by Kevin Cody
For a kid who lived just a few blocks from the bluff above Torrance Beach, Lonnie Agabright was late to surfing.
His first ocean obsession was fishing.
Beginning when he was 8, when he wasn’t in school, his dad would give him 50 cents for live bait and lunch, and drop him off at 6 a.m. at the foot of the Redondo “straight” pier. His dad worked at Greg’s Flooring, across from the pier, in the old Redondo Triangle Shopping Center, before it was condemned for condominiums.
“My friend Ernie’s mom owned a cafe on the Horseshoe Pier, next to the old aquarium. She would give us a short stack of pancakes every morning. Then we’d go to Redondo Fishing’s window to buy a quarter’s worth of bait tickets, and use the tickets for live anchovies from Old Louie, who ran the bait receiver at the end of the pier.
“When I got hungry I used the quarter I had left to buy a coke, fries and smoked mackerel at the Fisherman’s restaurant window.
“People say mackerel’s too oily, but not when it’s smoked. I liked it,” Agabright recalled.
The summer Agrabright turned 12, a neighbor friend invited him to climb down to the bottom of the Torrance bluff, where a group of kids kept their surfboards lined up against a brick wall.
“My friend was introducing me to his friends when a younger kid, carrying a new 7-foot Velzy Jacobs balsa board walked up to us with his dad.
“The dad said his son’s name was Jeff, and it was his first day of surfing. He was eight, and about my size because I was really small for my age. When I told him it was my first time surfing, he offered to share his new board with me,” Agabright recalled.
“We spent the morning soup sliding in the whitewater because we were too afraid to paddle out to the waves. We started trying to stand but kept falling. Then I had the idea of riding in lying down. We did that for about 10 minutes, and then started getting to our knees. Finally, Jeff stood up in a stinkbug stance and rode the board into the beach until the skeg started to drag in the sand. He had a big smile on his face when he paddled back out.
“So then I did it, staying low, in the same stinkbug stance, but goofy foot (right foot forward).”
Two years later the Hackman family moved to Hawaii. At 14, Jeff Hackman was surfing Waimea Bay. In 1965, Hackman, at 17, weighing in at 5-foot-4, 125 pounds, won the inaugural Duke Kahanamok Invitational at Sunset Beach. After winning the Duke again in 1970 and 1971, Hackman earned the name, “Mr. Sunset.”
Agabright’s surfing career remained rooted in the South Bay. His earliest claim to fame was in “The Adventures of Lonny,” the precursor to his friend Rick Griffin’s “Murf the Surf” cartoon, which became a popular feature in Surfer Magazine in 1961, shortly after the magazine was founded.
After that first day of soupsliding, Agabright convinced his mom to pay $25 for a used Velzy-Jacobs, similar to Hackman’s board, and aptly named The Pig. It was wide and easy to ride, not unlike today’s Egg models.
But he didn’t entirely give up fishing.
“At low tide, when there was no surf, we could see the reef, and there was a lot of sea life. I’d drag a lure for halibut. But in the mid-60s to protect homes on the bluff, they dredged sand and pumped it onto the beach, covering the reef, Agabright said.
When the rocks were buried, the rock reef gave way to a shifting sand bottom; and the soft, predictable waves of Agabright’s youth became today’s shifting points and hard breaking barrels.
Surfers in the ‘60s, like skateboarders in the ‘70s and e-bikers today, were an outlaw culture. The assistant principal at South High routinely stopped Agabright and his friends to ask when they were getting haircuts. He and his friends, despite their athleticism and conditioning, eschewed school sports because they didn’t want to attend afterschool practices when the school flags showed offshore winds, which meant good surf.
Agabright did make a favorable impression on the one adult local whose acknowledgment all local surfers sought.
Shaper Hap Jacobs (SWOF 2003) had a shop at 422 Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach. The shop was cleaner and cooler than race car driver Vasek Polak’s Porsche dealership across the street.
In 1963, while a junior at South, Agabright, and his friends formed the Haggerty’s Surf Club, named after the Palos Verdes reef break beneath the Neighborhood Church, and walking distance from Torrance Beach.
The club was a way of planting the flag.
“Leroy Grannis (SWOF 2003) was the only photographer we’d let shoot at Haggerty’s. In the afternoons, we’d go to his garage on Monterey, in Hermosa and he’d let us use his lupe to look at his black and white negatives. Then he’d print 8 x 10s of the photos we wanted.”
Grannis was a founding member of California’s first surf club, the Palos Verdes Surf Club, founded in 1935
Haggerty’s was the second California surf club to be founded.
Agabright was manning the club’s booth at Surf-O-Rama in Santa Monica, when Henry Ford (SWOF 2008), a lifeguard at Torrance Beach, introduced Agabright to Jacobs.
“After we shook hands, Hap asked me if I’d like to ride for his team. What could I say to Hap Jacobs, other than, ‘I’d love to.’”
“He told me he’d make me a new board every year, and if I returned it in good condition before the year was up, he’d make me a second one. He said he’d call me when my red Jacob’s team trunks and jacket, and two Jacob T-shirts came in.
“A month later he called and said he had my gear. I raced down to the store to get there before he closed. But when he put the gear on the counter I saw my name on the T-shirts was spelled Allbright.
“Hap apologized, took back the shirts and said he’d get new ones made.
“I said, ‘Wait, can I keep those shirts.’
“He said, ‘No, the name’s mispelled.’”
“I said, ‘Yeah, but your name’s spelled right.’
“Today, those shirts are in a ziplock bag in my dresser drawer,’” Agabright said.
Agabright competed with the Jacob’s team until graduating from South High in 1964 and joining the Navy, just as the Vietnam War was ramping up.
Fortunately, he recalled, his Vietnam tour was just four months.
“I was in communications. We collected information we wanted kept secret. One of the precautions was to limit troops in communications to short stints,” he explained.
After returning to the South Bay from the Navy, Agabright’s interest turned from surfing to motocross racing.
When he resumed surfing, after a 10 year absence, it was because of Jeanne, his future wife.
Jeanne lived on Hermosa Avenue in a duplex with a bay window and an obstructed view of the surf and the 24th Street lifeguard towner. After moving in with her, a friend moving to Oregon sold him a 10-foot Weber Pro Model for $25.
The Weber collected dust in the garage for a few months, until one afternoon Agabright looked out the bay window and saw the lifeguard tower flag blowing off shore.
Agabright worked as a communication technician for AT&T, and as in high school, his afternoons were free.
He didn’t care that the surf was small. He wasn’t sure he could get to his feet.
“I grabbed my Weber, and found a bar of wax a kid must have left on the lifeguard tower. Paddling out felt good. The water had always been my church. I caught a waist high wave, ran to the nose and did a ‘standing island’ (burying the nose and spinning the tail around). I thought, ‘Whoa, I can still surf.’”
Agabright started hanging out at the Dewey Weber shop on Pacific Coast Highway, just north of Jacob’s shop. It was managed by his longtime friend, Chris Hill.
“One day Dewey saw me and asked what I was doing there. He remembered me as a Jacob’s guy. I told him about my 10-foot pro model and he said he’d make me a new board.”
Agabright and Weber (SWOF 2003) had known each other since childhood, when Weber’s mother Gladys, made Agabright and his friends board shorts in crazy colors that became a signature element of Griffin’s “Murph the Surf” cartoons.
Weber sensed a resurgence in longboarding after the style all but disappeared following the shortboard revolution in the early ‘70s. He asked Agabright to put together longboard team.
Agabrite called up several fellow Vietnam vets, including helicopter pilots Peff Eick (SWOF 2008), and Daryl Dickie (SWOF 2005), and grunt John Joseph (SWOF 2004) whose platoon Eick rescued from a firefight.
Eick had been on the Weber team before the war. John Joseph had been on the Jacob team.
Shortly after Agabright organized the Weber team, they organized the Peff Eick/Dewey Weber Longboard contest. They hoped for a dozen entries. They had to cut off registration at 150.
The contest ran from 1981 through 1987 and is credited with the local resurgence in longboarding,which continues to today.
Agabright tied for eighth, with fellow South Bay native Mike Doyle, winner of the 1970 World Surfing Championship, and whom the Encyclopedia of Surfing describes as “arguably the 1960s’ best all-around surfer.”
A painting from the contest by surf David Drake, based on a photo taken by surf photographer Bryan McStotts, hangs over the fireplace in the Agabright family home in San Clemente. The painting shows Agabright going left past a contest buoy with a black flag that almost drowned him.
“The day before the contest, Chris Hill asked me to set a buoy with a black flag just past the waves. The buoy and the flag were in a milk crate. Attached to a 20 feet of chain, and a small anchor.
“When I paddled it out a random wave knocked the crate off my board, and like a fool, I tried to hold on to the crate as it shot to the bottom. Luckily, the water was only 10 feet deep, or I’d have blown out my ear drums,” Agabright said.
After riding the buoy back to the surface, he paddled ashore, dragging the chain along the bottom.
While deeply appreciative of the Walk of Fame Induction, he express concern about his acceptance speech being limited to five minutes.
“The people I need to thank will take five minutes,” he said. HBSWOF
