Granny and Doc

Images surfacing in the developing tray.

Two men: one younger, one older, surfers. Clearer now, seeming to step forward across Time’s barrier from somewhere in the 1930s.

John Heath “Doc” Ball and LeRoy “Granny” Grannis, several years into a friendship they would maintain for over six decades. Granny followed the “Doc,” first as a kid surfer, next into military service in World War II, then as a surf photographer, and finally, with Doc’s passing, as the elder statesman of surf photography.

Doc Ball’s photographic images, taken and disseminated in the 1930s and ’40s, now exist primarily as randomly gifted prints to his surf friends as mementos of notable days, glued into personal scrapbooks, gathering dust on the shelves of adult children who inherited them from their surf pioneer fathers.

With time’s passage, the identities of the people in the photos have grown increasingly obscure. It’s a shame. His iconic, black-and-white images of California surfing stand alone as the first comprehensive documentation of surfing by a surfer, depicting the roots of a nascent culture on which many of our lives are based.

Doc’s California Surfriders: 1946, originally published in a limited edition of 510 copies, something near the number of surfers in California at that time, became the basic template for all books of surf photography to follow, serving until the 1960s as the first and only compilation of a single surf photographer’s oeuvre.

Today, when a year’s worth of expensive coffee-table tomes of surfing photography can weigh more than the table itself, Doc Ball’s modest effort, like the Wright Brothers little bi-plane, marked an auspicious beginning.

AN IMAGE DEVELOPING

Until the 1960s, surfing’s documented past, both literary and photographic, is a thin skein—not notably abundant in recorded images.

So few people surfed in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s that even Tom Blake’s first photographic efforts were received on a very limited basis.

Additionally, Blake’s penchant to serve as an inventor and conceptual innovator probably outweighed his self-taught abilities as a photographer. It would take someone of greater skill and creative dedication to formulate and then master—the still-undiscovered techniques of surf photography.

That individual, John H. Ball, was a native Californian, born in 1907 and raised with his sister Ruth, in Redlands, California.

HARD TIMES

Doc was in his second year of dental school at the University of Southern California in 1929 when the Great Depression began sweeping the nation.

Doc’s father and mother weren’t dependent upon working for wages. The seniorDr. A. E. Ball’s Redlands dental practice was successful and securely grounded in an economically stable upper-middle-class clientele.

While discretionary dollars were certainly less abundant than they had been in the 1920s, the Ball family owned income-producing real estate and had additional investments. Dr. Ball had provided a sound education for his only son and was happy to assist John in focusing on a professional career.

APERTURE OPENING

Looking back into the 1930s through Doc’s photographs and grasping the reality of what surfing was like then requires understanding pre-war American society.

California’s population, especially in SouthernCalifornia, had increased by several million since Blake had first set foot on Santa Monica’s beaches in the early 1920s. But compared to recent census figures of 36 million, at a little over six million, the Golden State was barely occupied.

John Heath Ball, not yet a doctor or nicknamed “Doc,” was a young, somewhat- indulged dental student at USC in the late 1920s, when he met Blake—who had wholly created himself despite an orphan’s childhood—in Santa Monica. Grannis, Ball’s lifelong friend, recalls it this way:

“Doc’s family had a summer place in Hermosa Beach. That’s where he started surfing. Doc met Tom right after he came back from his first trip to Hawaii, and I think Blake’s cameras intrigued him. Doc liked to tinker with stuff, and he was already taking pictures.

“In ’31, I’d just started high school. I was a kid, 14, hanging out at Ma Brown’s hot dog hut; Doc was 24. I think he was already out of dental school and he was a nicknamer, with a sense of humor. I’d been watching guys surf, and I built a board from a pine blank.

“My closest friend in those days was Norm Hale. Norm died of a brain tumor in his mid-twenties. Later, Doc named his first son for him. Norm loaned me his board, and that’s how I started surfing.

“I became closer to Doc than to my brother,” Grannis recalls. “My brother was seven years younger than I, and he and Dale Velzy were a pair of hell-raisers.”

Granny was cut from different cloth.

A PENCHANT FOR READING

Grannis describes himself as “a studious kid.”

He was intelligent and precocious, with an early penchant for reading that allowed him to skip the second grade. That reading ability served him well through the rest of his life.

“I loved reading, and I haunted the library and checked out books to take home….”

Among Granny’s childhood favorites was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. He also read and enjoyed stories about America’s pioneers such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and the West, themes of men existing in a wholly natural environment, sustained by their wits, physical skill and stamina, and a fierce sense of self and pride in physical mastery.

With the Great Depression’s arrival in October 1929, Southern California’s local economy, especially for those in the building trades, began feeling the impact.

“My folks were divorced in ’31 when I was around 14. Dad and Imoved into an apartment house just off the beach that his dad had built in 1909. The bottom floors were a small hotel.”

Granny met Doc about this time. “He was a warm guy, easy to get to know, funny, eccentric—a real screwball. A bit absent-minded, so spur-of-the-moment was normal for him.”

Tom Blake’s enthusiasm for photography had already affected Doc.

“He was influenced by Blake to use large-format cameras, those old “D” Series Graflexes. He used clumsy, slow equipment, and as a result he learned to anticipate. We’ll never know how many shots he missed.”

Leica’s new 35mm camera was coming into its own, along with a series of exceptional lenses. “But,” reports Granny, “Doc’s longest lens was only a 350mm. Without a real telephoto lens, he had to pick conditions that were optimum. He wanted good, clean waves.”

While Granny’s father, a licensed general contractor was able to keep working throughout the Depression to support his family, doing so often meant taking jobs out of town. When he was offered a position as the lead carpenter at $25 a week plus room and board building a processing plant in Turlock, California, he took the job. Granny moved back in with his
mother and younger brother, but was still able to surf.

“When Dad came back, I moved back up to Hermosa and Hop Swarts and I were close. I was a junior, and we surfed Hermosa Pier and PV Cove together.

“While we didn’t suffer as hard as many others, times were tough and we didn’t have a lot, either. When I was in high school, I went weeks at a time without a coin in my pocket.”

“In spring of ’35, my dad got a job rebuilding the Redondo High School auditorium. I remember him giving me 35 cents, and I went down to the cafeteria and gorged myself.

“Later, when I was a senior in high school, my dad began getting remodel jobs locally, and I was able to pick up laboring jobs that paid 30 cents an hour.”

Graduating from high school in 1937, Granny was able to buy a good paddleboard for six dollars.

“Norm Hale and Fred Heidenrich had started a little garage business building racing paddleboards—H&H boards. There’s one at the California Surfing Museum in Oceanside; somebody put a fin on it. They made very fast 14-foot paddle boards for 20 dollars. Doc had one of these and liked it a lot and did well racing it.”

Granny smiles as he reflects on then versus now.

“Imagine a kid today seeing somebody surf, getting stoked, and then building a board for himself from a wooden plank.”

Unlikely.

Surfing today is too sophisticated to embrace the naive exuberance that so typified and characterized its past. What surfers in “those days” had in abundance that seems in short supply in today’s scene is that surfing was truly a revolutionary, individualistic, and wholly inner-directed activity. It was in Doc Ball and Leroy Grannis’s generation that this quality—“stoke”—was identified and named.

It was a group effort.

THE GENESIS OF A SURFING CLUB

Another near victim of contemporary surfing in the U.S.A. is the concept of a “surfing club.”

While surfing clubs still exist, in today’s relentless world of corporate exploitation they appear more as naive artifacts— retro social holdovers from another time and place, upstaged by a commercially driven surf culture, orchestrated by marketing executives to garner publicity, spin image, and display products.

Today’s generation of surfers, collectively, more resemble tightly focused professional athletes than the happy-go-lucky Depression-era wave riders of Doc and Granny’s time.

In the ’30s and ’40s, clubs by the thousands for every kind of interest abounded. For Doc, ever youthful and perpetually stoked, what could be more natural than forming a surf club?

Every kid knew how to do it. You found something neat that you and your buddies liked, got together in secret, found or constructed a place for gathering—a clubhouse—devised an initiation for members with secret passwords, handshakes, symbolic recognition markers, and conducted meetings and events.

During the early 20th century, clubs dominated American society. Popularwere theY.M.C.A.,Masonry youth organizations DeMolay and Job’s Daughters, college Greek-letter fraternities, Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, The Loyal and Fraternal Order of Moose, The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, and the Odd Fellows Lodge, to name a few.

Additionally, there were exclusive country and beach clubs with racially and ethnically restricted memberships. At that time, the upscale Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu was said to deny membership to Jews, Orientals, and people of color, resulting in the more relaxed Hui Nalu and Waikiki Surf Clubs.

Mainland surfing in the 1930s was demographically a sport of the middle class. And surfing clubs reflected, to a certain extent, the petit bourgeois, Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street” mentality of American society. Most surfers were younger and un- or under-employed. Surfing—offering a level of excitement unmatched by tennis, golf, or the other outdoor activities or sports common to that time—was cheap.

Joining PVSC, which Granny described as “a serious business,” ensured a member a comprehensive social life. There were frequent meetings, events, paddleboard races, ab-and-bug banquets, dances, and beer-drinking camaraderie.

In our time, with unlimited entertainment options, it’s hard to imagine what this meant to a Depression-era surfer.

Doc’s photography was another factor, offering surfers a new level of involvement.He kept a series of double-sided 5″ x 7″ mounted prints, each designated with a cloth laundry-mark numbered tab on the left-hand corner that he called his “catalog.” From this, prints of all sizes could be ordered.

Sale of the images defrayed Doc’s film and developing expenses and, to someextent,the expense of producing
the club newsletter.

Such was the genesis and genius of the Palos Verdes Surfing Club.

RULES OF ORDER

In all probability written by Doc, the PVSC’s “constitution” (bylaws) is telling in and of itself.

Organized into Articles and Sections, and formatted according to Roberts Rules of Order with “secret ballot,” six-month terms for officers, not to be “…held twice in succession,” it was professionally typed onto a mimeo-stencil and mimeographed so that each member would have his own copy.

Doc—mirroring a careful attention to detail and form that would prove to be his hallmark—took his club seriously enough to spring for a professional typist.

PVSC was an all-male organization “…built upon the principles and dedicated to the purpose of COURAGE, HONOR, and SERVICE.”

The club creed was required to be memorized and recited by each member upon initiation and at every meeting: “I as a member of the Palos Verdes Surfing Club do solemnly swear to be ever steadfast in my allegiance to the Club and its members. To respect and adhere to the aims and ideals set forth…To cheerfully meet and accept my responsibilities hereby incurred and to at all times strive to conduct myself in a manner becoming a Club Member and a gentleman, so help me God.”

A PVSC member was expected to: “…create an active interest in the art of surfing by elevating and maintaining the moral (sic) of those concerned and by promoting the good fellowship of all concerned.”

High-minded moral ideals such as these, by today’s standards of surfing behavior, seem not only quaint but also invasive. Not to mention misogynistic, since a member must: “Be of the male sex.”

Less gender-restrictive, but indicative of the nature of Depression-era surfing was the demand that each surfing member: “Own his own board,” and “…ride his own board satisfactorily” as well as “provide himself with the Club wristlet.”

“Swats with a paddle” were doled out at meetings.

A“pledge,” after paying the “initiation fee” of $6.00, (of which a portion was defrayed to pay for the wristlet) was required to attend four “compulsory” meetings in succession, every Wednesday night. Smoking was not allowed at meetings.

Initiation was a serious and formal affair requiring that members “…(in suits) shall be seated in semicircle facing the official table,” with the “officers on the right according to rank.”

In the hushed inner sanctum of the clubroom, “three burning candles set in the abalone shell on the presidents (sic) table” offered the only light.

Thus began the secret process of a pledge’s initiation.

With PVSC membership came a document unique in surfing’s then very brief history, SPINTAILS.

Looking at SPINTAILS today the reader can sense that it spoke not only to Doc’s devotion to surfing and photography— which in 1936 was demanding nearly equal time to his dental practice—but to his whimsical and affectionate efforts to create a “Kukai organization the BROTHERHOOD OF VARMINTS.”

Hand-typed by Doc or his fiancée, Eve, on mimeograph stencil, at Doc’s Los Angeles dental office/photo lab/clubhouse located over a theater on the SE corner of Santa Barbara and So. Vermont Avenue, the WEEKLY SPINTAIL newsletter was then illustrated with Doc’s hand-drawn cartoons and actual photographic prints, individually pasted onto the pages of each copy.

“Labor intensive” is an understatement.

SURFING’S PRIMARY PERIODICAL

Experiencing surfing’s near-history clearly, without romanticism, is a process simultaneously demanding of accuracy and filled with perplexing gaps.

Any understanding of “what happened” is always incomplete, and rendered even less so as the individuals who participated in past events pass away. Time’s attrition is inexorable.

LeRoyGrannis, at 89, is strongly aware of this. A three-ring binder on his table holds one of only two existing photocopied sets of the newsletters, recalling that Doc lent the originals out years ago to a man who never returned them—a fine case in point.

In Doc’s words, SPINTAILS was “a weekly combination bulletin
of announcements, fun, and just plain kukai nui as a means of stimulating
club interest.”

But beyond this declaration, and its perfunctory Hawaiian
scatology, lay another, deeper level: Doc’s complete unbridled
commitment to surfing.

SPINTAILS offers us Doc’s slightly wacky, corny sense of humor. No four-letter words, no invective. Nicknames sometimes change two or three times in an issue. In-jokes and surf jargon—“boggled” meant a wipeout—so obscure that today they’re about as accessible as the Nag Hammadi scrolls.

But most importantly, SPINTAILS offers a clear and surprisingly detailed picture of a time and place otherwise lost.

Eras, as Ernest Hemingway so wryly noted, are something that while “…nobody knows when they start everybody is pretty sure when they are over…”

And that era ended precisely on a lovely Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, and marked the precise start of another era, World War II.

WARTIME

Granny describes how their war started:

“We were in the water, off Hermosa Pier with a pretty good winter swell running, when someone paddled out to shout the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the Pacific Fleet sunk.”

Casualties amounted to 2,500 American servicemen and civilians. At the same time, America’s bases in the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Wake Island were struck. In Manila, American forces were quickly overrun and retreated to Luzon.

For those on California’s southern coast, the war took the immediate form of a Japanese submarine shelling Santa Barbara and reportedly torpedoing a lumber ship somewhere in the Catalina Channel.

Monday, 08 December at 0700, found Granny and Doc beachcombing in south Redondo Beach. The surf was flat and the South Bay’s beaches were littered with redwood.

Granny had borrowed his father’s new 1941 Chevrolet pickup with an eight-foot bed, and they’d made two trips from Torrance. They were starting on their third at Palos Verdes Cove. The lumber was wet and heavy and the work was hard. Scavengers suddenly appeared up and down the beaches, lured by the temptation of free booty.

“We’d finished by 12 o’clock, but had to guard our stack because people came up and tried to take it. We were on the beach by the pier and talking about Pearl Harbor. We knew it would never be the same again.”

Several of their mutual friends, including Naval Reservists Hal Pearson and Bernie Zeller, had been mobilized earlier. Both Doc and Granny were married with 3A deferments.

Granny and his young family were living at 308 Hermosa Avenue, in a Craftsman bungalow—a house his father had built in 1917.

“I’d attended the University of California Los Angeles until my funds ran out. Then I worked briefly as a carpenter, then as a crane operator, and finally for Standard Oil as a boilermaker’s apprentice.”

By 1943, both Granny and Doc had volunteered. Granny chose the Army Air Corps; Doc selected the Coast Guard.

PACIFIC THEATER: 1943—1945

Training completed, newly commissioned Doctor J. H. Ball, Lieutenant, USCGR, on loan to the Navy, shipped out.

Aboard a large, new troop transport, the U.S.S General H.L Scott, AP136, often within earshot of heavy weapons fire and easy binocular range of battles raging on the long string of Pacific atolls leading toward Japan, Doc Ball and the other Naval Hospital Corps professionals characteristically worked long watches treating countless GIs. Some would never return, except as the photographs and x-rays Graves Registration required of dentition for posthumous identification.

For Doc,who was emotionally empathic and compassionate, assembly-line dentistry was difficult. Sensing the desperation of a man returned from vicious combat with shattered teeth, and fearing he’d be sent in again, had to be traumatic.

But Doc and the rest of the hospital corps had their own dangers—from kamikaze attack above and submarines below. Doc’s son Norman recalls one incident his father described: “He was working on a patient when the vessel lurched into a hard turn and the instruments on his bracket table flew to the floor. A Japanese sub had launched a torpedo, and his ship had to take evasive action.”

To maintain some level of physical fitness and reduce the effects of stress, Doc would circle the Scott’s boat deck twice daily, scooping a bucket of ocean water from the mess deck bay and taking a sip or two to “keep him in touch.”

Norman reports a humorous but illustrative story that his father was fond of telling one day before a scheduled landing on some “strategic atoll.”

“Just outside the dental clinic’s doors an enormous group of GIs had lined up. They were stretching all the way
down the deck. Doc’s assistant took one look and jumped in the dental chair and began screaming and yelling, ‘No, no! Please. Oh, my God! You’re killing me!’ And pretty soon the
entire line had disappeared.”

Humorous incidents aside, Doc’s formative wartime experiences remained a story largely untold. Like many
returning vets, he chose not to dwell on them. History, however, is witness to the fact that Doc and his military medical colleagues were treating severe trauma in ways that rarely, if ever, would have touched them in civilian practice.

A LONG MARCH HOME

U.S. Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. LeRoy Grannis was processing to discharge in September 1945, when the now-Lieutenant Commander John Heath Ball returned to San Francisco, California.

A phone call confirmed that both had survived and were anxious to replace G.I. khaki and Navy whites with surf trunks. “I had a 30-day leave scheduled just before the war ended in August. I had a ’39 Studebaker Champion I’d purchased new for $880, which I rebuilt myself, but we were still on war rations. That meant four gallons of gas on an “A” ticket.

“Our buddy Hal Pearson, from the PV Surf Club, had been a Chief Gunner’s Mate and had a lot of juice. He walked off his ship with a crate of .30 Caliber M1 carbines. I don’t know what he did with them,” pines Granny, “but I didn’t get one.”

Granny elected to stay in the newly re-named Air Force Reserve, eventually retiring as a Major.

Doc, however, had severalmore months until his separation from service. Base duty now replaced ship duty. The clinic where Doc was assigned regular hours was filled with long lines of patients. Leaving his new billet the first day, he encountered a bustling post-war San Francisco discernibly different than the one he’d left.

Rationing was finally phasing out. Wartime assembly lines were being converted to peacetime production. Automobiles, appliances, radios, food, clothing, and apparel—items rationed for four years—were now in great demand.

A TOAST TO SOLACE

Doc found solace on the beach.

“Dad dearly loved beachcombing,” Norman Ball recalls. “It was something of a passion with him. Right after the war when we were living at Pedro Point, there was a big naval base nearby. We’d find all kinds of stuff on the beach—jettisoned off the ships coming into the harbor.”

But despite being reunited with his wife and the boys, things weren’t quite as he’d expected. Resuming civilian life for some didn’t appear to be at all difficult. Professionals with dental careers, such as Doc’s colleague Don James, started practice immediately. But for others, for any of a thousand reasons, the adjustment wasn’t as simple as they’d anticipated.

It may be reasonable to speculate that for Doc even trips to his old surfing spots, PV Cove and San Onofre, couldn’t begin to cure his personal psychic wounds. Evelyn Ball, who managed the family finances and investments, reports that she noticed early that her husband was frustrated and often angry. Hanging out on the beach with old surfing buddies offered only temporary solace. It was always fun, but nobody was “the same,” and several of the old gang were dealing with similar issues.

Along with the war’s rationing restrictions of certain alcoholic beverages came post-war demand.Doc and some of his buddies drank. But whether because of or in spite of drinking, other behaviors indicated that he was heading toward crisis.

CRISIS

Whatever John Heath Ball was exhibiting externally was increasingly reflected in his troubled but unspoken internal demeanor.

Today, medicine and psychology recognize the complex series of behaviors as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, and extensive treatment protocols are readily available. But in those days, the Veteran’s Administration simply had fewer options for dealing with the phenomenon.

Doc’s friends, as well as his wife and sons, recall that anger and frustration often boiled over into the Ball’s domestic life. Dissatisfaction marked many of his reactions to the rapidly changing post-war landscape and even the physical atmosphere of Southern California.

One afternoon he expressed shock when young Norman and John came home from after-school activities coughing— with eyes running from what the Los Angeles Daily News had recently labeled “smog.”

No, things just weren’t the same, “…not as good,” he would express to Norman, and certainly not as healthy. Dismay accumulated until it became an emotional surplus, spilling over.

“He couldn’t control his language,” Norman confided. “And he told me that at one time he was actually considering paddling out and never coming back. What he was experiencing was life changing, and it changed the family’s life as well.”

On the surface, he had everything: a loving, devoted wife, two wonderful sons, an education, a profession, and a solid practice. He had excellent physical health, surfing, and a circle
of faithful friends.

But somehow all of this wasn’t enough to quell the occasional depression and subsequent suicidal feelings. Part of this was Doc’s feeling about his book, California Surfriders: 1946.

“Basically,” Granny recalls, “how he got into surfing was taking pictures for his friends. And that’s how the book came about. That was a thing that affected him later, he wanted to do the best he could with the book and, despite his best efforts, the reproduction, the paper and materials, and the binder turned
out to be a lot less than what he’d hoped for.”

Norman concurs with that assessment: “…and the book began falling apart, and that may have been part of the stimulant of his depression, and that was an element that resonated with him about the gospel and impermanence, and our lives and best efforts aren’t enough to warrant a place in God’s heaven. And it isn’t by our own merits—and he’d given his best efforts and it wasn’t good enough. He read the Book of John, 3 : 30, where John’s exalting Christ, “‘He must increase, I must decrease….’”

For Doc, the obvious deterioration of the book became symbolic. The best he seemed to be able to do was achieve impermanence. Doc became aware that to survive he needed something more.

TO GOD’S EARS

Men’s souls and psyches are infinitely complex.

Doc had attempted to replicate his pre-war life, regressing with certain behaviors to reestablish the simple joy of earlier times. But the world around him was rushing forward. He couldn’t swim psychologically against the societal rip.

Doc’s creative nature, which had early expressed itself with his ability to sketch, cartoon, write, and become a photographer, was now the side most impacted by the war and its social aftermath. In those who have these qualities and choose the healing professions—exposing themselves to a daily share of human suffering—embracing some form of spirituality may provide a balancing component.

Granny believes it began some time in the late 1940s. Doc had been experiencing longer periods of depression and occasional bouts of drinking.

“One night, in 1950, Doc was headed south and passing North American Aviation’s plant near the old Los Angeles Airport. Somehow his new Ford station wagon ran off the road, hitting a tree, and badly damaging the car.”

At times such as this, in certain individual’s lives, a triggering physical incident may be followed by an intruding psychological insight. Both Grannis and Doc’s wife, Evelyn, attribute the accident as a turning point that caused Doc to begin examining the direction his life was taking.

Doc found himself being forced to confront his self-destructive behavior and begin looking for a way to deflect or change course. As both Granny and Mrs. Ball recount, it took the form of a patient, “…sitting down in his dental chair.”

Granny acknowledges that Doc was probably inherently spiritual as a man, but until that time had no religious focal point. There’s an old Zen axiom: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Doc was apparently ready.

Norman describes it this way: “I recall it started in 1952, when a pastor came into his office, and, over a course of treatments, the pastor shared the gospel with him. It began the process of a deep change.”

Whatever chord that unknown man-of-the-cloth struck, it did not fall on tone-deaf ears. Doc began a period of reflection, reading the Bible intensely, and engaging in long discussions with other people of faith who were willing to both listen and assist in whatever way they could.

Norman’s memory of that period reveals something of his father’s internal conflict. “He wasn’t an easy guy to talk to about anything but his spiritual interests and surfing. He never spoke about politics or put anybody down, but he was kind, compassionate toward his patients.”

It soon became obvious for Doc that the only way to find himself was to leave that old self behind.

NEW BEGINNINGS

Doc headed north.

Taking a long trip up the California coast, Doc kept an eye out for a place where the qualities of an unspoiled environment and a slower, more human pace would be accessible, where he could practice and the boys could grow without undue exposure to a seemingly endless series of bad examples.

By 1953, he’d found what he believed was the right place, Garberville—a small rural community in Humboldt County, on Highway 101, four hours north of San Francisco and a few miles inland from the Pacific. He’d wanted a hideaway, and little Garberville provided that.

Returning to Southern California he began making inquiries and financial arrangements, and with relocation, his professional life took a strong turn.

As the only dentist in the community—he’d taken over the practice of a respected retiring dentist—Doc, upon opening his door, had a large and demanding patient load.

“He was enthusiastic about life.”Norman recalls. “That’swhy he was so charismatic; people loved him.” In tiny Garberville, afloat in a sea of California’s most splendid natural scenery, Doc experienced a newfound sense of both community and self-respect.

Grannis shows Doc’s letters from the period, replete with whimsical cartoons and his ever-present wacky sense of humor.

California’s Lost Coast in the 1950s was perhaps more overlooked than “lost.” This land of giant sequoias, removed, remote, and undeveloped, insured that Doc’s compelling mix of artistic talent, medical skills, and compassionate personality soon made him a community fixture.

“He loved the place and couldn’t wait for us to come up on vacation,” Granny smiles. Those yearly vacations would continue for Doc’s lifetime.

REVERENCE FOR CREATION

While Doc had given up surf photography, he had not renounced that part of his intensely artistic nature, which demanded an outlet. He was a man who sought out and discovered form, substance, shape, and beauty, and his own way of expressing it.

A natural teacher, he mentored Granny at the start of his photographic career, as well as Norm and John, and his nephew, John Hoekstra, and Norman’s son, Jonathan—always stressing his reverence for nature’s beauty and man’s ability to appreciate it. This, he sincerely believed, was God’s wonderful gift and not to be taken for granted.

On the beach at Shelter Cove, he found sinuous shapes of driftwood. They suggested the forms he was seeing around him, perched on driftwood arms and stumps. He soon learned to carve them into the shapes of the local land and sea birds.

Curlews, terns, gulls, bobwhite quail, sandpipers, his eye and deftly skilled dentist’s fingers captured their shapes. His sons, John and Norm, were his companions on these voyages of local discovery.

“My dad instilled inme and inmy brother a real appreciation of nature and the outdoors and that’s been a part of my life ever since.”

He always had an affinity for the ocean, and he grew to love it more even as he surfed less.”

In 1964, during a violent storm, floodwaters submerged part of the Ball home, destroying the largest part of his entire collection of original negatives.

REBORN, AGAIN

Decades passed and a new generation of surfers emerged.

They held a reverence for surfing’s past, to which Doc Ball represented a living linkage. Requests for interviews, interest in his photography, and a folio edition of his iconic images— Doc was recast, reborn into a world of surfing legends.

And it was for him a quiet reaffirmation that he had indeed contributed greatly to a sport and life way he had always held in esteem.

“When he got into surfing, it was a fun thing,” Norman reports. “And his photography was one part of it. I think he was amazed to see what had happened later, and the fame that came with it sort of bothered him. He enjoyed it in a non-egotistic way, and I suspect he was amazed that people were coming fromall over the world to interview him. But the fame aspect bothered him.”

Fame or obscurity aside, for Doc, this was apparently not a time to let grass grow under his spiritual feet. He became active in another surfing club, as well as handing out Bibles from the Gideon Society at local college campuses. Students became familiar with the still-robust, tanned, and always smiling older gentleman who had time to discuss the Bible and often, to their amazement, surfing.

Approaching the end of his life, Doc was still stoked, alert, and playful, skateboarding into his nineties, as he claimed, “…to keep young.” On 06 December 2001, seven weeks short of his 95th birthday, he took the final paddle out.

Though Doc’s last chapter has long since been written and his life’s book closed, he left behind a window he had opened through which all of us can see—California, as once he had seen it—through a lens, brightly.

By Craig Lockwood

Principal Photography by Doc Ball

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