Ron and Tracy Sizemore remember their father Ted and his enthusiasm for surfing and reflect on their experiences with surfing competitions. Ron Sizemore (left) and Tracy Sizemore (right). Recorded at Dana Point Library.
Transcript
0:12 RS: Our father made surfboards. Then there were very few, uh, in the '50s, very few surfboard shops around that you could go buy a surfboard, so, there again we were really lucky that we had a father that, he surfed in the 1930s in Long Beach and Palos Verdes, and also in San Onofre.
0:30 TS: My dad, Ted Sizemore, uh, he made me my first board when I was five years old. It was a balsa wood board. And eight feet long, and it had an Andy Panda sticker.
0:42 RS: I remember that!
0:44 TS: Yeah. AndOne of the pictures I gave you of the Model A with all the surfboards on the top What my dad did, because all the boards were balsa wood at that time, is that each fin had an orange stripe on it. So, if you lost it while you were surfing then you were swimming in to get it, and it would fin up, then you could see yours had the orange stripe on it. And sometimes like, at Doheney in the old days, there'd be like a bunch of toothpicks inside the surf line there, 19cuz everybody wiped out on the same wave. So that's where I got my start to surfing in, and all of us, of course either as a family went to San Onofre or to Doheney.
1:27 TS: Mother surfed. My sister kind of surfed. She had her own board. She had her, like I said, had her own board, it was.
1:34 RS: Old balsaown balsa wood board,
1:36 TS: Yeah.
1:36 RS: and then some years later, Ted had gotten her a uh, Gordy Board, uh, in Huntington Beach, and it was a foam board that when they made the transition from balsa wood to foam, and it was uh, looked like they had poured a pigment into the foam and then stirred it, and it was a strawberry color. Really nice board! She was reallyIt was a girly board and she was really happy with that. She broke away from the boys'wood, balsa wood boards, and was also lighter, and she could handle it.
2:07 TS: My dad made a surfboard trailer, metal, that we could carry the 10'3 surfboards on. It Ronnie had modified his so that he could put the hibachi, the sleeping bag and everything.
2:20 RS: I had a Coleman stove!
2:21 TS: and Coleman stove, too! And he would ride all the way from Laguna Beach up to Malibu and sleep on the beach.
2:28 RS: [Our] parents let me do that! Yeah.
2:30 TS: And so he was doing this anda long time ago when they had the Longboard Surfing Magazine out, some the guys they were interviewed [from] the Malibu Surfing Association, they made the comment we always looked forward to beginning of summer when Ron Sizemore would ride his bike up with the surfboard trailer and camp out on the beach here for a whole week.
2:51 RS: It was uh, seventy miles up there, and the first year I did it, I did it on a balloon-tired bicycle. And the reason they looked forward to it, too, was because, it was coincidental, but when I would show up a Malibu, the surf would pick up too. Uh, and I'd sleep right behind the lifeguard tower there, at Malibu. [I] put towels up on the fence so you couldn't see [me from] the Coast Highway, and nobody bothered me.
3:14 RS: And the second year I did it, I did it on a ten-speed. And uh, it had all the gears and all that stuff, but it still took twelve hours to get up there. It was, it was an interesting uh, trip.
3:25 TS: In 19
3:26 RS: . .61.
3:26 TS: 61, Ronnie was the Men's U. S. Surfing Champion at Huntington Beach. He was a junior at the time. He surfed up to the Men's Division. He was only seventeen when he won that contest.
3:41 RS: Uhgoing back to contestswhat's interesting is, that they had a contest at Salt Creek, again, which is in front of us here, uh, backoh, I wanna say, in the, probably late Seventies, Eighties when they first started offering money, and a young kid, I forget what his name is, right off hand, but uh, won enough to put a, put money down on a house in Laguna. And, uh, in the old days it was just a hearty handshake and aa trophy, or whatever. But contests now. In fact kids are, uh, training to surf, where we just went out and surfed for the pure enjoyment of it.
4:20 TS: [inaudible] a trophy was nice, but even to get a free t-shirt, or for years I was in what they called the [] Olympics surfing event, and it was actually a board that my dad shaped, 10'3, the yellow board that I still have. And I always say that board won more gold medals than any other board I surfed on. I was just along for the ride.
4:45 END
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