📍Manhattan Beach, CA, USA
1940 – 1954“I was born in San Diego in February 1937, and as a small boy I moved with my mother to Manhattan Beach, a small beach town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, with a long wooden pier and wide sandy beaches. We lived near the pier, and I learned to fish there and worked dishing out bait, and I spent every hour I could on the beach and in the water. I hung around with the local lifeguards and begged them to let me ride one of their heavy rescue paddleboards, until they finally gave in and lent me one. By ten or eleven I was surfing the South Bay, and I joined the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, where I learned to shape surfboards from Dale Velzy, the first commercial shaper, who opened a professional surf shop in Manhattan Beach. I shaped my own balsa boards in my parents' garage and later in Velzy's shop, and I became a Los Angeles County lifeguard and a competitive paddleboarder. I was big and strong, and I loved the biggest waves. At seventeen I went to Hawaii, and on the North Shore of Oahu I became one of the first to surf Waimea Bay in 1957, and they called me Da Bull for the way I charged the giant waves in my striped trunks. In 1969 I rode what was thought to be the biggest wave ever surfed, at Makaha. Back in California I built one of the biggest surfboard companies, Greg Noll Surfboards, in Hermosa Beach. The South Bay remembers the bait boy from the Manhattan Beach pier who became Da Bull.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today