20.3 Whitmore

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Wl ConneEDThe 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) enjoy
a ride in the sand dunes above Velorenvlei, outside of Elands Bay. He
discovered the nearby left-hand point in 1957, bought a farm called
“Aandster” in the early ’70s, retired there in the ’90s, and when he
passed in 2002 his ashes were dispersed in the river below…where
they no doubt washed down to the point.
DickMetzcollectionSHF

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.
Gunshs and bsters
While 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....”
Atlanc Ocean Gesis
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 secondstop 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:
77
The “Oom” talks story somewhere near Elands Bay on South Africa’s west coast with
Pat O’Connell, Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, Bruce Brown, and company after a day’s
surfing 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 and
unsung South African Springbok surf prodigy-turned-troubled-hippie journeyman,
Donald Paarman.
SHaronMarSHall
JoHnWHitMorecollection

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.
Prtypes and Expration
So, 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 Mome
A 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
79
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 regarding
the 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 these
two 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 surfing
in the cold Atlantic. Judging from the color of that water, it couldn’t be more than 9 or 10 degrees Celsius (49 degrees Farenheit).

am, Magnes, 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 Summ
In late 1963, John Whitmore greeted Brown, August, and
Hynson at Cape Town airport. Spurred by Metz’s glowing
Kombis and Craysh
In 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 Calirnia Kid
It 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....’”
8180
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-era
airport policemen.
John’s 185 Buitengracht Street factory, the de facto grand central of the ‘60s Cape
Town surfy scene, where Whitmore Surfboards were made and Clark Foam blanks
blown. Note the VWs in the foreground and the Kombi (stacked high with boxes of
Clark Foam). While still working at the VW showroom in Cape Town and shaping boards
at night and on the weekend, the “Oom” is reputed to have sold many a surfer a
combo deal of a surfboard and Kombi or Bug.

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 Conntion
For 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.
82
A 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 surfing
clans et al., many of whom also worked for him in his factory at one stage or another.
83
Part of the 1970 Springbok surfing team departing for the world championships in Bells
Beach, Australia, including Shaun Tomson, Michael Tomson, manager John Whitmore,
Donald Paarman, and captain George Thomopoulos. It was on this trip that Whitmore
would soon discover the second great passion of his life: Hobie Cats.

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 Ends
Besides 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
Tomsonstill 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 Dicon
Fortunately, 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.
85
Meeting Duke for the first time at the 1966 World Championships in San Diego was a
special 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 his
teenage 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 to
detail, his mint-condition polyurethane Clark Foam boards are prized collector’s items, some still surfed regularly by their owners.

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.
Bce Brown Rus
Through 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 Yea
One 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 commercialization 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.” ◊
86
Never regarded by himself as a particularly “great” surfer, Whitmore was nevertheless
one of the most adept of his generation. This photo was probably taken at his home
turf of Glen Beach around in the early to mid-’60s.
pHotograpHeDbyDezitter.
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 well
spent. By all accounts he was also forever stoked in his charismatic, humble way.

20.3 Whitmore

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