Capsules in Monochrome

The archives of John E.O. Larronde are housed in three corrugated boxes that on most days sit undisturbed on a set of metal shelves in a room on the second floor of the Museum of Ventura County. They contain photographs, newspaper clippings, technical drawings, cartoons, club patches, handbills, and shipping manifests—one of which accounts for the delivery of four Dad Center redwood boards that arrived in Los Angeles from Hawaii in 1921.

The receiver was Larronde’s father, Pedro Dominguez Larronde, an executive of the Franco American Baking Company, who in turn handed two of the redwoods over to his sons, John and Jimmy. John Larronde was 6 years old. His board, like his brother’s, was engraved with his name. The legions of unjazzed in California at the time consisted of a scant population of roughly 4 million, a figure that would compound in the coming century to exceed 38 million, a mass laced with Miki Dora’s hordes of “inland slave-mentality imbeciles” and “Encino proctologists.”

The state’s surf population hovered around a dozen dedicated wave riders, a number that also would compound, perhaps even more dramatically. “[Sam] Reid is often quoted as saying that ‘there were only six surfboards in the entire United States’ when he graduated from Santa Monica High School in the early 1920s,” writes Pablo Capra, the archivist for the Topanga Historical Society. “Although Reid’s count was meant more to give an impression, two of those ‘six’ surfboards belonged to [the Larronde] brothers.”

John and Jimmy were the progeny of an erudite, influential, and landed family that came from Basque ancestry and by the early 1900s sat in proximity to the origins of mainland surf culture and the wider twentieth-century boom of Southern California. “Their clan played a significant role in the development of early Los Angeles,” says CR Stecyk III, who came to know the extended Larronde gens as a child, in Malibu. “Pedro Dominguez Larronde was good friends with George Freeth, Tom Blake, Duke Kahanamoku, and Jack London. His Topanga beach house was certainly well placed for aquatic pursuits.”

By the time he reached middle school, in the late 1920s, John Larronde was customarily diving, beachcombing, scouring the canyon for Chumash artifacts, and shaping and surfing his own boards. He grew into a photographer, a collector, a horticulturist, and a historian in the years that followed, with most of his interests oriented around the outdoors. He ran with a group of surfers, spear fishermen, paddlers, and shapers across California’s pre- and postwar landscapes, ranging at one point—at least in what’s suggested by his photos and records—as far as Baja, Hawaii, and Australia. He attended the University of California, Davis, and, in the late 1930s, built a transition balsa-redwood design known as the Larronde Model. In the 1940s, he shot and cut a 16-millimeter surf film depicting a series of trips he took between Malibu and Santa Barbara. After serving in the European theater during World War II, he built a home and settled in Latigo Shore, where he lived for the next 40 years.

“I was fortunate to become acquainted with John and Jimmy, who were pillars of coastal Malibu,” continues Stecyk. “Uncle John was an ecologist and a continual proselytizer of surfing as an activity and a philosophical way of life. He lived an ascetic, monk-like existence and personally inculcated generations of wave riders. As a philanthropist, he helped bring the history of surfing to the general public’s attention. He studiously approached his passions and was generous in the sharing of his knowledge and artifacts. In the water, he was competent and connected as all hell. He and his friends would simply run you over if you got in their way, since they were riding real men’s surfboards, with real weight. They were a generation that grew up trimming, when nobody else was around, and they chose great lines. Jimmy and his wife, Charlou, were internationally renowned bon vivants and hosts. Their graciousness even extended to the numerous surf types who courted their three daughters. Casa Larronde was arguably the social center of what decades later devolved into the enclave now known as Billionaire Beach. Newer Malibu locals like Eli Broad, David Geffen, Larry Ellison, and [former] LA mayor Richard Riordan became the arbiters of contemporary coastal chic.”

A trove of prints in Larronde’s archives in the Museum of Ventura County offer windows into the scenes Stecyk describes—and into the nascent and changing coastal culture that Larronde inhabited. Many of them display the work of well-known shooters, crackling with an occasional sighting of Wally Froiseth and George Downing, a famous backwash explosion in La Jolla captured by Woody Ekstrom using Doc Ball’s camera and water housing, or a Malibu bonfire that may or may not have been attended by Marilyn Monroe. Other images Larronde chose to collect show quieter moments made by whoever happened to be holding a camera on the beach before 1949.

The mainline of the cache, however, consists of albums containing Larronde’s own exposures, wood-bound time capsules with yellowed pages, the margins filled with his gentlemanly penmanship. His subjects are men in handmade wetsuits, bottom-scratchers displaying big lobster catches, gremlins with oversize sleds, beer-fat party boys in palm-leaf hats, shapers gluing up and planing planks in backyard garages. In their composition and tone, these photos suggest that, behind the lens, Larronde hovered somewhere between casually making snapshots and doing the work of a documentarian. The redwood board bearing the inscription of his name, which he kept throughout his life and is now more than a century old, is also housed with the archive in the museum’s artifacts collection, existing as a kind of three-dimensional vestige that somehow escaped the flat confines of the prints and documents.

“Archives are purposeful, and they are random,” the artist and historian Edmund de Waal reminds us. “They record the personal and the institutional, plural and singular histories. They are passed on, inherited, stolen, plundered, and lost. They are destroyed by accident and by design. They record rewritings, rethinkings, retellings. They hold stories so they don’t disappear. 

They preserve information in the hope of a future. Archives cross all the senses. They are tactile, digital, somatic, auditory. They are places of memory.…And archives are fallible. They bear witness to incoherence and violence, elisions as well as presences. A beginning becomes an ending; an ending becomes a beginning. The fantasy of completeness is dangerous. Instead of answers, you are confronted with gaps, with the unstable and the impermanent. Instead of guidance, you are left to navigate alone, make up your own route through.”

The chosen navigation through Larronde’s archive was to trim as closely as possible toward the images and items that, as far as we could tell, were made by him, or specifically for him, to document the life he lived as a surfer.

Larronde died in 1990, at the age of 75, after an extended battle with Alzheimer’s disease and its decaying and hallucinatory mental labyrinths. “The saving grace of this tragic end,” note his niece and nephew in a biographical one-sheet included within the boxes, “is that more often than not, John ‘thought’ he was surfing the big wave, catching the big fish, and whatever else his memory bank brought up for him to do in his busy days and nights.”

[Feature image: Album containing a portion of Larronde’s prized snaps and docs from as early as the 1930s. Photo by Photo by Grant Ellis/artifact courtesy of the Museum of Ventura County Larronde Collection]