Legendary Surfer Les 'Birdman' Williams RIP
Legendary Surfer Les Williams has passed on. Les was the first one to show what could be done with a Quigg Chip at Malibu in the late 1940s. He remained active in surfing and was dedicated to the San Onofre Surfing Club, as a long-time member and recently as President. The club's blog has a bit more about Les available to view by clicking here.
After shaping the first Malibu Board in 1947 and seeing Tommy Zahn's success with Darrylin's board, Joe Quigg followed up by shaping a similar board for his girlfriend Aggie [September 1950]... What subsequently happens is told by C.R. Stecyk in terse style:
"Joe Quigg fashions a couple of extremely light 9'0" surfboards for his wife Aggie and his friends. Quigg frequents ten different lumber yards to get the lightest balsa possible. These twenty-four pound boards were an immediate curiosity.
"Les Williams, a guy from Santa Monica, borrows Aggie's board, and promptly begins to surf in a manner never before seen. The Birdman starts laying out full banked turns on the wave's face, and is cutting back from the wave's top all the way through the curl and then bouncing back into a bottom turn.
"Matt Kivlin has bought some balsa from Joe and has fashioned a 9'6" streamlined stick for his girlfriend and starts surfing it for fun. Being the best surfer around, people are acutely aware of these light boards performance capabilities. The extremism of Williams and Kivlin set the new style. Leslie Williams was the first one to cutback," Steve Pezman, editor of The Surfer's Journal stated it simply to me in 1998.
Nat Young, in his "History of Surfing" put it another way, writing that even though this second of what would later be termed Malibu boards was built by Joe Quigg for his girlfriend Aggie, "she was not the person who ended up surfing it. It was a radical nine foot-six-inch long board and eventually wound up in the hands of a local surfer named Leslie Williams. He ended up wailing on that board, becoming the hottest surfer in the area and turning faster than anyone else."
Joe Quigg recalled that these 9 foot balsa boards were considered small, but were a big hit with his girlfriend Aggie... and her girlfriends. "So Matt (Kivlin) bought some balsa from me and made his girlfriend a nice, streamlined nine-six board.
That was Matt's first light, all-balsa board." It was out of curiosity and fun, Quigg said, that Kivlin began surfing on his girlfriend's smaller board. "And about the same time, another local surfer by the name of Leslie Williams began borrowing my wife's balsa board."
"In those days," continued Quigg, "Matt was the best surfer around, so he made quite an impression on people who saw him on that light board. And Williams, he really got into my wife's board. He started doing things nobody had ever seen before. He was the first guy I knew of who made radical bank turns.
He would lay out on a wave and just generally rip." Together, Kivlin and Williams made quite a splash and began setting the style for everybody who was watching them.