STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Dick Metz found the world’s perfect surfing wave by accident. That accidental discovery spawned the 1966 movie “The Endless Summer” and changed the surfing scene forever.

Tonight “Birth of the Endless Summer: Discovery of Cape St. Francis,” which recounts the story behind the earlier movie, will be screened at Magic Lantern Cinemas in Ketchum. Metz will field questions following the 4:30 p.m. showing and introduce the second screening at 7 p.m.

“That was a long time ago,” said Metz of the time he first laid eyes on the wave near Cape Town, South Africa. “But I knew it was the best in the world. it’s a very, very consistent, beautifully shaped wave, and they have all the world championships there now.”

Surfing was hardly on anybody’s radar when Metz, now 94, took it up as a boy growing up in Laguna Beach, Calif., where he even hung out with Shirley Temple.

“It was the throes of the Depression and people didn’t have jobs or a place to live. People were living on the streets—there was no recreation. Those who did have jobs didn’t have weekends off. They didn’t say, ‘Let’s take off for the weekend and go skiing or surfing. You didn’t do that then,” he said.

Metz learned to surf as a 6-year-old boy from surfer kids his father had babysit him outside his  beachside restaurant. There were probably a hundred people on the West Coast who surfed in 1935, he estimates. Surfboards then were 15 feet long carved out of solid redwood and they weighed between a hundred and 120 pounds.

“You couldn’t buy them. You had to make your own. And when you were done surfing, you left them on the beach. They weighed so much you knew no one was going to carry them off,” he said.

By 1960 while Metz was in the middle of his three-year journey around the world, manufacturers were making surfboards out of foam, which knocked the weight down to 35 or 40 pounds.

“This allowed girls and younger kids to surf. You could pick up a board and put it on the roof of your car. Of course, now, they’re maybe 5 pounds and five feet long.”

Metz didn’t exactly set out on his trip around the world to find the perfect wave. His father had served  in the South Pacific during World War II, and this spurred him to read all he could find about that part of the world. Soon, he yearned to see “the bare breasted maidens of the South Seas” that “True” and “Argust” magazines wrote about.

“In those days, there were no ‘Playboy’ magazines, R-rated movies or TV. There was no pill, sex was unheard of and girls wore Mother Hubbard dresses where you never saw any skin,” he said. “As a young guy I wanted to see a naked girls. I read about Tahiti and the South Seas, about how the water was warm, the air was warm, and they were running around naked.”

At 32 Metz was bartending his father’s bar and had no money. But he yearned to go to Tahiti and Australia. He wanted to go to Africa to see wild elephants, lions and wild tribes. He wanted to go to the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. And he wanted to run with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.

There was no air travel to Tahiti in those days so he hitchhiked to Panama, catching a ride on a boat ferrying troops and supplies from Marseille to the Indo-China War in Vietnam. After he’d had his fill of Tahiti, he caught work on a Norwegian freighter to Australia, then another that took him to places like Cambodia and India where he watched the snake charmers before heading to Africa

“I spent three years hitchhiking around the world and the movie covers only about six months of it,” he said.

After working in East Africa for a safari company, Metz caught a ride at a little town in Tanzania bound for  Victoria Falls. They traveled at night, taking refugee during the day from temperatures that could get as high as 130 degrees. Consequently, the driver arrived at the falls at 2 a.m. in the morning. But, when he woke Metz up, Metz peered out the window and decided not to stop.

“There was no gas station, no hotel, no buildings, nothing there except a couple little African huts and a burnout fire flickering in the night. I said, ‘Where are you going?’ and the driver said ‘I’m going another 1,500 miles to Cape Town, South Africa. So, I said, ‘Screw it. I can see Victoria Falls later.’ ”

The decision was made easy by the difficulty of getting from one place to another in Africa, Metz said.

“Africa is four times bigger than the United States and, at the time, there was only one road that went from Cape Town to Cairo. None of the roads were paved, the roads were single lane, there were no bridges, no gas stations, no place to stop for food. So, you had to carry all your own food, gas, everything—I was riding in a truck that had to carry a 55-gallon drum of gasoline.

“I waited 17 days for one car to come by,” he added. “We’re not talking about Highway 101. You’re out in the jungle and the Serengeti Plain, and elephants and lions are out there and it’s scary and dangerous.”

In Cape Town, Metz met John Whitmore, a used car salesman whom he stayed with for seven months. As Whitmore showed him around, Metz spied the wave that set his heart racing.

“The South Africans didn’t surf,” he said. “John wanted to learn to make surfboards after I told him about surfing. But they didn’t have material for making them so I came home, loaded a container with surfboard material and shipped it to Cape Town, then flew back in 1962.”

In 1964 Metz finally talked his friend Bruce Brown, who had made his first surfing moving, “Slippery When Wet,” into retracing his footsteps to Tahiti, Australia and Africa via film. The 1966 movie became the most popular surf movie in the world—“still is,” Metz said—and spawned a surfing revolution.

Metz settled in Hawaii where he co-founded Hobie Surf Shops and ran a surf clothing shop named Jams on Front Street in Lahaina. The building where the shop was located burned in last week’s wildfire. Metz also founded a surf museum in San Clemente. And after checking out Sun Valley’s skiing in 1952, he eventually settled in Sun Valley, trading the ocean for Warm Springs Creek, which sits between his home and Bald Mountain ski area.

The new documentary, directed by Richard Yelland, features Metz and Brown, who passed away in 2017.

“Much like Brown’s The Endless Summer, Birth of the Endless Summer is a testament to the fact that life is meant to be enjoyed, meant to be explored and meant to be fully experienced in all its discomforts and comforts,” wrote critic Alexander Hars for The Inertia.

“I had been to the wave twice before Bobby Brown got there once,” Metz reminisced. “Since, I’ve been there 12 times. Finding it was a serendipity-type of thing. I stayed in the car, and things fell in place.”