Center of Attention

From: Vol. 1, Issue 9, May 18-24, 2006

By Sam George
San Clemente Times

With three major surf magazines published in San Clemente (and Surfer just down the road), it’s the surf media capital of the world

I lived in a one-bedroom bungalow on Buena Vista, so close to the ocean that at night I could lay on my living room floor and listen to the waves breaking inside Mariposa Reef, counting the intervals between rumbling crashes and knowing whether the swell was coming up or down. Mornings I would look out from the balcony through a pair of binoculars down past Riviera toward Cotton Point, reading the patterns of whitewater: southwest swell, high tide. The garage I lived over opened onto Canada and I’d roll down the driveway on my red bike and wheel onto Buena Vista, coasting and pedaling as it undulated along the coastal bluff. I would head north on Pacific Coast Highway to Surfer magazine, where I worked as an editor and would spend the day until my afternoon session thinking about things to say about being a surfer. Life couldn’t get much better.

I am not the first to feel such feelings. For the past 46 years, the San Clemente area has been the core of the surf media universe, an epicenter, the actual place where surfing magazines were born and have thrived since boards were made of wood and men of iron. I’m simply one in a long and illustrious line of periodical employees who found in San Clemente’s unique combination of geography and culture the ideal climate to combine passion and profession.

It all began with John Severson, the surf magazine world’s Moses. Severson was 12 years old in 1945 when he and his family moved from Pasadena to the sleepy beachside tract community named after the channel island still visible on those clear Santa Ana mornings. His father bought an apartment house, a gas station and a ranch-style home on the corner of Algodon and the two-lane El Camino Real. All San Clemente roads, however winding, seemed to lead to the pier back, then and it was only a matter of time before Severson and his brother Jim found their niche, fishing, swimming, bodysurfing and riding rubber rafts next to the wooden pilings. It was here Severson developed an interest in photography, innovating from the get-go: his mom’s Kodak Brownie in a new-fangled “plastic” bag, shooting raft-riding water shots at the pier. The surf bug bit hard on later trips to San Onofre and Severson immersed himself in Southern California’s nascent surfing culture. Along with surfing he eventually majored in art, graduating from Long Beach State in 1956, where he had already begun shooting the waves on Super-8. A few home movie projects led to the real thing in 1960: full-length “Surf Fever,” shot in 16mm. And a great idea. At his screenings Severson was selling 8×10 glossy frame grabs to imagery-desperate surf dogs for a buck apiece. Would they pay the same thing for an annual program, filled with both original content and film promotion?

The result was a magazine, The Surfer, and it was an instant hit. It quickly outgrew Severson’s garage and moved into an office, went from quarterly to bimonthly and established the San Clemente area as the sport’s cultural touch point.

“It was called the Dana Point Mafia,” says Jeff Divine, legendary surf photographer, longtime Surfer contributor and photo editor, and current photo editor of The Surfer’s Journal. “In this one little area-San Clemente, Capo Beach and Dana Point-you had guys like Bruce Brown [“Endless Summer“], Hobie Alter [Hobie Surfboards], John Severson [Surfer magazine] and Walter and Flippy Hoffman [Hoffman Fabrics], the real captains of the early surf industry.”

And it was no coincidence.

“They were all attracted to the surf,” says Divine, himself a San Clemente resident since 1981 and whose own picture window looks out over the Pacific Ocean. “They were close to Trestles, San Onofre, Doheny and Dana Point. These were all young guys with families, and they could afford to live at the beach.”

Almost 17 years would pass before Severson and Surfer, which was located in Capistrano Beach before moving into San Juan Capistrano, would have to share its Kingdom in and around San Clemente. In 1977 Surfing magazine, previously published in Los Angeles, North County San Diego and Mission Viejo, shifted operations to a surfside building on Camino Capistrano, directly across PCH from Poche Beach.

“We were the first surf publication to move to San Clemente,” says Bob Mignogna, who started at Surfing as a freelance photographer in 1973, only to rise to the role of publisher over the course of a 30-year career with the magazine. “Some years later, Breakout magazine launched and headquartered in town. Wave Action also launched in San Clemente. Neither Breakout nor WA lasted too long. After that, Steve Pezman launched The Surfer’s Journal after leaving Surfer; and [Guy] Motil launched Longboard after leaving Transworld Snowboarding.”

Surfing’s move to San Clemente set the stage for a new battle ground for supremacy in the surf media world.

“Remember at that time a lot of the industry-like Op, Gordon and Smith, Hansen-was located in San Diego County,” says Dave Gilovich, Surfing‘s editor from 1978-’90 and currently the editorial director at Surfline in Huntington Beach. “There were no dominant players in Orange County, no ‘Velcro Valley.’ But as the industry, especially the surfwear industry, started to center itself in Costa Mesa, the power started to shift north. San Clemente had reasonable rent, but most importantly, it was right in the middle. It was right on the freeway, which made it easy to move up and down Southern California. It was geographically perfect.”

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, having the sport’s two major surfing magazines located so near each other had an affect beyond the sport’s bottom line.

“With the magazines in town, there was definitely a bit more notoriety brought to the area as the sport’s best surfers and photographers were in our offices on a regular basis,” remembers Mignogna, who has called San Clemente home for more than 27 years. “It was only natural for them to go for a surf at Trestles and for photos to appear in the magazine from those sessions.”

The resulting push established San Clemente as a hotbed of surfing stardom and the list of homegrown talent, especially during the ’80s, reads like a competitive who’s who: Jim Hogan, brothers Sean, Brian, Terence and Joe McNulty, Dino Andino, Matt Archbold, Christian and Nathan Fletcher, Jolene and Jorja Smith, Andy Fomenko and George Hulse. And more recently surfers including Chris Ward, Mike Losness and the Gudauskas brothers have kept San Clemente on the map. “I think the area is just as vital as ever,” says Gilovich. “Take the surfboard industry, for example. Some of the most influential shapers and designers in the world, guys like …Lost’s Matt Biolos and Timmy Patterson are based here. The magazines are here, the surfers are here and the shapers are here.”

San Clemente is also home to Longboard and The Surfer’s Journal magazines, asserting the seaside town as the undisputed surf media capital of the world. Both these newer titles are decidedly homegrown affairs.

Guy Motil, publisher of Longboard, began his magazine career as a Surfer dark room technician back in the ’70s and has seen the San Clemente surfscape change with the eras. And this means quite literally-Motil has lived at the same address at the end of Canada since 1976, with views of the surf and a short ride to Longboard‘s Avenida Palizada editorial offices.

“It is great living right down the street,” says Motil. “But proximity to the other magazines is just as important. When surfers and contributors, the writers and photographers who make up our talent pool, come into town, they usually make a pass through all the mag offices, ours included. Advertisers, too. If we were up in Cayucos, say, they’d never come see me. What would I do, buy them a bus ticket?”

Steve Pezman is the most tenured surf editor/publisher in the business, having helmed Surfer throughout the ’70s and ’80s, before launching his own publication in 1992. In the 14 years since, Pezman and co-publisher wife, Debbee, have never considered moving to a different surf town.

“Never even thought about it,” says Pezman, who lived in Surfside and Laguna Beach before moving here in 1983. “I’m originally from the Los Angeles area, sort of oriented toward L.A. And this is as far south as I can live before a completely different zone begins. There’s the whole ‘going surfing at lunch’ thing. That could be a reason.”

That reason has remained unchanged for the last 46 years-since that day in 1960 when John Severson stood in his garage, staring at the box of newly printed The Surfer, wondering if there was any future in surf publishing. Call it ambiance, call it authenticity, call it affordability, in this center of the surf-publishing universe it’s always boiled down to one thing.

“It’d be after work, and I’d be driving along the coast highway through San Clemente on the way to surf Trestles,” says Gilovich with a laugh, summing up the collective mindset of the entire surf-publishing industry-myself included. “And I’d realize that I hardly ever had to go much farther east than PCH. And that’s just the way I like it.”

Quick Facts

Surfer
Founder: John Severson
Year: 1960
www.surfermag.com

Surfing
Founder: Richard Graham
Year: 1964
www.surfingthemag.com

The Surfer’s Journal
Founder: Steve Pezman
Year: 1992
www.surfersjournal.com

Longboard
Founder: Guy Motil
Year: 1993
www.longboardmagazine.com