Greg Noll photographed by John Severson in 1964 at Pipeline
Beach style is one of the hardest to pull off but somehow Greg Noll figured it out. Whether the jailhouse trunks were a conscious statement or not their legacy cannot be denied. Enough to the point where he was recognizable by just one article of clothing. You can't say that about a lot of icons. His attitude and fearless stee is highly respected in these parts. Here's the cool story of those legendary shorts in the man's words himself...
"Going back to when I was about 13 years old everybody was wearing plain old trunks from JC Penney's or wherever you bought trunks from in those days. I spent a lot of time at the Manhattan Beach Surf Club under the pier. This was at turn of the Grannis era, when surfers were guys like Don James and Doc Ball, educated guys who went to church and didn't swear and were polite. Well I got involved when the whole thing was falling to shit and guys like Dale Velzy and George Kapu got involved. Things turned and went the other way. There was a pretty earthy group of guys at the Manhattan Pier who set the style for the South bay and that effected things all up and down the street.
So what happened at Manhattan Beach is someone like Barney Briggs or Velzy started going to the Salvation Army to buy their clothes, because you could get an overcoat or Army surplus stuff for 25 cents. Well they started buying white sailor pants and cutting them off above the knees and started surfing in them. And that caught on, and pretty soon everyone was doing it. At some point somebody got the idea to see who could live in those cutoff sailor pants the longest, without taking them off or washing them.
There were rules to this deal. You could only drop the shorts to your knees to take a crap, or to your ankles to screw your girlfriend. Otherwise they stayed on and whoever kept them on the longest won.
Anyway these things got to be the standard surf attire for the guys in the South Bay and when some guys started going to Hawaii to surf Makaha they were still wearing their cutoff whites.
On the west side of Oahu in Waianae there was a tailor named M Nii. He and his wife were Japanese or Filipino and they made shorts for the Hawaiian surfers. At the time some guys were wearing Outrigger Canoe Club shorts that had stripes down the side, but those were a big deal to get. You had to know someone or be a part of the club or get them underground somehow.
At some point we started going in there and looking at all the different-colored striping material - red and gold and green and all kinds of colors.
I think it was Billy Ming who first got the idea to go to M Nii to get that colored striping into their white shorts. The gaudier the better. One guy had red and another guy got blue stripes and some guys had trunks that looked like a clown suit.
Well they wore those trunks as hard at Makaha as they did at Manhattan Beach and by the end of the winter they were so worn out, guys would go back to M Nii and get some more custom tailoring done before they went back to the mainland.
Guys were pretty much living in those shorts so they evolved wax pockets and comb pockets and wallet pockets and all this shit.
I went back to California with those white sailor cutoffs customized by M Nii and people really liked them. So the next winter I went back to Hawaii with orders and measurements from my friends and about $350, which was a lot of money back then. I got custom trunks made for myself and friends and the rest is history, you know? I don't know what other guys will tell you but this is all happened when I was 15, so that would have been 1952."
For more on Greg Noll, the cultural and artistic significance of surf check The Art of the Surfboard...
