The Day Hobie Made Nixon a Surfboard

Tricky Dick Was Not the First President to Hang at Cottons Point

Cotton’s, the best lefthander of the series of cobbled point waves was named after  Hamilton Cotton. He financed San Clemente founder Ole Hanson, helping him develop  “The Little Spanish Village by the Sea.” Cotton, a major moneyman, was also treasurer of the California Democratic Party during President Franklin Roosevelt’s four unprecedented terms. The two would play cards and talk politics when FDR would come down to visit Cotton on the train that still runs right past the Trestles breaks.

In the early days of the Roaring Twenties, before the Great Depression collapsed America’s economy for a decade, Hamilton bought 20 acres of choice land overlooking the Pacific and built an opulent Spanish Colonial-style 10-room hacienda that spared no expense.

Nixon bought the estate in 1969 from Cotton's widow shortly after his victory in the tumultuous election that saw riots and the clash of the generations over Vietnam, civil rights and longhaired free spirits, many of them surfers.

The 38th President dubbed the home "La Casa Pacifica". It was soon nicknamed "The Western White House" by the press and was the name Nixon himself preferred.

The Western White House is Born

If you are wondering how all this relates to a surfboard Nixon once owned, you are about to find out. It is a tale of two surfboards. Well, three actually, but we’ll get to that. First we need to set the stage.

When the President’s family moved into the Cotton estate Nixon’s younger daughter, Tricia, (that’s the sweet, prettier one) wanted a housewarming present for dad on Father’s Day. What better than a surfboard to say beach life and fun? But how to get one? Secret Service wouldn’t have a clue. She knew the name Hobie, a brand famous around the world and discovered it was right in San Clemente. Perfect!  Ordering a board from Hobie for her father board to arrive by Father’s Day, she left it in the good hands of the Hobie craftsmen.

The shaping job fell to Hobie shaping guru Terry Martin. Martin was the main production shaper who is estimated to have mowed  over 80,000 boards, perhaps the most shaped by any single person. After Terry the production was picked up by Danny Brawner, the lynchpin craftsman for Hobie’s Dana Point factory, who glassed, pin-lined and resin-tinted the majority of the hundreds of sticks moving out of the factory each month. Danny worked with legendary shapers such as Micky Munoz, Gerry Lopez and Corky Carroll, as well as Terry “the Machine” Martin.

Dealing with Disaster

Tricia’s custom order, with pin-lines, tints, tailblock, presidential seal and all, was finished ahead of schedule and had come out looking fabulous,” Danny told me over a breakfast recently. But on the afternoon before they were to deliver the Father’s Day present to the POTUS home, disaster struck. As Danny explains it, Someone, (Danny said no one ever fessed up the blunder) either knocked the board over or dropped it while moving it from its glossing rack to the boxing room.

“The damage was not much more than your average ding, but it was a glaring boo-boo that just couldn’t be hidden. Or fixed without showing,” He laughs now at the thought of it. “There just no way we could give this to the President of the United States.”

Danny and the crew at Hobie were in a panic. “There was no way to make a new board,” Danny remembers. “None of us knew what to do.”

But Danny came up with a novel idea, which would at least prevent the accident from catastrophe. He figured he couldn’t make a full-sized remake. But he could build a 3-foot miniature as an “artists proof. Much like a sculptor makes a small version of a life-size figure before the final casting, he could present it as “at least something!”

Danny went into full fiber jacket mode, sculpting, glassing, sanding, putting all the detail back into the mini-board. It went through the night and into the next day, but by deadline time, they had something to take to Tricia for the family affair.

“I guess his daughter was OK with it. She never knew why the real board didn’t show up,” he chuckles. A second full-size board was made and delivered days later, and no one was the wiser. But people still ask, what happened to the board afterwards?

Hobiegate: A Piece of History Lost in the Mist

When the Nixon’s sold the classic Casa Pacifica beachside mansion in 1980 to retired Allergan CEO Gavin Herbert, the presidential assistant press secretary Judy Johnson gave me the board for safekeeping when the Nixon family declined to take it with them to their new home in New York City. It hung proudly in my North Beach restaurant in San Clemente for many years, enjoyed by thousands of visitors who patronized Margarita’s Village in those heady times. One day a member of Nixon’s press crew demanded that it be returned to him. Begrudgingly I gave it to him. Where that famous piece of surf history lies now, no one seems to know.

Nor will we ever know if Nixon took the board into the water while he lived at Cottons. Neither Danny Brawner nor his son and master student Damian were able to confirm if President Nixon ever stepped foot on the full-sized model. It belongs in a surf museum. Hopefully someday it will.