelves until you got enough capital to buy a house. Now you'll spend all your gol danged money at Taco Bell just to survive. I don't know how the kids are doing it. I predict, I hate to say it, there are going to be so many homeless or marginal people that are unable to make their rents. It used to be fun to rent places because it was a token payment for a temporary residence. Now it's like, can I scrape it together month from month just to survive. It is scary. But these early days that we're talking about, I think, I was very naive as to the landscape. And I had no comprehension, I thought real estate, Jesus don't get locked in that's worse than marriage ... A mortgage? Mortgage and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.

DD: I was 19, I got married, bought a house, had my own business and kids by the time I was 21.

WC: You were the example to all of us; "Can it be done?"

DD: The nice thing was surfing with my kid at Rincon when I was in my 30's and doing "Go behinds" on 8' waves!!


... continued