“Wardy Surfboards,” Part 2

Surfers and Their Wardy Boards
The International Surfboard Builders Hall of Fame honored Frederick Wardy’s work in 2014. Fig. 132 shows him holding the mounted small surfboard and sander award given to inductees while standing between the organization’s founders Mike Ester and Bob Bolen in Huntington Beach, CA. Asked in 2022 about the induction, Wardy replied: “There have been many builders who have contributed—from previous times and those building surfboards today. The ceremony brought back memories of my starting to build surfboards in Laguna Beach, which was, of course, a very exciting experience.”

Lance Conragan maintained in 2022 that the history of surfboard makers deserves to be further explored and commemorated, as the following indicates:

The surfing tribe is unique in that although it is a relatively young culture with a short history, the pure intrinsic beauty of the act and the lifestyles itself have drawn tens of millions to it in a very short time, spreading its alluring addiction around the world like a salt water carried virus.

All of this originated with a handful of pioneers, craftsmen and artists only several generations removed, the tribal elders whose impact on the tribe has been vast. The more we can learn about the unique, individualistic spirits that brought our elders to the water’s edge, the richer the history of our tribe is.79

Conragan currently owns this board, measuring 9’7” (Figs. 133 and 134). For Fig. 135, he lined up the fin of his board with the Wardy fin shown on the upside-down cover of The Surfer’s Journal (June/July 2023), which contains his article on Wardy’s years as surfboard maker and artist.

Collectors often join or follow the activities of The Vintage Surfboard Collector Club, formerly the Longboard Collectors Club, to see older boards and sometime acquire them. Wardy boards occasionally show up at the club’s events; however, acquisitions of Wardy boards also occur behind the scenes, often with knowledgeable individuals giving guidance. One of these, Erwin Spitz, has handled the private sales of many Wardy boards and has shown an appreciative knowledge of their overall quality and special characteristics, from shapes, to stringers, to fins, etc. A surfer since his youth, Spitz was the president of the Longboard Collectors Club for four years and is now on the board of directors of the club under its more recent name. He is also a docent at the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center where he has helped to locate important information on Wardy’s work.

Many surfers still remember their Wardy boards and/or have collected one or more of them as well as related memorabilia. Among those who have taken an interest in surfing history, surfer and collector Mike Essner from Maui discovered various long-lost facts about Wardy Surfboards and visited Wardy in Long Beach in 2021 (Fig. 136). The Fly confirmed in April 2023 that he has had an enlarged version (Fig. 137) of a photograph of Wardy (Fig. 78) in his surfboard shop in San Juan Capistrano for many years.80 Former surfer Larry Howlett, whose Wardy boards story follows, took this photograph in Spencer’s shop in 2022.

Photographs of surfers with or on their boards in the 1960s are relatively rare although a goodly number have been provided for this essay, and yet others are promised. Of professionally shot photographs is one that Essner located (Fig. 138) picturing three surfers at Malibu in the early to mid-1960s, one of whom is holding a green and yellow Wardy board. The photograph was by Jonathan Blair, a well-known photographer.81

Joey Hamasaki:
Fig. 138 pictures Joey (Joanne) Hamasaki (1946–2022), one of the first major female surfers, with a Wardy board. Taken by Stoner, the photograph appeared in a 2021 article by Mindy Pennybacker in The Surfer’s Journal where it carries a caption referring to her second-place win in October 1966 at the World Surfing Championship at Ocean Beach, San Diego.82 By 1966, Hamasaki either had or would soon endorse her “Signature Model” Wardy board, one of the first surfboard models to be championed by a woman. Fig. 139, restored by Randy Rarick, with colors of his choice, shows a Wardy board with Hamasaki’s signature at the logo area. Born in Honolulu, Hamasaki came to Southern California in 1963.

Sheri Crummer, a writer on women’s surfing and a good friend of Hamasaki’s beginning about 1967, remembers that over several conversations Hamasaki said that she was “stoked on Wardy,” in that she not only liked riding one or more Wardy boards but also that she was “fond of Wardy himself.” Following an interview with Hamasaki in 2020, surf historian Matt Warshaw wrote to this author, “. . . please tell Fred that I've been in touch with Joey Hamasaki, who sends her regards!"83

Ron Sizemore:
Sizemore was one of the most accomplished riders of the early to mid-1960s in Southern California. He worked for Wardy when in high school and has remained a close friend. See Fig. 72 for the story of the board that Wardy designed for him for the 1961 West Coast Surfing Championship at Huntington Beach, which Sizemore won. In Fig. 141, Sizemore appears on the board in a frame, shot the day of the competition but not during it, by Bud Browne for his film, “Goin’ Surfing.” The board was partly red and had seven stringers.

Fig. 142. The photograph shows Sizemore on one of the days prior to the 1961 West Coast Surfing Championship competition, “just flaunting the pilings” in his words, as he sits on his rapidly moving Wardy board, He had gotten the idea of sitting from surfer and lifeguard Jack Halley of Seal Beach.84

Sizemore stands in a “reverse island pullout” on a 10’, square-tailed Wardy board with three stringers during a 1964 competition at the Oceanside South Jetty in San Diego County (Fig. 143). That year The Daily Pilot, noted above, published a photograph of him at Newport Beach with his 10’ Wardy board strapped to his Lambretta scooter (175cc) (Fig. 144)

In 1966 and 1967, Sizemore saw combat in Vietnam but also surfed during his tour of duty there (not on a Wardy). After he was discharged in 1970, he returned to California and resumed surfing with the same 10' board. Fig. 145 shows him, age thirty-five, riding the board at Oak Street Beach in Laguna Beach in December 1979. The photograph was taken by the surfing photographer Spyder Wills, from Laguna Beach. Sizemore says that he might still have his beloved 10’ board had it not been stolen from the top of his van about 1980.

Sizemore, who grew up in Laguna Beach across the street from the beach and still lives a short way up a hill from it, likes to reminisce about surfing and has been helpful with many details in this essay. In 1960, when he was first working for Wardy, he made a camping trip from Laguna Beach to Malibu with his 9’2”, blue-tinted Wardy surfboard and his trailer filled with a Coleman stove, a sleeping bag, and food (Fig. 146).

In April 2023, Sizemore was joined by Wardy, The Fly, also a longtime friend of Wardy, and Erwin Spitz, whose connections to the world of surfing have been many, for lunch in Laguna Beach. Talking together, the three from Wardy Surfboards remembered many details of the early 1960s, including special techniques used in the shop and what was noteworthy about their favorite surfing spots. The Fly wore an original 1960s shirt with a Wardy logo, and Sizemore dipped back to his earliest observations of surfing, watching his father: when he was about four, his father would tie a rope around his waist and fasten him to a fishing shack at San Onofre while he surfed.85

Chuck Bassett:
Bassett, a long-time Southern California surfboard maker and surfer since his high school years, published Doheny Crazed: Barefoot Misadventures in The Golden Age of Surfing in April 2023, putting a photograph of himself and his surfing buddies on its cover (Fig. 147) 86. Bassett, sixteen, stands third from the left; to his left is Jeff McVicar, thirteen, holding up his Wardy balsa board, which he had acquired earlier in 1963 and which Bassett frequently rode.87 In 1993, Bassett sent a similar photograph to Wardy.

Bassett owned four or five Wardy boards at varying times and reminisced about them in an email in 2023:

My first Wardy was a tee-band stringer design with an all-glass pigmented fin that was very popular at the time. The second Wardy had a solid redwood stringer. There were several others I owned around that time. Whenever I was doing a repair job on someone’s board, I reluctantly loaned out one of my Wardy’s. Lucky for me, I got my boards back. Riding a balsa wood Wardy was like driving a luxury car. A very smooth glide compared to a foam surfboard. My circle of friends and I would usually see Ron Sizemore surfing Doheny on a Wardy and of course we wanted desperately to surf just like Ron.88

In Doheny Crazed, Bassett describes how one of his friends, Elwood Logic, got his Wardy board. Elwood brashly demanded that the Laguna Beach Shop produce a board for him in a week, an unheard request because of the amount of work involved with balsa. He was quoted a price of two hundred and forty dollars, about twice the going rate, either to discourage him or to compensate for the rush. Elwood was not discouraged, and Wardy Boards delivered. Picking up the board a week later, Elwood had a taxi drive him to Doheny State Beach, the board resting horizontally across the back seat and extending well out the windows. Upon arrival, with a honking horn and the taxi driver opening his door for him, he was greeted with applause by onlookers who recognized how proud he was as the new owner of a Wardy.89

Paul Rappaport:
Rappaport, who grew up in Los Angeles, has memories of Wardy boards from surfing and from often visiting his shop because of work that he did for his father. Over the years, he surfed in many spots, including Seal Beach, Laguna Beach (Thalia Street), Doheny Beach, and further south.90

I began surfing in 1962 at the age of 14. I had seen the movie Gidget Goes Hawaiian and thought, “You get to ride waves like that and when you arrive back on the beach cute girls are waiting for you in bikinis?? I’m in!!” I realize that my generation caused the Southern California surf scene to explode and that we were responsible for the overcrowding that began on adored breaks like Miki Dora’s treasured Malibu. For that I apologize. But the way things were happening, it was going to be hard keeping something as beautiful and spiritual as surfing a secret. Besides, if it weren’t for guys like me, visionaries like Frederick Wardy wouldn’t have been able to bring their artistic visions to life. And when we are talking Wardy, we are talking visionary and art.

When I was 17 years old, I sold my used Hobie for another secondhand board, a Wardy. Blue-collar kids like me could only afford one board at a time and not until my fourth surfboard was I able to purchase a brand new one. Long before social media and the internet, if you didn’t go to a shop, you bought and sold by word of mouth. Some kid knew some kid who knew some kid—you get the idea.

The Wardy, even pre-owned, was a big step up for me. My previous two boards, although adequate, were pretty basic shapes. When I went to visit the fellow who was selling the Wardy and first laid eyes on it, I was entranced. Stunned really. It was so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Not beautiful because it had cool color patterns, intrinsically beautiful because of its simplicity and shape. It was your basic clear board, just foam and a stringer. But that was where basic ended. The board was made with the whitest foam I’d ever seen. It had an extra wide balsa wood stringer. The natural wood against that ultra-white foam looked elegant. A third way up from the tail was that great Wardy logo in black, and the board boasted a black fin. So, snow white, beautiful natural wood stringer, with black accents. It was a work of art.

That crisp striking look was what you saw on your initial glance. Upon further inspection you began to appreciate the sculpture. I’m not sure if Wardy shaped it himself or if it was done by one of his trusted hands, but whoever shaped it was really going for something special and they achieved it. At 9’6” it was thinner than most boards of that era and had very little rocker. Looked revolutionary. Even without a lot of volume the outline was broad enough to make it an easy paddle. The pièce de résistance was the nose. It was wide and the thinnest I’ve ever seen to this day. The foam had been shaved down so thin that if I held the board up to the sunlight and put my hand behind the nose, I could see the outline of my fingers.

That was the thing about Wardys, they weren’t repeated model shapes named after a particular surfer. Each was individual, had its own soul. Having spent my life in the music business I would describe it this way. If Hobie was The Rolling Stones, turning out good surfboards albeit in an ultra-commercial style, Wardy was like Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground. Hip, cool, eclectic, even a bit eccentric. I am not surprised that Frederick Wardy went on to be a great painter and sculptor.

The way that board operated in the water was unreal. It turned beautifully and when you got up to that nose you could just stay there for your whole ride watching the water plane away from each side. It was on this surfboard that I found my style and became a good surfer. I spent many days at Doheny Beach taking beautiful right handers, running up to the nose, crouching down to a cheater five, and just staying there in trim across the face of the wave on rides that seemed to last forever. My only challenge came at rocky breaks like Salt Creek where I feared losing my board on a big day and having that gorgeous nose crack up on the rocks. I was more concerned for the board than my own safety.

On a side note, my father was in the reconditioning 55-gallon steel drum business in Los Angeles. He bought used drums, cleaned them up and sold them by the hundreds to eagerly awaiting oil, paint, chemical, and food companies. When I told him that all the surfboard shops used resin and acetone that came in drums, he asked me to work up a route for him that I could travel once a month buying up all their used barrels.

I drove a huge truck with bars along the sides to which were tied ropes that held rows of drums in place. The truck was 40 feet long and had eight speeds forward and two speeds in reverse. An overhang on top of the cab was handy for adding an extra 24 barrels. The truck fully loaded held 200 drums.

One of my favorite stops was Wardy’s. The shop was in a mysterious barn. You couldn’t see inside so I always felt like the surfboards being designed in there were top secret. Made me feel even more special because I owned one.

I still own my original WARDY IS KING blue T-shirt. Back then all the surfboard builders had their own slogans, “The Best,” “The Greatest,” etc. And all us guys teased each other relentlessly about who had the best surfboard. I always had fun piping up with, “You guys can say whatever you want, but Wardy is King!”91

Larry Howlett: 
Howlett, at about thirteen, stands at Newport Beach with a secondhand foam Wardy board (Fig. 149). By this point, he had had a lot of experience riding secondhand boards. While he was living in Santa Ana, he and five friends (who remained close for years) were driven on weekends to beaches along the coast by one or another of their parents. Howlett remembers that his first brand new surfboard was a Wardy “balsa board, nine feet long with two, 2½″ foam stringers!!!” About 1963, he and his father had gone to Wardy’s Laguna Beach shop and ordered the board using Howlett’s specifications. Howlett could not resist dropping by to see how the work was progressing, and The Fly showed him the board in the “‘glue up’” phase.92 As noted in regard to Fig. 137, Howlett visited The Fly at his surfboard shop in San Juan Capistrano in 2022.

On his fiftieth anniversary of surfing, Howlett asked a friend, his “lifelong surfing buddy,” to make a replica of the board. Figs. 150 and 151 picture the 14-inch replica, complete with two foam stringers and a red resin fin.

Howlett’s enthusiasm for surfing remains. Visiting Wardy’s shop was “one of the most wonderful connections I have ever had, one that changed my life from thirteen to the present,” he says and adds, “Boards like mine made during the 1960s touched many lives.” After talking by telephone with Wardy in 2022, Howlett emailed him the following: “Thank you, Fred, for a lifetime of surfing memories—There is only One ‘First Surfboard,’ and you, my friend made it so very special even to this day.”93

Carl Samo Abejon:
Abejon, a surfer from his teens, says that he owned at least ten Wardy boards during the 1960s. As an aforementioned member of the Midway Surf Club in Pasadena, he took advantage of a policy Wardy established for that club: returns were accepted toward the purchase of a new board at a reduced price. Abejon remembers how much he “just wanted to be trying something new.”

Fig. 152 pictures Abejon, age fifteen, holding his board (9’6”) at Surfrider Beach (also known as Malibu Lagoon State Beach) in 1962. He recalls: “it was cold and I couldn't afford a beaver tail wetsuit. . . . ahaha.” In 1965, he was at County Line Beach in Ventura County (Fig. 153), in his words, “doing a left hander off the reef down the beach on a Wardy redwood three-stringer [9’6”] heading into a section, crouching or squatting, and grabbing a rail hoping for a tube ride as I only weighed 130 lbs!”

At Leo Carrillo State Park, a.k.a. Secos, in Malibu in 1967 (Fig. 154), Abejon recalls “standing on the nose hanging 10 [toes over the front] on a Joey Hamasaki model 9’6” long, showing off by emulating famous surfers for two or three seconds, or as long as possible, sometimes five.”94 

Abejon’s other surfing memories include the following:

All my Wardy boards were great, medium glass weight and strong. They turned well and trimmed nicely. Even at a young age I could tell there was thought and knowledge put forth. New designs were mostly subtle, and I was playing catch-up! I do remember an 8’6” yellow color that was nimble. The Joey Hamasaki model held trim great through tubes, and nose riding was superb, but my all-around fav was the 3-stringer parallel railed 9-footer. I first bought a new Wardy at the shop in the alley behind the bowling alley in Pasadena. I had gotten into the Midway Club, and they told me about "Wardy in the alley"! The shop was tiny!!—a little quaint. It had some posters and I think netting with palm fronds hanging down. Most of my boards were 9 feet or longer. A few 10 footers helped me get in the wave early and speed trim along! The shorter were more maneuverable, but the longer ones were great cruisers. They didn't bounce in larger waves! 95

Mike Armstrong:
Mike Armstrong grew up in Laguna Beach and would often take advantage of having a paper route to stop by Wardy Surfboards with his friends, just to look and maybe be able to ask a question. Once he surfed, he had several Wardy boards and not only remembers them well but also says, in enthusiastic tones, how meaningful riding them was to him as a youth. His descriptions of his experience with Wardy boards when in California and later in Hawaii are noteworthy and will soon be included here. In Fig. 155, taken about 2003 by Randy Rarick on Oahu, Armstrong stands with a large “gun," which he owned for a time.96

Bill Longenecker:
Longenecker, who grew up in Florida, visited his brother in Laguna Beach in June 1964 and remembers, “The other goal was to go to the Wardy Shop ‘under the eucalyptus tree,’ as one ad said, to order my first truly custom surfboard.” Longenecker thinks he met Wardy then and recalls his experience at the shop:

I did go through the process of describing just what I wanted to guys who were very nice and patient. My new board arrived [in Florida] by truck about three weeks later, and I took it from the box to the ocean within minutes. I was the very proud owner of the only Wardy surfboard in our community, and maybe in the South.97

Longenecker eventually sold the board but regretted it. Years later, he learned that a surfboard dealer in the Jacksonville area had it; but before he could make contact, it had been sold to another dealer. He tracked it down, purchased it, and now keeps it, the only board he owns, on display in his home. Fig. 156 shows Longenecker in 2022 with the board. An earlier photograph pictures it as well (Fig. 157). Longenecker has written about surfing and other matters for the Florida Times–Union, published in Jacksonville.

Rev. David Tamaoka, Senior Pastor, Grace Fellowship Hawaii, Waipahu, Hawaii:
Rev. Tamaoka acquired a Wardy board (Figs. 158 and 159) about 2017 on Oahu and decided to sell it in 2021, “just looking to replace it with another kind of board,” he says. Reluctant to part with it, he surfed on it for several more months before finally selling it to a member of Wardy’s family, saying, “It’s my honor to get this really great board back your way.”98

Fig. 160 is from a short video of Rev. Tamaoka on his board, taken in 2021 by Esther Tombo at White Plains Beach on the Westside of Oahu, Rev. Tamaoka’s “regular spot.” In the following, written that year, he looks back on some of his experiences with the board:

I took one look at it, knew it was special, and just had to have it. I rode it for over four years and got it down, wired. Randy [Rarick] saw it when I surfed Sunset [Beach] with him and a friend and told me it was a great board, especially with the ‘Hawaii’ on it.

The board was just what I have grown to love: Classic. Good solid weight for trimming and gliding. Straight rocker for easy paddle and early entry. The narrower nose with no concave made it trickier to noseride, but I figured it out. The wider point back with that beautiful D fin made for nice, slightly pivoted turns, but could still draw out of the arc a bit too. It was a head turner, which was a bonus, everyone would ask about it at the showers. They would say how amazing it looked, especially for its age (mid-60s). That board will be unforgettable.99

Don Granada:
From his home in Southern California, Granada purchased a Wardy board long-distance, one that Rarick had restored on Oahu after Mike Essner found it on Maui in a locker that had not been opened for many years. Fig. 161 shows Rarick’s restoration of the board, informed by his long experience with Wardys.

After Granada received it in California, he took it to Long Beach for Wardy to see and to sign (Figs. 162 and 163).

Rarick has remarked as follows about this fin:

I always loved the reverse fin template and the original one of Mike’s was damaged, even though the template was correct and it was white opaque. I laid up a fin panel that was blue tint and put the small round logos back to back in the fin, so you could see them through the tint. So, correct template, correct “look” based on another original one I had previously worked on and just thought its color matched Don Granada’s board.100 (Fig.164)

Ken Hall:
Ken Hall, a longtime Southern California resident, has explained why he acquired a Wardy board:

I wanted a Wardy Surfboard because it’s an iconic name in the surf industry and Fred’s boards are works of art. Mine is prominently displayed in our home and I love showing it off and talking about our friendship with the Wardy family.101

Fig. 165 has Wardy signing the board in 2021, and Figs. 166 and 167 show it in place.

Dr. Barton H. Wachs:
Dr. Wachs is another Southern California resident who enjoys having a Wardy board (Fig. 168), as his comments indicate:

In 1965, I became familiar, like so many of us who lived in Long Beach and further south, with Wardy Surfboards. It was fifty years later when the legend walked into my Long Beach office. It’s been fun and a privilege to be able to see his 10 six in my home and hung high on a rafter.102

Other views of the board are Figs. 169 and 170.

Appendix C holds commentaries from an earlier section of this essay and from this section, Surfers and Their Boards.

Wardy boards at the McKenna Subaru dealership showroom in Huntington Beach, CA:
Two Wardy boards, part of a personal collection, are displayed at the McKenna Subaru dealership in Huntington Beach. A relatively short foam board with eleven stringers (Fig. 171) has been mounted near one of the office areas for several years.

The other board (Figs. 172 to 174) is mounted in a large showroom of the dealership. Wardy made it at the Hobie factory in San Juan Capistrano in 1997, roughly thirty years after he had left surfboard making. He was in California from New York City, the location of his art studio since 1970, and went down to Hobie’s to sign some boards for surfers. Word got out that he was there, and he was asked to make some new boards. Orders were placed, and every board he made was purchased. Although by that time the shaping of most boards was done by digitalized machines, Wardy shaped all the boards by hand. Conragan has noted that Fig. 173 reflects contemporary developments in the positioning of the fin in relation to the tail.103

Hobie shops and Mark Christy:
In 2017, a Wardy board belonging to collector Mark Christy, a Hobie business owner, placed vertically, helped to introduce a small exhibition (Fig. 175) sponsored in part by the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center and located at the former Hobie Surf Shop on the Pacific Coast Highway in Corona del Mar, north of Laguna Beach. The sign attached to the Wardy board gave its length as 9' adding that it “features a unique reverse T-band stringer of ½″ redwood, ⅛″ balsa wood and ½″ redwood, as well as one-of-a kind redwood, balsa wood and resin tail block.” Fig. 176 shows part of the installation, with another Wardy board at the center of a rack, its current owner unknown. A more recent photograph (Fig. 177) shows the Christy board featured in the rafters of the Hobie Surf Shop at 294 Forest Avenue, in Laguna Beach. The shop stands on the opposite side of the same street, and not far, from where Wardy Surfboards once stood.104

Laguna Beach Marine and Safety building, Laguna Beach, CA.:
In Fig. 178, Wardy and Sizemore stand in front of a board given about 2017 by Sizemore and The Fly to the Laguna Beach Maine and Safety department for a display on surfing at its building on the north end of Main Beach.93 The Fly partially restored it. Wardy had sent the board to Sizemore in a crate that Sizemore remembers admiring for its craftsmanship. Wardy acquired the board serendipitously. Early one morning, he was walking along on a sidewalk near Canal Street, a drunken man passed by him carrying the board. Wardy struck up a conversation, and “before he knew it,” Wardy says, “the fellow handed me the board, struggling with and not knowing what to do with it anyway, having gotten it from another drunken person shortly before.” Wardy took the board to his studio a few blocks away and cleaned it up before shipping it from Manhattan to his old friend Sizemore.

From Surfboards to Artworks
For about seven years, Wardy lived in a small house on a cliffside in the town of Dana Point. He has described how this occurred and the location:

One day Bruce Brown, an early pioneer of films on surfing, including The Endless Summer (1966), came by the shop and asked if I was living there, which I was. He told me about a very nice place in Dana Point with a good view. Within a day, I went there and told the landlord I was manufacturing surfboards in Laguna; he charged me fifty 50 dollars a month. Dana Point was just a little place then, completely undeveloped, not even with a grocery store nearby. The owner’s main house was on a cliff, and down a long flight of stairs was a little house that had been built on the cliffside over the water. I thought it was natural; everyone else was aghast. To me it was very romantic.

Fig. 179 (2015) shows many more houses than existed in the 1960s. Wardy’s house was perched to the right of an A-frame and was much smaller than the one shown here, as was the original A-frame. The path to Wardy’s house descended almost directly downward from the owner’s house, seen above it. To shower, Wardy stood outside on a rickety, slated wooden base through which the shower water flowed down the cliff. His view from the windows was mainly of the ocean and small parts of the coastline left and right. He lived alone, never had a television, and spent much of his time reading or practicing classical music on his guitar. The setting, he acknowledges, helped to inspire him when writing about surfing and the ocean.

When Wardy surfed at Dana Point Harbor, he went up the cliff and walked toward the harbor to take a small path or road running diagonally down to the water. As mentioned earlier, he and other surfers would paddle out to catch waves on the ocean side of Cook’s Point and attempt to ride past it into the bay without being hindered during a south swell by the notorious surf break called “Killer Dana.” In 1966, construction of a stone breakwater of 1.5 miles was begun, which eventually stopped significant wave action. It was dedicated in 1971.

Wardy did not want to stay to see the changes that were beginning to occur in Dana Point and in its harbor. Fig. 180 is a view of the north side of Dana Point Harbor, showing the breakwater at Cook’s Point. Fig. 181, taken by professional photographer Don Ramey Logan Jr., reveals some of the later development of the boat basin and of the business and residential areas.

Wardy began to think of pursuing something new, not only because of the changes at Dana Point and elsewhere along the coast but also because of the changes in making surfboards. By 1965, he was producing longboards and the relatively new, somewhat shorter beach break boards; however, he was uninterested in making the newly popular short boards, ranging from about five to seven feet long.

Wardy had grown increasingly interested in making art. For several years, he had created paintings after hours in his shop and at his auxiliary workshop. At the annual Festival of the Arts Fine Art Show, he sold many of them at a booth maintained by an assistant while he continued to make surfboards just blocks away. His words explain the context:

I wanted to build surfboards and discovered Laguna Beach—but it also had a great art world, which I enjoyed. There was the annual Festival of the Arts and many galleries all over the place. That inspired me to study different types of art I would never have dreamed of.

Wardy sold his business by 1967 and had by then begun studying at Chouinard (The Chouinard Art Institute), part of the California Institute of the Arts.100 He left Dana Point and moved to a studio in downtown Los Angeles, near Chinatown. Petersen’s Yearbook (1963) had foreseen the possibility of a change. After writing that Wardy’s “company, with a branch in Pasadena, is now considered among the top in quality and quantity,” the publication described Wardy as “a soft spoken craftsman of 27 [sic 29] . . . who probably would have been successful in many other fields.”105

Wardy has explained some aspects of the transition that occurred: 

In Laguna Beach and Los Angeles, I took some of what I’d learned in making surfboards and applied it to painting. And it didn’t take long to settle into the latter. It was a very interesting thing that I knew how to paint because of what I’d done with surfboards. I started using resins and pigments from surfboards to try to paint pictures. Instead of fiberglass, I just used cardboard, and the pieces were coming out quite nice. In designing surfboards, you’re working in a sculptural way and with color and line. It’s all the same ball of wax.

With the perspective of knowing the extent and stylistic characteristics of Wardy’s output as a painter and sculptor during his many years in New York, Conragan has connected the two parts of Wardy’s professional life:

The evolution of his designs prefigured his subsequent, continual experiments as an artist with color, gesture, line, rhythm, space, etc. He had already trained himself to see beyond a block of wood or a plain surface. Later, when he went to New York at age thirty-six, he was very excited and full of energy. His physical abilities, already long demonstrated in swimming, surfing, and hard work, added greatly to the physical process of painting large canvases and sculptures and to his tremendous output in many mediums. He also brought his sense of quality, superb sense of design, and love of sculptural form, color, and line with him.106

See Appendix A for the photographs in this essay in order of appearance.

Please click on Artwork here or on the opening page of this website to view more than five hundred and fifty of Wardy’s artworks, arranged by stylistic period and in chronological order and accompanied by information about each period. See also “About Wardy,” which covers his early years and development as an artist.