Billy Meng was a surfing pioneer and fishing legend who’d been close friends with my dad, George, since the 1940s. They met in the South Bay but later moved to Santa Barbara, and Billy was like part of our family. I grew up listening to Billy’s stories in his wise old leprechaun voice:
“In 1938, I was 8 when I got my first surfboard. It was a Tom Blake and was a hollow wooden board with a cork plug and a cord that I pulled to let the water out. Fiberglass wasn’t used back in those days. I surfed in a wool sweater because wetsuits weren’t invented yet and witnessed the first surf leash just about the time I was getting out of surfing.
“I have had a life out of the movies, and enough adventure, surfing, fishing — and dated enough women! — to last three lifetimes. Some people say that I created the surf culture and was probably the first of the free spirits. Dewey Weber, Greg Noll, Miki Dora, Mickey Munoz, Mike Stang, and Velzy all called me ‘The Legend.’ I was like the Pied Piper and influenced those young surfer kids; many became legends themselves. My truck was full; by the time I drove from Manhattan Beach to Malibu, I picked up so many of them that there were surfers and surfboards everywhere, kids were on the roof, on my running boards, in the back with all of the boards and six of us sitting in the front seat!
“In the ’50s, I was Greg Noll’s guardian in Hawai‘i. He was only 16, but later Greg became a surf legend, and the first to conquer Waimea and a 25-foot wave at the outside reef at Banzai Pipeline. In my twenties, I lived under the Manhattan Beach pier, surfed; I didn’t work, but always made out. I lived in surf trunks and enjoyed life the way it should be lived, but not everybody agreed to that. I didn’t have a job, got my mail at the Knot Hole Bar, and ate breakfast at The White Stop Café at the bottom of the pier and drove an old Weber’s bread truck.
“At 22, I moved to Santa Barbara. In 1952, the 101 freeway was just a small road. I drove up the coast with my surfboard and had countless miles of beach all to myself. They called them ‘Billy’s Beaches.’ Hardly anybody surfed. It was totally different back then. Those were the best years of surfing because there were only four guys that surfed in this area.
“One place I heard a lot about was Rincon, but nobody surfed it. I asked the guys at my college fraternity that I later got kicked out of, ‘Where’s Rincon at?’
“They said, ‘We don’t know where the heck that is, but the best place to surf is called ‘Three Mile.’
“I told myself, ‘I’m going to find this place called Three Mile!’ I grabbed my board and drove my ’40 Ford coupe through Carpinteria on top of Rincon hill and looked down and said, ‘OH MY GOD, LOOK AT THOSE WAVES COMING IN!’
“I drove down to the beach, parked on the road, grabbed my board, and surfed perfect five-foot waves. I was the only one out, it was the middle of October, and the surf stayed up every day ’til June.
“In 1953, we never had any money for pay phones, so me and my roommate Dick Metz figured out a way to give each other a secret code for the surf report for free from a telephone booth. In those days Dick dialed ‘0’ for the operator and would say, ‘I want a person-to-person collect call to Billy Meng from Mr. Be Swell.’
“I could hear Dick on the other line, we’d have codes for this stuff, and I would say, ‘No, I won’t accept the call, but tell him Billy isn’t here right now, but that he’ll be back at 6 o’clock.’ That meant six feet at Rincon and if it was 6:15, that would mean it was a little windy and choppy, and 6:05 was calm and flat.
“Later, I became a commercial fisherman and moved to my Hammond’s beach house in Santa Barbara. It was a captain’s paradise nestled right on the beach. I met a lot of good gals and barbequed tons of fresh lobster, abalone, and seafood that I caught. I invited beachcombers to join me on my patio to enjoy homemade paella. Oh, the beach life was just so simple! There I made friends with actresses Julie Andrews and Kim Novak.
“Commercial fishing was a dangerous occupation, especially the one time when a pod of killer whales surrounded my boat in the Santa Barbara Channel. One whale wanted my dog Russell for lunch, so we ran inside the cabin and looked out of the port hole and the eye of that killer whale was peering in at us. We were scared!
“I almost lost my life at sea, when I didn’t realize that I was standing inside a big stack of coiled rope. All of a sudden, my boat hit a big swell and went up the giant crest of the wave; all 15 traps that were roped together were sliding off the back of my boat down into the ocean. The coil wound tight around my boot ankle and the rope was pulling me overboard with the traps — each weighed 100 pounds. I hit the deck flying and couldn’t get to my controls to stop the boat. That was almost the end of old Billy boy right there! Luckily, I put my right foot on a stanchion post, and my left foot was hanging over the left side of the boat with all of my traps dragging. I was going down into the bottom of the ocean when suddenly my boot popped off!
“I was on the cover of the National Fisherman in my boat the Giocanda: ‘Fishing Salmon with Billy Meng.’ The saddest moment of my life was when that magazine burned up with my trailer in the White Fire in 2013.”
Billy and I sat under the ancient white oak tree at his new spot at Paradise Campground. “On my tombstone epitaph, I want it to say, ‘Billy was a good person.’ If you’re a good person, people will like you. Just be good to everybody. It’s really simple!”
I held Billy in my arms at Cottage Hospital. “Jennifer, when you’d come to my beach house as a little girl, I knew that we had something special — ‘ditto, ditto!’” (Our secret code for “I love you.”) He took his last breath at 6:05 a.m.; his secret surf code immediately popped into my head: 6:05 meant “calm and flat,” and I knew that Billy was at peace.
This piece is adapted from Know When to Jump, an autobiography by Billy Meng with Jennifer Grgich-Harden, introduction by Peter Maguire. A celebration of Billy’s life will be held Sunday, November 26, at 11 a.m. at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum’s outdoor patio, weather permitting. For more information, contact Jennifer at sugar_shack77@yahoo.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment.