Paul Holmes on, “making a living out of a lifestyle”: shaping surfboards in England and Australia and becoming editor of SURFER magazine in south Orange County. Recorded at Laguna Beach Library, Laguna Beach, California.
Transcript
Yeah, my name’s Paul Holmes. I’m a former editor of SURFER magazine, a writer, and a specialist in surfing culture, I suppose.
Being able to make a living out of a lifestyle is really the objective of most people who become as passionate and obsessed with surfing as I was. For me that started in England as surfing developed over there in the mid-to-late sixties. Surf shops started to open. Surfboard factories started to open. And I started working at my local surf shop, behind the counter in the retail store. And then, gradually started working in the factory making surfboards and learning how to make surfboards. Starting with rudimentary tasks, like sanding, and gradually building up to being a surfboard shaper.
So, by the early seventies I was a surfboard shaper. And I’d been working one summer at Bilbo surfboards in Newquay with an Australian fellow who went back to Australia, and subsequently offered me a job for the winter season, in England, which is of course the summer season in Australia, shaping surfboards with him at a renowned factory in Brookvale, in Sydney, called Keyo surfboards.
And I went down to Australia, because it was like, great, get out of here for the winter and go to the summer in Australia, and have warm water, and great waves, and have a job to go to, it was a great thing. So I went down to Australia to shape surfboards for six months, but I ended up staying down there for nine years.
In the course of that nine years transitioned from working in the surfboard industry, I started freelancing some stories to the local magazines and what have you, and eventually got hired at TRACKS Magazine to be part of the editorial team. And, ended up in the late seventies becoming that magazine’s editor.
That work, at TRACKS Magazine in Australia, was noticed by the people here by the people here in Southern California, at SURFER Magazine, and they recruited me for a position as editor of SURFER. So I came from Australia to Southern California in 1981 to be editor of SURFER magazine, and that was a wonderful position. The world’s leading surf publication. It was like a dream come true for me.
So, I ended up being the editor of SURFER for about eight, nine years. One hundred issues. It was a monthly magazine. While I was there we started a television series for ESPN. And, I did three seasons of SURFER magazine for ESPN. Enjoyed working with a full film crew. Went all around the world, man, it was great. We had a lot of fun. It was, you know, it was a lot of work, I don’t want to underplay that, it was a great deal of work, publishing a, putting out a monthly magazine, is a very stressful thing. But, it was surfing, so how stressful could that be. So, it all worked out really good.
I think what has made surfing so enthralling even to outsiders is this idea that it’s a free and easy kind of lifestyle. That when you paddle out into the surf you leave all the cares of the world kind of behind you on the beach, and you enter into a new realm, where none of that matters. And I think people find that very attractive, the idea, the freedom that surfing represents.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This item may be used for non-commercial and educational purposes.
The opinions expressed in OC Stories do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of Orange County Public Library or its partners and no official endorsement should be inferred.
Images are courtesy of story tellers and affiliate organizations or used in accordance with fair use and Creative Commons.
Music and sound in accordance with fair use and Creative Commons [ http://creativecommons.org ].