Gidgey’s… Believe It or Surf! No. 2: The Man Who Could Walk on Water

Grab a towel and pull up some sand, beach buddies, it’s Gidgey with another Believe It or Surf! This one sounds like a carnival poster, and that’s because it basically was one. Every item stamped ✔ TRUE has been checked against the history books.

A railroad tycoon hired a man to walk on water

✔ TRUE. In the summer of 1907, a 23-year-old Honolulu waterman named George Freeth stepped off a steamship in California. Back home he was already famous for swimming, diving and, above all, standing up on a surfboard, an old Hawaiian art that had nearly died out. Writer Alexander Hume Ford had met him that spring and sent him off to the mainland with letters of introduction.

That’s where the business angle comes in. Henry E. Huntington, the streetcar and real-estate magnate behind the Pacific Electric railway, was busy promoting Redondo Beach and building what was billed as the largest saltwater plunge in the world. He needed a reason for Angelenos to ride his red cars to the coast. So he hired Freeth and had him advertised as “The Man Who Can Walk on Water.”

It worked. Crowds lined the shore to watch Freeth paddle a solid-wood board, about 8 feet long and close to 200 pounds, out through the surf, catch a wave and ride it all the way to the beach, standing up. Most of them had never seen anything like it. He put on shows off Redondo and also drew crowds at Abbot Kinney’s Venice. A Santa Monica paper reported surfing being shown off Venice in July 1907.

Then he invented half of lifeguarding

✔ TRUE. The surf shows were only the start. Freeth taught swimming and surfing to local kids and trained some of California’s first professional ocean lifeguards. In December 1908 he led a volunteer crew that saved eleven Japanese fishermen whose boats got caught in a storm off Venice, and he went back into the surf again and again to do it. That rescue earned him a national medal for valor. He’s also credited with an early version of the torpedo-shaped rescue buoy, which is the ancestor of the red cans you still see on lifeguard towers.

But wait, was he really first?

⚠ FINE PRINT. Freeth’s memorial bust in Redondo Beach calls him the “First Surfer in the United States.” The Los Angeles Times has pointed out that the plaque is out of date: three young Hawaiian princes surfed the mouth of the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz back in 1885, on boards made from local redwood. Our verdict: Freeth wasn’t the very first, but he was the one who made California fall for surfing, with a railroad paying the bills.

That’s a wrap, beach buddies

Next time you hear someone say surfing in SoCal started with a movie, tell them it started with a railroad ad and a guy who could walk on water. Got a strange-but-true surf story for us to check? Send it in, and it might make the next Believe It or Surf! Stay SuFu.

The featured illustration is original art for Surfing Fukcs, with invented ShellBilly characters standing in for the people in this story. It is not a likeness of any real person.