Writer Jeff Duclos interviewed Matt Kivlin for a 1998 Longboard magazine profile titled “Matt Kivlin: A Precedent of Style."


He’s someone I knew my whole life. [Peterson’s brother was married to Kivlin’s aunt.] I’d see Pete at family gatherings or run into him at the beach. He always had his own way of doing things, and was good at everything he did. I worked one summer at the Jonathan Club [Santa Monica] as a beachboy. This was 1943, I was 14. I had a paddleboard that I’d made in woodshop, and Pete came by the club one day and asked if I’d like to go surfing at Palos Verdes. We went to the Cove and he pushed me into a few waves. I was hooked.


It was tough. There wasn’t anybody to copy. Everybody was gone, so you kind of learned from pictures in 

. Gard Chapin was around, and he was good for the time. Very showy.


He’d been hit by a car and was still recovering from that. He was pretty thin and a lot of the muscle in his arm [where he’d been hit] had atrophied. Paddling was hard for Bob, and he was struggling, trying to catch waves. No one paid him much attention for a long time, but he hung in there. And of course he was the kind of guy you’d pay attention to after a while. He brought in concaves, twin-fins, and the scoop nose. As with most people who design things, a lot of what he did was to design around his own capabilities. He had a lot of trouble paddling. If you hold your elbow stiff and try and get it in the water and paddle, you can see where you’d want something other than a big, heavy board.


He was older and had a car, such as it was. Us kids would pile into his four-door Model A convertible and go—Malibu and Point Dume to the north, Palos Verdes, Dana Point and San Onofre to the south. And other places. Simmons was out there looking all the time. He had topographic charts from around the world, and he collected these pilot books that described each section of coast—it was like a hobby. He’d get out his charts and see where there was a reef or a point, and we’d drive there and take a look.


Simmons and I worked together out of my mother’s garage for a little while, but we didn’t get along real well. Then Simmons tried working out of his own house, but he didn’t get along with his brother, so he opened a shop in Santa Monica, at 20th and Olympic, among a bunch of sheet metal shops. He built this little plywood box in the back which was his room, and he lived there. There were plenty of other shops available in the same area, and the rent was very reasonable, so I rented one and Joe [Quigg] rented one. Joe and I did a lot of things together. We got along really well. I’d build some boards. He’d build some boards. We’d try something a little different each time, and take them down to Malibu, one or two boards a week, and try them out. We’d surf Malibu every day at five o’clock. If a board worked well, somebody would usually come up and ask to buy it.


Tommy Zahn went in ’47 and wrote us about the waves and all the places he’d been, so we went over on the 

 in ’48. It was the cheapest way to travel, and you could take all your stuff. This was late winter, early spring. We mostly surfed Waikiki.


He was light years ahead of everybody. What people later called the “Malibu style”—that was something we got from Rabbit and the hot curl guys. Stall, run to the nose, shoot the curl. We brought that kind of surfing from Hawaii back to California. Before that, everybody here just stood on the tail.


To accommodate the new style, we began making the front of the board kind of pointy so it wouldn’t pound [slap the water]. Then the center was flatter and the tail kicked up so it would be maneuverable.

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