Woody Brown (surfer and catamaran inventor)

For other people of this name, see Woody Brown (disambiguation).

Woody 'Spider' Brown (1912-2008) was a surfer and designer notable for introducing surfing to America and for the invention of the modern catamaran.

Early Life

Woodbridge Brown was born into a wealthy family of Wall Street brokers in January 1912. By the time of the Wall Street crash of 1929 he had rejected the trappings of this life, though still benefited from its connections. At this time, he had moved out of the family home and was sleeping on hangar floors, helping with chores with early aviators such as Charles Lindburgh, whom he waved off on his historic 1927 flight to Paris.

Aviation

Inspired by Lindburgh, he bought a glider for $25 and towed it to California with his new four-year-old stepdaughter Jenny and wife Betty Sellon, a widowed daughter of a retired army officer with a distaste for the glitz of the "gilded age", whom he'd met at a society party he'd been persuaded to attend.

Brown was the first to launch a glider off the cliffs at La Jolla and in 1939 set a new world record for altitude, distance, and time aloft by flying his glider, Thunderbird, 263 miles from Texas to Kansas.

Surfing

Brown began body-surfing in California on a carved wooden plank, using it in a style now known as Boogie-boarding. Realising that if he could stand up he could catch waves before they broke, he used his knowledge of aerodynamics to build his first hollow plywood surfboard in 1936, a forerunner of modern boards. Although people had been surfing for years in the Polynesian islands, this was the first appearance of it in California. For more manoeuvrability, he added a skeg, or small keel, a breakthrough normally accredited to another legendary American surfer, Tom Blake. Brown was happy to give Blake credit.

Death, WWII, and more surfing

His wife Betty died giving birth to a son, Jeffrey, in 1940. Brown suffered a breakdown: "She was all I lived for. I cracked up." Depressed and near-suicidal, he left the baby Jeffrey and stepdaughter Jenny with Betty's family and moved to Hawaii, not making contact again until they were grown up due to his remorse and guilt. He had intended to move to the South Pacific, but WWII's intervention prevented him getting a visa so he was forced to stay in Hawaii. Brown was a conscientious objector during the war (and had been a vegetarian since his youth after looking into the eyes of a chipmunk he had wounded with a shotgun).

He joined half a dozen other surfers who collectively became known as the Hot Curl surfers, named after a new type of board they carved, semi-hollow, with a V-tail to avoid what they called "slide-ass" and help them stick to the "hot curl", the breaking curve of a wave.

Brown was one of Hawaii's first big wave surfers and board designers. He was nicknamed "Spider" because, as he put it, "I surf with my arms all out, half squatting down, and with my long legs I look like a big spider riding a board." He was captured in a 1953 photograph by Thomas Tsuzuki which helped turn Hawaii into a mecca for surfers worldwide. It showed three men riding a 20-foot wave, the kind rarely if ever photographed close-up in those days. Brown was the only one who "made" the wave.

Invention of the catamaran

After the war, Brown served as a US government surveyor on Christmas Island. There he was fascinated by the speed of the Polynesian natives' twin-hulled outrigger canoes. Back in Hawaii he adapted the idea, using lightweight hulls and adding huge sails, and in 1947 built the Manu Kai ("Sea Bird"), probably the fastest sailing boat in the world at the time and now seen as the first modern, ocean-going catamaran. He did not patent the idea; Californian surfer Hobie Alter, who sailed on the Manu Kai, did so and made a fortune as a result.

Later life

Brown, having benefited from the Hawaiians' aloha spirit of generosity when he first arrived, became the epitome of that spirit in later life and was renowned for sharing "life's positive energy" with whomever he met.

He met and married his second wife, Rachel, a hula dancer, in the mid-1940s, and had two children with her: William and Mary-Sue. Rachel died in 1986 and the following year, "feeling lonesome", he married Macrene Canaveral, whom he met in the Philippines on a trip specifically "to get me a new wife". Their son Woody Jnr was born when Brown was 76.

Brown never sought fame or recognition. Nevertheless he featured in two US documentaries: Surfing for Life (1999) and Of Wind and Waves: the Life of Woody Brown (2006), both made by the mainland American David L. Brown (no relation). It was during the filming of the latter that he was reunited with Jeffrey and Jenny.

He said of the surf in Hawaii: "I loved to get just as close to death as I possibly could and then dodge it. That was my thrill in life."

References

• Davison, Phil (2008.05.03) Record-breaking aviator who became a legendary surfer The Financial Times (obituary)