Matt Warshaw interviewed John Severson in 1995. Quotes from this conversation were used in "Articles of Faith: 35 Years of Surf Magazines," which ran in the Spring 1996 issue of Surfer's Journal.

I went to Capistrano Union High School. I was editor of the school paper, the Cougar Highlights. But there were only 160 kids at the whole school, so if you had anything going for you at all you could rise to the top. I was a pitcher on the baseball team, played football. Baseball I liked, football not so much.

I grew up without much money. I'd work in the summer to get enough money for school, then during school I worked on the weekends. So all I could afford was Orange Coast College, which I did for two years. Then I went to Chico State because it was a state school and I could go for practically nothing. You know, I actually picked up a lot of design ideas at Orange Coast. I was always fiddling with cameras, but that was outside of school. Orange Coast gave me a pretty good art background. And I worked on the paper there a little bit. At Chico I was focused on getting a teaching degree, but I took a few photography classes, learned about developing and processing, and also learned how to run projectors. I made a little extra money showing school films during classes—including the one about giving birth, which always caused a few girls in the classroom to faint.

Baseball, yes. I was still hoping to play pro, right up until the last year at Chico. I actually threw my arm out in high school but still had this dream that I could get it back; that I could get my fastball to hop. But it never really came back. A lot of my fastballs went straight into other guys' bats, then straight over the fence.

Didn't you go to Long Beach State at some point?

Yes, in 1955 and '56. That was a real awakening for me. I got a Masters in art education. I got into writing. And somewhere along the line I had to make a speech, and that loosened me up a little bit, which came in handy once I started to tour with my surf films because we did live narration. I got more confident in my painting, too, which in turn gave me confidence in my uniqueness as a surfer. I was painting surfing things, and the other students thought that was kind of bogus. And I remember, even at that time, thinking: how am I going to surf, paint and pay the bills? There wasn't anything coming along, as far as I could see.

You taught for a while after college, right?

Yes. Not long, though. I did my student teaching in a really depressed area of Long Beach, near a government housing project. The state was integrating mentally challenged students into the classroom. So I had six or ten of these low-IQ students. Which was actually a great experience, really educational for me, it just opened my eyes. After that I taught for just two or three months in Laguna, then I got drafted.

That ended up working out well for you, getting stationed in Hawaii.

The Army was a turning point, absolutely. You know, I wouldn't have minded getting stationed in Germany; I would have loved being in Europe. On the other hand, I just couldn't believe they were going to send me to Hawaii. All these other guys were saying "Oh, no, Hawaii is the worst duty in the Army." Everything there was expensive; the locals didn't like 

. But I was just delivered to Heaven. Some guys before me had already put together an Army surf team, and I got into that right away. They'd figured out that since the Makaha International was turning into a big thing, the Army should have a team, and I was the new hot recruit. There was a half-dozen of us. Mostly these really heavy local Hawaiian guys.

No, that began earlier. In college, when I could afford a roll of film I'd go off and shoot Huntington Beach, then edit something together, and show up at parties and we'd all just get smashed and run the thing through the projector over and over again.

How did you get into surfing, by the way?

I was a loner as a kid, for a lot of complex reasons. I think that's why I got into art and surfing, both. But, ah . . . I had a hard time with my dad, and that led to trouble in school when I was young. My dad used to beat me, and so I'd go to school beaten, and the kids picked up on that and they'd beat me too. This is when we lived in Pasadena, and in general I just didn't like a lot of what was going on around me. So when we moved to San Clemente [in 1945], that kind of gave me a new start, and when I started surfing a year or so later it was like I found my escape. I found my own place. I retreated into art, into photography, into surfing.

You made your first surf movie while you were in the Army, then one or two more before doing the first issue of 

They're gone. They don't exist at all anymore. I'd take the full-length film around for a few months, do maybe 50 shows, then cut the thing down to 37 minutes because I'd do these high school assemblies for 50 bucks apiece, which I needed just to keep the whole thing rolling, you know? And then I'd re-cut two or three movies into a highlight reel, and so on and so forth, and after a while the thing was just rags. Just torn to pieces, spliced and taped and spliced again, until it wouldn't even run through a projector anymore, and that's when its life was over.

Some of it exists. Bits and pieces. Some of it's been stolen. A lot of it's been stolen. Guys would come into the magazine, go into the warehouse, and a can or two of film would disappear. But those movies were period pieces, you know? Most of the stuff in there would be really boring now. Remember, they originally played to audiences who hadn't seen anything like it before. If an eight-foot wave came onscreen they'd just start screaming. And also, of course, you couldn't recreate the music or the narration, the way it was when we showed it originally. I mean, you could never bring it all back.

Fred Van Dyke went out with my first movie and did the narration, 'cause I was too crowd-shy to get up there and do it myself. Then I got it together and did it for my second movie, and a couple after that. But yes, live narration was a real experience. I'd write stuff down, then end up creating things as I went. Lines would pop up in the middle of a show. I was always amazed at how I could ad-lib something. I'd say a line and get a great reaction. By the end of the year I'd have this whole act down.

The music was taped. I just ran it on my Wollensak reel-to-reel, which I'd plug into a speaker system. I just took whatever songs I wanted, taped whatever I was listening to at the time that I thought would work. You learn how to choreograph the visuals to the music. If there's a big horn blast in the song, you show something special right there. Things like that.

You make any money on those early movies?

Believe it or not, yes, I did. After Fred brought the first film to California, right away I started getting checks in the mail for $75, $100, $300. That was big money! I was on an Army salary of $75 a month. So I was just rolling in it for a while there.

And then the magazine right away brought money in too, right?

No, the movies did great, the money rolled in, but the magazine sucked it right back out. For a couple of years, anyway.

You put the first issue together in your garage?

Yes, out of our garage, in Dana Point. No, wait, hold on. No, before that Louise [John's wife] and I were in a two-bedroom apartment, and the 2nd bedroom was the office. But I laid out the magazine in the front room because it was large enough to put all 36 pages down on the floor. Then we bought a house, I think it cost $25,000, there on Blue Lantern in Dana Point, and right away I turned the garage into an office. We moved from the apartment to the house either in late '59 or early '60. And then within a year or so we got a little office in Dana Point. Everything was happening so fast!

The cover of the first issue, of Jose Angel at Sunset—man, you tilted the hell out of that shot!

That was an old Bud Browne trick. Bud would tilt photos to make 'em look heavier. And I thought, Yeah, that works. I wanted it darker, but the printer, Parker and Sons, wouldn't do it. I liked really dark shots at the time, I liked how they felt, the drama.

It's also, and I kind of love this about the shot, but it's also really grainy.

That's because I didn't have many shots that were in focus! I had a couple of good shots of Waimea, one in particular of Pat Curren. Pat was runner-up for the cover. But for some reason, the Jose one just seemed right for the cover shot. I'm glad I stayed with it.

The first issue had that famous shot of Mickey Munoz doing what you called the "Quasimoto." How did that come about?

Mickey came up with all these sort of goofy things, these moves, the Mysterioso and the El Telephono. It was a riff on bullfighting. The bullfighter, in defiance, would go down on one knee and pretend to answer the phone, even as the bull was charging. Bravery and comedy in the face of danger. Mickey got into all that.

There's one flopped shot in there, of Fred, where's he's going left at Waimea.

I flopped it on purpose. There were too many right-breaking waves, and I wanted to do something to wake 'em up. Fred didn't see the humor in it. He thought it made him look like a bozo.

You ended the issue with that soon-to-be-famous quote, "In this crowded world . . . ." Do you remember how that page came together?

I do, yeah. I was laying out the magazine in Dana Point and came to the last page. I'd saved that picture because it meant so much to me.

No, it's not my picture. I forget who took it. Rennie Yater knows who it is. But the guy didn't want his name on the photo; he wasn't a big-time photographer or anything. He just picked up the camera and shot this great day at Hammonds. So I ran it without a credit.

I don't know his name either; just some local guy.

Another thing I remember is, I was driving to Los Angeles a few days a week around that time. I used to have to go up there a lot, for the films [Seveson was a surf moviemaker before he started SURFER], and then to get the magazine started up. It was harder to get things shipped back then, and I needed stuff all the time, so I was driving up there maybe three days a week—and I hated it! So when I hit the water, it really meant a lot. But back to the story, I was finishing up the magazine, got to the end, found that picture, and it struck me that here was this guy going out to these perfect waves all alone, and . . . [Severson trails off, at a loss for words]. I mean, that's it, you know? That's kinda the whole deal. And you can still do that, even now.

Do you remember actually writing the words?

I don't, no. But I do remember later, Fred Van Dyke saying to me, "You don't even know what you wrote there; the significance of it." And I remember thinking, "No, I understand it perfectly."

The first issue has a horizontal format. All the ones after are vertical. What made you do horizontal that first time, and how come you changed?

Just because photos fit better horizontally. Unfortunately, it didn't work on the newsstand, the magazine got lost behind all the other magazines. I wasn't thinking about that at the time. In fact, the idea at first was that the magazine would be sold mostly in bookstores. I imagined 

 as a little book, like an annual. That first issue was supposed to have a hard cover. But it cost too much, so I went with a card cover instead.

That first issue, what was the first shop you delivered to?

You and your brother drove around delivering mags?

I had a blue VW van, and my brother Jimmy helped with the delivery. We'd drive way out somewhere, all these different surf shops, and the shop would take, I don't know, seven magazines. Oh, great. Once we went all the way out to this big bookstore in Pasadena, we had like 50 magazines or something in the back of the van, and they ended up not buying a single copy.

The van, that's the same one in the background of that shot of you typing on the beach?

Yes. Except Louise actually did all the typing. That picture was a total set-up. Louise took the picture and made it look like I was doing all the work. She was right in there the whole way.

It had to do with community. Everybody who surfed was "the surfer." I wanted everybody to feel included. Title-wise, I mean, it was wide open for me; I could have picked anything. I had this list. Man, I wish I would've kept all that stuff. I wrote maybe 100 titles and just started crossing 'em off. "Surfing" certainly was in there at the end. "Surf Rider." "Surf." But "The Surfer" just felt right. It felt like we were something we were all going to do together.


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