Surfing the Sun Belt South:An Oral History Steve Estes (bio) Glenn Tanner works at the paper mill north of Charleston, South Carolina. This week, he will have seven, twelve-hour shifts in as many days. He grumbles that the company would rather pay existing workers overtime than hire new ones and pay more benefits. Even though the hours are tough, Glenn is sticking it out. Close to retirement, he can see the light at the end of the tunnel. In Glenn's case, it's the sunlight illuminating the opening of a head-high, glassy tube as the Atlantic Ocean barrels into the Carolina coast.1 Glenn was the second surfer I interviewed for a project on surfing in the American South. The interview took place two hundred yards from the ocean after a dawn patrol surf session at the Folly Beach Pier in South Carolina. Glenn insisted that we meet in the water. A storm brewed. Lightning forked menacingly a few miles offshore. It didn't matter to Glenn. He was most comfortable in the ocean. After our surf session, Glenn was circumspect about his mill work, but when I asked him about the ocean, his answers stretched out in long, swooping arcs that mirrored his classic surf style. He spoke proudly about winning the U.S. Surfing Championship in 1982. At that moment, he was no longer a guy who worked at the paper mill. He was a savvy competitive surfer, who battled the best wave riders in the world.2 [End Page 849] Southern surfing may seem like a surprising topic. The waves in the American South are smaller and less consistent than those that curl along the coasts of California and Hawaii, where surfing constitutes a central part of the culture and identity. Actually, the history of southern surfing reflects many of the major trends in the region since World War II: Cold War militarization, civil rights, the counterculture, the women's movement, environmentalism, and coastal development. More important, a history of southern surfing challenges stereotypes about the South and southerners. I argue that surfing helped integrate southern coastal communities into the culture and economy of the Sun Belt that stretched from Southern California through Virginia, and it endowed individual southerners with a global identity, making them no less southern, but certainly less provincial than they might have otherwise been if they had never caught a wave. This article chronicles the history of southern surfing from its infancy in the late 1950s and early 1960s through its maturation as part of the region's coastal tourist economy in the 1990s and 2000s. Two factors led to the initial growth of southern surfing: the "surf craze" in American mass media of the early 1960s and the Cold War military mobilization that connected coastal communities across the Sun Belt. Surfing lineups began to diversify in terms of not only race, but also gender, from the 1970s through the 1990s. This era also saw the birth of a modern environmental movement that gave southern surfers a political language to articulate conservationist goals just as the Sun Belt economic boom fueled coastal development in the region's once sleepy seaside towns. Development and a growing tourist economy supported a homegrown surf industry that launched the careers of southern entrepreneurs and professional surfers who would be counted among the best in the world. Southern surfers created an alternative subculture and identity that allowed them to shed stereotypes long associated with the region. Historians of the South in the post–World War II era have generally sought to answer questions about the extent of southern exceptionalism based on analyses of civil rights, labor relations, evangelical religion, and Republican Party politics. Matthew D. Lassiter, Joseph Crespino, and other scholars have argued that southern exceptionalism is a myth, highlighting instead political and social continuities across the Sun Belt from California through Virginia. Yet much of this work has focused on conservative cultural and political trends. The subcultures spawned by [End Page 850] surfing tended toward antiestablishment libertarianism. Surfing cultures dovetailed with other southern countercultures, even liberalism, which contradicts the mainstream narrative of the Sun Belt South. Beyond Sun Belt historiography...