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Wl ConneEDThe Parallel Universe of South Africa’s “Godfather” of Surfing, John “Oom” Whitmore

By Miles Masterson

A passionate dirt biker, John and Shirley Metz (ex-wife of Dick) enjoya ride in the sand dunes above Velorenvlei, outside of Elands Bay. Hediscovered the nearby left-hand point in 1957, bought a farm called“Aandster” in the early ’70s, retired there in the ’90s, and when hepassed in 2002 his ashes were dispersed in the river below…wherethey no doubt washed down to the point.

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transportation, places to stay, game reserve things, every-

thing you can imagine; he had it all organized,” Bruce Brown

recounts. “John was the perfect host.” Gary Haselau, a long-

standing friend of Whitmore’s employed as a cameraman

for ESII (and whose hunting rifle Pat O’Connell shoots so

comically in the movie), exemplifies John’s kind of invaluable

contribution in one of the film’s classic scenes: “John

organized that beach buggy with the closed-in roof,” he

says. “Because we were going to the lion park, we took a

small O’Neill bag and some old suits and stuffed baby

chickens into the bag and let the lions do their thing.”

But, like the first time around, it was Whitmore’s

intimate knowledge of southern African surf conditions

and its coastline that had the most lasting effect on Brown’s

cinematic success. In an archive video of Whitmore,

filmed shortly before he passed away in 2001, the Oom

himself tells how he had convinced Bruce to postpone their

visit by a week to take advantage of a spring tide and full

moon following Easter. Brown wisely followed his advice.

“There wasn’t a day that we didn’t look at the ocean that

there wasn’t surf,” confirms Wingnut.

Gunshs and bstersWhile washing off their jetlag, the American contingent

had a volatile introduction to pre-democracy South Africa.

Nelson Mandela had by then been freed, but “unrest” was

still a daily occurrence. As the crew traded glassy three-

foot peaks at a beachbreak in full view of Table Mountain,

Wingnut remembers the pop of rifles across the bay from

the city as police shot rubber bullets at protestors. Though,

says Wingnut, it didn’t seem to bother John and the

other South Africans, it spun the visitors out. “There was

full-on rioting going on,” he relates with an incredulous

laugh. “Pat and I were scared witless...it was really radical.

We were not ready for that, a couple of kids right out of

Southern California.”

Fortunately they all soon escaped up the safer and

much more sparsely populated west coast—Whitmore

territory—to the left-hand pointbreak at Elands Bay,

founded by John in 1957. Here, and at a few tucked-away

nearby reef breaks that he lead them to, they scored a

couple of days of glassy groundswell and feasted on crayfish

(lobsters) and seafood in the golden autumn evenings.

“What a great person to travel with,” says Wingnut. “John

knew every tree and corner...every sand dune, every mirage,

every kelp track; he had it all figured out, ‘Oh someone

went off the road here,’ ‘Someone screwed some girl there’

—it was pretty good.”

Next up came Jeffrey’s Bay and St. Francis. Though

Whitmore didn’t drive up with the crew, he soon flew in to

join them and the likes of Shaun Tomson and emerging Zulu

surfer Sharon Ngcobo on the ESII set. John himself hadn’t

been to the area for a couple of decades, and wherever he

went the locals were in awe, compounded by the addition of

Brown, Tomson, and company. “He definitely had that great

patriarch of surfing persona going,” remembers Wingnut.

“I mean there are a lot of people everywhere we went that

were so stoked to see him...he just had that effect.” Thanks

to John’s impeccable timing and Devil’s luck, they had also

arrived to firing overhead surf in J-Bay. “The guys there were

asking, ‘How did you do this? We’ve been waiting for months

for waves,’” says Haselau. “John was amazing with that kind of

stuff; he could always predict when the surf would come....”

Atlanc Ocean Gesis Born on March 30, 1929, in the coastal suburb of Sea Point

in Cape Town. John Thornton Whitmore’s affinity for the

ocean began long before he reached high school. From

Afrikaner stock on his mother’s side and English descent on

his father’s, John’s mother had him when she was 40 and his

dad left shortly afterward, but he still provided for them well

enough. An only child suitably doted upon by his mother

(and a few of her middle-aged single siblings, who shared her

large apartment), in the mid- to late 1930s the prepubescent

John was free to roam, no doubt instilling in him his life-

long attributes of self-confidence and wanderlust.

Largely unchanged to this day, Sea Point is an area

characterized by high-rises and a long promenade featuring

manicured lawns and a high stone sea wall. This overlooks

craggy, surf-battered gullies scarred into the shale reef, the

largest of which is a small cove, Boat Bay, a mere block away

from John’s childhood home. Here, local fishermen would

o O Dogs April 1992. Nearly three decades after Bruce Brown first

set foot in South Africa, on the second stop of The Endless

Summer, he again arrives in the Cape of Good Hope. This

time it is to film a segment for his magnum opus’s long

overdue sequel, The Endless Summer II. Just like before,

Brown and his crew are greeted at the Cape Town airport

by goat-bearded South African surfing industry don and

guest star of the first movie, John Whitmore, who had

catalyzed Brown, August, and Hynson’s original travels

across South Africa in late 1963. Good friends who hadn’t

seen each other in years, John and Bruce’s ’90s reunion is

filled with backslapping bravado, ostensibly masking

their considerable stoke at seeing one another again. ESII

star Robert “Wingnut” Weaver describes with a chuckle

how they are like “two really old dogs sniffing each other’s

butts and trying to pee on each other....”

By then, the avuncular John “Oom” Whitmore had

long been an iconic “Godfather” figure in South African

surfing and was made famous as a surfboard entrepreneur,

his radio surf report, and as a contest administrator.

“Oom,” Afrikaans for uncle, was a respectful moniker

Whitmore had earned as a mentor for generations of local

surfers—among others his nephew and eventual IPS ’70s top

16 pro, Jonathan Paarman, as well as 1977 World Champion

Shaun Tomson. “The Oom got ahold of that beard of his

and he always looked like he was up to mischief,” says Shaun,

who in his teens knew Whitmore when he’d managed the

Springbok surfing teams. “Even way into his sixties he

had a great sense of humor. It always looked liked he was

hatching a scheme.”

As he had in the 1960s, the legendary resourceful

Capetonian once again eased the way for The Endless

Summer production. “Yeah, he had everything all set up:

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The “Oom” talks story somewhere near Elands Bay on South Africa’s west coast withPat O’Connell, Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, Bruce Brown, and company after a day’ssurfing and a mussel and lobster feast, on the set of The Endless Summer II in 1992.

Whitmore circa mid-’60s in Cape Town, probably Muizenberg, with his nephew andunsung South African Springbok surf prodigy-turned-troubled-hippie journeyman,Donald Paarman.

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spectacle of these three guys riding this monstrous wave

on surfboards,” described John, “and that’s when it clicked,

bing-bang, I had to get into it.”

John quickly became obsessed with the idea of

making his own surfboard and introducing the sport to Cape

Town. Yet, unknown to him, surfing had been entrenched

across the Cape Peninsula, in the warmer waters and gentle

rolling waves of Muizenberg since the 1920s. In the mid-

1950s, there was still a small paddleboard surfing scene here

that John, just a few miles away, knew nothing about; as

well a thousand miles up the coast, where Durban lifesavers,

of whom John also knew very little, had been surfing for

at least a decade on paddleboards modified by a certain

Fred Crocker.

Prtypes and ExprationSo, though the Oom is not the original South African

surfboard builder, he soon became the most influential.

His subsequent innovations in surfboard design spurred

rapid progression across the country, especially hard-core

surfing in the heavier waves of the Atlantic, where his guns

spawned the Cape Town big-wave scene. Yet, it was not

actually Whitmore that started building that first board,

but his younger brother-in-law Earl Krause and his friend

Gordon Verhoef, who had found a 1939 Popular Science

article by Tom Blake on how to make one from wood and

canvas. The pair struggled and they were about to give up

when, Earl tells, John discovered what they were up to and

immediately took over.

Whitmore finished the board and rode it at Glen

Beach in 1954, becoming the first person to surf on the

South African Atlantic coast. Over the following years, he

refined this heavy prototype, building a handful more as well

as some plywood and laminated veneer versions. Then, in

1955, he came across another overseas magazine article, this

one on how to make a surfboard out of polystyrene. He

obtained a large block from one of his other younger cousins,

Timmy Paarman, who had conveniently just started working

in the refrigeration industry, and carved a rough blank.

John began working from the garage of one of his

friend’s parents’ (Dave Meneses, who later became one of

Cape Town’s bravest chargers) adjacent to his own bungalow

in the seaside hamlet of Bakoven in Camps Bay. But building

these skegless boards was a protracted process of trial and

error and—in the absence of any further reference material

or advice—took all of Whitmore’s imagination to perfect.

The biggest challenge was to make sure they were water-

tight. At first, John tried to use epoxy but found it ate away

the EPS Styrofoam. According to Earl, John then developed

a system of gluing a wooden stringer down the middle of

the blanks, used butter muslin cloth to cover the foam,

coated this with Cascamite glue and PVA, and then sealed

it with polyester glass fiber. “These boards were so much

more maneuverable than the wood boards but also much

more fragile,” Krause recalls.

As laborious and rudimentary as these boards

were, on them John and his posse of willing young family

members and a few other groms began to venture farther

than their immediate environs in Camps Bay. In 1955, one of

the first heavy-wave spots they conquered on the Southern

Peninsula was at the Outer Kom, as well as a handful of

other beaches and heavy reefs closer to home and in Sea

Point. “We looked for size; that was the influence of

Makaha,” said John, who, thanks to his experience as a

fisherman, had seen most of these spots breaking in the past.

Whitmore’s posse also surfed Muizenberg, where they were

stoked to find a small crew of locals, and began to check out

maps and explore the coastlines north and east of Cape

Town. “John was always the adventurer. He decided where

we were going, and that’s where we went,” smiles Krause.

launch ten-foot skiffs made out of hammered tin. The

fascinated young Whitmore soon joined them. In a family

audio recording made by his descendents six months before

his death, the Oom—in a gravely voice interspersed by

coughs—recounts how they would stand in the boats as

they returned to shore. Though he never knew the pursuit

existed, he said, “That was my first feeling of picking up

the energy of the wave...and surfing; right then, it became

a part of my life.”

The Makaha MomeA few years later, as young teenagers during World War II,

John and his friends acquired their own boat to hunt for

abalone, crayfish, and fish and are remembered to this day

in South African diving circles for developing skin and scuba

diving in the freezing Atlantic. Isolated by the conflict, they

had to improvise most of their equipment, much of it

devised by Whitmore. “We made masks out of motorcycle

inner tubes,” remembers Gary Haselau, who first met John

back then. “We would cut a pane of glass and put it in and

make straps at the back. Our fins were tennis shoes with

a bit of Masonite glued on.”

After the war, Whitmore gained sporadic access

to US Skin Diver magazine. Sometime in the early 1950s, in

one of these he saw something that was soon to become

his real raison d’etre: an image of wave sliding in Hawaii,

ostensibly that of Buzzy Trent, George Downing, and Flippy

Hoffman taken at Makaha in 1953. “It was a fantastic

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The origins of this photo and the photographer’s name have been lost in the past 50 years. There is some mild dispute among family and other old-timers regardingthe location. Some are convinced it is the outer reefs of Elands Bay; others swear blind it’s Outer Kom. What is not in dispute is that Whitmore discovered thesetwo prime surf spots, and the person in it is indeed John. What is also undeniable is the hard-core attitude Whitmore and his wetsuit-less peers had toward surfingin the cold Atlantic. Judging from the color of that water, it couldn’t be more than 9 or 10 degrees Celsius (49 degrees Farenheit).

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am, Magnes, Movies In the meantime, Harry Bold, a surfer from Durban, had

traveled to California and met up with Dick. Just before he

left in 1961, Bold bought a 9'6" from Bob Olsen’s store in Seal

Beach and returned on a freighter to Durban via Cape Town

where, through a meeting arranged by Metz, Whitmore

was waiting for him on the docks. “The big focus, of course,

was the new board I had brought with me,” recalls Bold.

“It was the first polyurethane board to reach the country

and had a beautiful shape and polished finish...John was

very impressed and took measurements.”

Whitmore soon began to reproduce the sleek

lines of the Ole, which was a far cry from his chunky-railed

polystyrene boards. Metz then came back to Cape Town for

two weeks and brought a few Clark Foam blanks. The timing

couldn’t have been more perfect as John had just moved to

his first legit premises in Cape Town. “From then Whitmore

leapfrogged 20 years ahead,” says Metz, “just because of

our chance meeting.” Though he was still working at VW,

John’s reputation as a master craftsman was also spreading

and—thanks to his boards—surfing was growing fast. “John

would not accept second best, and he was always striving

for perfection,” adds Earl Krause.

In the summer of 1961, John and Earl traveled up the

east coast. Aside from revisiting a few spots and uncovering

a few new ones (including Jeffrey’s Bay, which he says they

didn’t surf, but scoped through binoculars from the N2

highway and deemed “too fast”), they delivered a couple of

the new-fangled Clark blown shapes to suitably impressed

surfboard shapers in Durban, such as Baron Stander. Back

in Cape Town, John continued to shape both polystyrene

and urethane boards when he could get a few blanks from

Grubby, with whom he was now dealing directly. Through

Dick, he also made contact with John Severson and Bruce

Brown and began importing Surfer magazine and Slippery

When Wet and Waterlogged, which he screened three

times a day to sell-out crowds across South Africa, fueling

the country’s first nationwide surfing boom.

e Endless SummIn late 1963, John Whitmore greeted Brown, August, and

Hynson at Cape Town airport. Spurred by Metz’s glowing

Kombis and CrayshIn the late 1950s, Whitmore began working as a salesman

for the exclusive distributors of Volkswagen in Cape Town,

though he continued shaping at night and on the weekends

and supplied boards to surfers as far afield as Durban. For

a time, John’s VW “Kombi” was the only one in the country

and the first true Saffa surf mobile, as the Oom built the

first customized surfboard roof racks to deliver boards

around the peninsula and for surf sojourns (on one such

mission discovering Elands Bay). On frequent business

trips to the VW manufacturing plant in Port Elizabeth,

John was able to deliver boards up the coast and uncover

scores of surf spots all the way to St. Francis, often using

his fluent Afrikaans to sweet talk skeptical farmers into

allowing him on their property.

Back in Cape Town, the Oom’s beachside Beta Road

bungalow in Bakoven had become the headquarters of the

late 1950s Atlantic surfing clique. Here the group would

bodysurf or catch waves at a small bombie out front, or

gather in the mornings for their surf trips around the

peninsula or up the coast, and then celebrate when they

returned. “The house was often full of people, and we would

party well into the early hours of the morning,” remembers

Pat Gerstle, who through his marriage to her older sister,

Thelma, had become John’s sister-in-law and moved into

the small wooden cabin along with her mother.

e Calirnia KidIt was exactly to such an eclectic scene that a California

surfer, Dick Metz, somehow soon stumbled in to; an

incredible piece of fate that would later have a profound

effect on all concerned. In 1958, the Laguna native had quit

working for his friend Grubby Clark to travel through

Central America, Tahiti, Vietnam, and Australia where Dick

surfed for a few months before continuing on to Singapore,

India, and Africa. From Kenya in early 1959, the boardless

Metz then hitched a ride from Tanganyika to Zimbabwe

where he arrived at night. “I could see a couple of huts and

a little fire,” remembers Dick, who on a whim decided to

continue with the driver to his final destination, Cape Town.

“I said, ‘I’ll see Victoria Falls on the way back; let’s go.’”

A week of hard driving later, Dick found himself

on the Atlantic coast, standing above a small boulder—and

bungalow-lined cove called Glen Beach—where he was

astounded to see a lone goofy-footer surfing in tiny waves.

“I had been living out in the bush with hunters, just hitch-

hiking around,” laughs Metz, who recalls that Whitmore at

first took offense to his brash appraisal of his lost polystyrene

ride, when the scruffy interloper retrieved it for him from

the shorebreak. “I did say something derogatory...like, ‘this

is probably the ugliest surfboard I have ever seen,’” says

Dick. “John got a little indignant and said, ‘Well what the

hell do you know about surfboards?’ and I said, ‘Obviously

I know more than you do because this thing really stinks!’”

After a short, awkward silence, they packed out

laughing. Whitmore invited him home and an impromptu

but typically debauched night followed with around 30

people and tons of wine, steak, and crayfish. Metz was

understandably more than a little amazed where he’d ended

up. “Bakoven looks just like Laguna Beach,” he explains.

“I mean there’s white sandy beaches and rocky points, and

all of a sudden I was home. I was so enthralled and excited

and carried away by the whole situation I got terribly drunk;

they threw me in the back of the Kombi where I threw up

for about two days.”

Enigmatic Metz quickly ingratiated himself into

the Whitmore household. He embarked on a relationship

with teenaged Patty and spent the following couple of

months surfing and diving with John all over the peninsula

and Elands Bay. “You know, it was just an instant bonding

by the way we lived, the culture, the style, the attitude, the

similarities, the priorities; we were [always] talking about

surfing,” says Dick. Though Whitmore, he adds, knew a little

about the sport, it was not very much. In fact, observing his

equipment—Stone Age compared to what Dick’s contem-

poraries were producing in the States—he promised to hook

John up with much better materials when he got home.

Yet, so besotted with Cape Town and Patty was

Dick, it took him two failed attempts to leave. But when

he eventually returned to the U.S. in 1960—via Durban,

where John set him up with his local mates—he began to

make good on his promise. Back in SoCal, he also regaled

stories of his trip to South Africa to his close friends in

Laguna and Dana Point. “I showed these pictures to Bruce

and Hobie and I told Bruce, ‘You gotta go down there and

meet this friend of mine, John Whitmore....’”

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The “Oom’s” momentous meeting with Bruce Brown in Cape Town in December 1963.Robert August and Mike Hynson in tow, all under the suspicious eye of apartheid-eraairport policemen.

John’s 185 Buitengracht Street factory, the de facto grand central of the ‘60s CapeTown surfy scene, where Whitmore Surfboards were made and Clark Foam blanksblown. Note the VWs in the foreground and the Kombi (stacked high with boxes ofClark Foam). While still working at the VW showroom in Cape Town and shaping boardsat night and on the weekend, the “Oom” is reputed to have sold many a surfer acombo deal of a surfboard and Kombi or Bug.

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John had to purchase the properties adjoining

his factory and knock holes through the walls and rip up

floorboards illegally to accommodate his improvised, but

effective, blank production line. “At first we imported

everything from Grubby but then started sourcing the

chemicals locally,” recalls Geoff Fish, one of John’s early

workers and eventual business partner, who says that they

were later assisted by the arrival of U.S. Clark Foam employee

Mike Johnston. Fish and another Whitmore employee,

Anthony Piataki, then traveled to the U.S. in 1968 to work

in Clark’s factory for a few months, which in the late 1960s

further improved their output in South Africa.

By all accounts, Whitmore’s own frequent trips to

the U.S. were usually all business, though he occasionally

surfed at spots like Doheny and San O’. An avid petrol head,

John also visited motor races with Walter Hoffman and rode

dirt bikes with Bruce, with whom he met the likes of Steve

McQueen in the trails above Dana Point. John, whose

wife Thelma eventually befriended her equals in SoCal,

occasionally accompanied him too, and they usually bunked

with Metz in Laguna or with Clark or Walter Hoffman at

Poche (whose spare car John often used). Here they would

party and eat abalone and lobster, just like back home.

“He fit right in here like I did in Cape Town,” says Metz.

“He was a laughing, funny guy, he just fell along

with us in every way,” agrees Walter Hoffman, who along

with his business partner Jim Jenks, daughter Joyce, Clark,

and Metz repeatedly all visited Cape Town where the

Whitmores could reciprocate their hospitality. “From

partying to motorcycles to surfing to everything, it was

perfect,” says Walter, who during his trip to SA in 1970 was

introduced in Jeffrey’s Bay by Whitmore to his good friend

Cheron Kraak, who had just started her Country Feeling

label (and to whom Hoffman and Jenks later sold fabric).

On his trip, Hoffman was also able to surf Elands

Bay and feast on west coast lobster. Aside from surfing,

praise of Whitmore and the surf potential in South Africa,

the trio, says Brown, originally intended to find a new spot to

film besides the well-worn locales of Hawaii and California.

“You look on a map and there’s got to be surf there,” says

Bruce explaining his motivation, “and John was a contact

that could show us around.” However, Bruce soon realized

that it would cost them roughly the same to travel all the

way around the world. “It was like 50 bucks less,” he

laughs, “so that really lead to The Endless Summer...it was

just kind of like happenstance.”

As usual, they were given a traditional festive

Whitmore welcome and bunked down at his house. The

arrival of the Americans also attracted all of the surfers in

Cape Town (which, though surfing had grown considerably,

as is evident in the movie, still only amounted to about

three dozen). Then John hooked up his friend, hunter

Terrence Bullen, to transport the crew up to Durban in his

gray van with the pachyderm art. Whitmore was obviously

keen on the trip, but couldn’t go as he was in the process

of moving into a new, larger surf shop. Nevertheless, a nice

stop on the way, John told Bruce, might be Cape St. Francis,

which had a great little farm run by a friend with a place

to camp and a reasonable beachbreak out front.

John had been to St. Francis in winter a few times,

but knew nothing of the latent potential here that would,

through Bruce’s lens, soon rock the surfing world. We now

know that Bruce’s Beauties lights up on an east swell, unlike

most of the more south facing rocky pointbreaks nearby

that work on frontal southwest swells. But because it was

summer in South Africa—and cyclone season in the Indian

Ocean—Bruce, Robert, and Mike were in the right place

at the right time and scored at the adjacent sand-bottom

point that no South African surfer had ever seen break. At

first they didn’t notice it either, but when they turned to

look up the point, rubbed their eyes in disbelief, as Bruce

now says, “at these tube things coming in.”

In the movie, their epic discovery is dramatized by

Brown’s artistic license with a long speculative walk across

and slide down the nearby dunes, but that anomaly still

doesn’t detract from their find, both for South African

surfers (who, once the word had spread, flocked there and

then soon to nearby Seal Point and J-Bay) and the surfing

world at large. The footage, which in many respects made the

movie, was gold, and following a fun but largely uneventful

trip to Durban where they were nevertheless treated like

rock stars, Bruce, Robert, and Mike left South Africa,

mission accomplished and then some.

Dana Poi ConntionFor John Whitmore, his appearance and role in the impact

of The Endless Summer was only to be the beginning of

his association with the Dana Point and Laguna crowd.

By 1965, he was importing Clark Foam blanks in greater

volumes, supplying other shapers as far as Durban, and

his surfboard business was thriving. But John’s vision also

extended beyond commerce, and it would be contests and

not business that would ultimately enable him to first

travel Stateside. Largely through his influence, the South

African Surf Riders Association was formed in 1965, with

John as chairman. That year, the first SA Championships

were held in eight-foot waves at Anstey’s on Durban’s

Bluff, where though he was usually behind the microphone

or a clipboard, Whitmore proved his often unheralded

ability as a surfer by winning the over-35 division.

This contest was used to select the first Springbok

surfing team to compete at the 1966 ISF World Champs in

San Diego, which Whitmore was to manage. Though the

inexperienced South Africans, met by Metz at the airport,

didn’t do very well at the event, it was a journey they all

relished, none more so than John who got to attend the

mixing ceremony with Duke Kahanamoku, an experience

he described as “magic.” The visit was also the perfect

opportunity for John to reconnect with Bruce, and befriend

all the other Laguna/Dana Point characters, including

Grubby, Walter and Flippy Hoffman, and Hevs McClelland.

After the event, John stayed on to finalize a deal

to blow Clark Foam blanks in South Africa instead of

importing them, which was slow and expensive and couldn’t

keep up with the ever-growing demand back home. “John

had to come up to get the technology and everything from

us,” reveals Grubby. “We sent him some of the components,

or he would come [back] over on a trip and take something

back in his baggage...it was real touch and go.” As he alludes,

it wasn’t easy for John to manufacture Clark Foam so far

away, and though Grubby sent detailed instructional

letters, much of the initial setup once again depended on

Whitmore’s ingenuity.

82A great family man, the “Oom” was never happier than when surrounded by his wife,three daughters, and the extended members of the Whitmore and Paarman surfingclans et al., many of whom also worked for him in his factory at one stage or another.

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Part of the 1970 Springbok surfing team departing for the world championships in BellsBeach, Australia, including Shaun Tomson, Michael Tomson, manager John Whitmore,Donald Paarman, and captain George Thomopoulos. It was on this trip that Whitmorewould soon discover the second great passion of his life: Hobie Cats.

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fishing, and diving, the two shared an affinity for knife-

making and Walter at first sent John different types of steel

to make knives. John returned in kind by sending him the

finished product...although once with a twist. After Bruce

Brown left South Africa in 1992, Whitmore gave him an

unfinished knife among a few more to pass on. “Bruce said,

‘Here’s your knife,’” laughs Walter. “ And I said, ‘What kind

of crap is this?’ before Bruce got the other knives out. John

was a real joker, he always liked to play games like that.”

An a EndsBesides being a notorious prankster, John’s creative pursuits

extended to carving wood, and he would replace the gear

sticks and dashboards of his VWs with meticulously-crafted

replicas. Often at odds with the conservative values of 1960s

South Africa (he was once arrested for not wearing a T-shirt

on the beach), once he left his job at VW, John wholly

embraced the non-conformist values of his contemporaries

in the U.S. He refused to wear a suit and usually always wore

slip-slops and a tatty old surf tee, although he would put

on a Hawaiian shirt, leather thongs, and perhaps comb his

hair if he had a meeting at the bank. “Uncle John took the

American, Southern Californian lifestyle and brought it

here,” confirms Johnny Paarman.

A devout family man, Whitmore employed and

mentored Paarman as well as all three of his daughters in his

business and influenced many other local rookie shapers

and continued to spread the gospel of surfing across South

Africa through all his endeavors. Like his U.S. counterparts

at the time, John became obsessed with logos (his stretched

diamond-shaped decal is still one of the most recognizable

in South Africa) and his sponsored team riders, including

a short-lived skate team in the mid-’60s, would all be be-

decked in the ubiquitous Native American influenced ochre

color that became the Whitmore Surfboards trademark hue.

Throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1970s,

John remained the manager of the Springbok surfing teams.

Though he missed Costa Rica in 1968, John returned for

the 1970 ISF world contest at Bells Beach. This trip was

significant for two reasons: Members included future

South African stars Jonathan Paarman, Gavin Rudolph, and

Michael and Shaun Tomson. It was also the first time South

African surfers had experienced pressure from the media

who harassed them about apartheid. This proved testing

for the younger guys, but John helped them remain focused.

“It was difficult, very stressful for the guys that weren’t used

to it,” says team stalwart George Thomopoulos. “He told us,

‘Remember, we are not politicians; we are here to surf.’”

That year the South Africans achieved their best

results, assisted by John’s now good friend George Downing

in timing the sets to get out at big Bells in the early rounds.

However, most of the team were more predisposed to riding

big surf, and the contest ended in small beachbreak

conditions at Johanna, where cousins Shaun and Michael

Tomson still made the quarters and semis, respectively. Two

years later, the Springboks attended the final ISF contest

in San Diego where Johnny made the semis. The experience

gained by all the Springboks under John Whitmore’s steady

guidance and connections laid the foundation for their

confidence in Hawaii in following years, with Paarman,

Rudolph, and the Tomson cousins all winning and placing in

a number of events and making the IPS top 16 in the 1970s.

To this day, each one of them cites the Oom as

one of the main influences on their surfing success.

Ironically, John himself was a diehard proponent of amateur

surfing and was deeply skeptical about the impending pro

era. He had always felt that competing for your country

was the highest honor and surfing for money was a sell-

out. The dissolution of the ISF and the rapid growth of

the surf industry and the changing of the competitive

guard that occurred during this time also soured things

for John, who was staunchly old school and against the pot-

smoking hippie generation, among them his own infamous

nephew, Donald. “He was very disappointed with that,”

recalls Donald’s younger brother and the always cleaner-

cut Johnny. “It upset him tremendously.”

A New DiconFortunately, while in Sydney that year, Whitmore discovered

a new passion, one directly linked to his friends in SoCal:

the Hobie Cat. John had built his own outriggers at home in

the 1960s and was smitten by Alter’s creation. By late 1971,

he secured the rights to sell these in South Africa from

Alter and, though he still made blanks and shaped the odd

board, removed himself from the surf scene and soon

began manufacturing Hobies full time. One of only three

franchises in the world (the other was in Brazil), many feel

it is testament to John’s reliability and integrity as well as

his direct in with Dana Point that Hobie entrusted him.

“I said, ‘John? No problem, he’ll be a good guy,’” recalls Alter.

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Meeting Duke for the first time at the 1966 World Championships in San Diego was aspecial moment, something John later described as “magic.” In 1972, at the same event,in the same location, he got to repeat the experience and also proudly watched histeenage nephew Johnny Paarman make the semifinals of the contest.

Early factory shot of John checking out the rails on one of his prototype polystyrene-core creations. A consummate craftsman who paid meticulous attention todetail, his mint-condition polyurethane Clark Foam boards are prized collector’s items, some still surfed regularly by their owners.

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Back at Whitmore’s Cape Town HQ, further

expansion was necessary to include the moulds and store

materials and finished craft, and by the mid-1980s John’s

factory was making more than 700 Hobie Cats a year. John

also took his experience as a surfing administrator to this

new realm. He traveled with the South African Hobie team

to Hawaii for the first time in 1974, as well as Tahiti and the

U.S., and under his 20 years of management, the team

scooped their first world title in Texas in 1976, and to this

day holds more Hobie championship victories than any

other country.

Bce Brown RusThrough his Hobie business as well as Clark Foam and later

Morey bodyboards (which Whitmore introduced to South

Africa the same year as Hobie’s), John was able to finally

purchase his dream ranch in Elands Bay in 1974. Though

he remained in his mountainside home in Camps Bay for

a few more years after his retirement in 1990 (where he

still shaped the odd board in his garage), like many of his

contemporaries in California, he eventually moved up the

coast permanently, allowing him to welcome and assist

Bruce Brown when he returned in 1992. “Well, you know,”

says Bruce, “he moved up away from the crowds, like I kind

of did the same thing here.”

Indeed, when the two old-timers later went to

St. Francis, their amazement at how the place had changed

was palpable. Though, says Wingnut, Bruce was stoked

to find out the spot had been named after him, he was

dumbstruck by the housing developments, as well as the

fact they had restricted the sand movement and the

quality of the wave had deteriorated noticeably. “But I think

they had both gotten over any concept that it was going to

change,” says Wingnut. “Bruce was shocked and I’m sure

John was when he went to Dana Point 30 years after he had

been there at how it had changed; it just happened to the

world.”

e nal YeaOne surf spot that never changed for Whitmore, at least not

much in his lifetime, was Elands Bay, where he occasionally

rode a bodyboard into his late sixties and kept himself busy

on his farm with his knife-making, carving, painting, and

making miniature longboards. Joined by Metz one last time

for his 70th birthday in March 1999, video footage shows the

two reminiscing about their first meeting, which Whitmore

called “pre-ordained.” When the two got together, tells Dick,

they always marveled at how it had resulted in the Endless

Summer movies and catapulted South African surfing

into the modern era—as well as heralded John’s de facto

inclusion into one of the U.S. surf industry’s most exclusive

cabals. “It was like it was meant to be...in one fell swoop

John comes from Cape Town and was in the ‘Dana Point

Mafia,’” says Metz to the camera. “I never knew I was a

member,” quips the red Speedo-clad Whitmore in his deep

laugh, before excusing himself for a smoke.

Soon afterward John Whitmore was diagnosed

with lung cancer. He passed away on Christmas Eve, 2001.

The Oom was sent off at Glen Beach a couple of weeks

later in a paddle-out ceremony in a solid groundswell,

attended by hundreds of friends and admirers from all

over the world. In his inimitable style, Whitmore never

professed to regret his lifelong habit and refused all but the

most rudimentary medication, happy on his farm as “pig

in you know what.” Though he had become disillusioned

with the commercial ization of modern surfing and

harked back to a purer, unpolluted era, Whitmore was

understandably proud of his legacy. “It was a wonderful

part of my life,” he said in the family recording. “I was very

fortunate to be ahead of it all and sort of pioneer the thing;

it gives me a lot of satisfaction.”

Johnny Paarman recalls how he visited his uncle

shortly before his death. “We were already surfing Dungeons,

and the guys were surfing bigger waves than they’d ever

done and towing and going crazy. I was talking to him about

how it is nowadays, and he was listening and he shed a tear,”

says an emotional Paarman. “Everybody had respect for him,

so many guys that John influenced in some way in their lives;

Uncle John brought them fun, you know.” Unsurprisingly,

out of all his achievements, Whitmore, it seems, was the

most stoked with his involvement in both of Bruce Brown’s

Endless Summer films, made clear by one of his last wishes.

“We put him in his corduroy boardies and his Hawaiian

shirt worn on Endless Summer II and his leather slip-slops,”

remembers John’s youngest daughter Sian, “and when they

picked him up, he was dressed like a surfer.” ◊

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Never regarded by himself as a particularly “great” surfer,Whitmore was neverthelessone of the most adept of his generation. This photo was probably taken at his hometurf of Glen Beach around in the early to mid-’60s.

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John “Oom” Whitmore spent the final years of his life in his shop on his farm in Elands Bay, making knives and replica longboards, deeply satisfied with a life wellspent. By all accounts he was also forever stoked in his charismatic, humble way.