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Life’s a Beach! Book Review: Wave Woman, The Life and Struggles of a Surfing Pioneer, by Vicky Durand

by Edith Frampton, Ph.D.

In November of 1959, my life became inextricably connected to Vicky Heldreich Durand. I wouldn’t realize it, though, for fifty years. Now Ms. Durand has published the remarkable story that created our bond, among many others, spanning the Pacific Ocean.

Wave Woman is a biography of, and tribute to, the extraordinary mother who inspired Ms. Durand: Betty Pembroke Heldreich. Along the way, the book captures a bygone Hawaii of the 1950s, before surfing became a ten-billion-dollar industry and before a voracious beach economy had eaten up entire coastlines. Durand evokes the innocence and simplicity of the midcentury moment, after the toll of the Great Depression and World War II but before the upheavals of the 1960s. With a straightforward, measured voice that exquisitely reflects the era that she brings back to life, Durand submerges us in a time in which prefab houses could be purchased for $10,000, shipped from Washington to Oahu, and constructed by a determined divorcée with two daughters and without a penny to spare.

The narrative details the entire, rich, tumultuous century during which Betty Pembroke Heldreich made her mark on the world and lived many different lives, between 1913 and 2011: as a tom boy in Utah, an Olympic swimmer in Santa Monica, a walnut farmer in inland California, a novice pilot, a talented jeweler, a self-taught poet, a dental hygienist, a ceramicist, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and more. With every roadblock thrown her way, she crafted a bridge to something new. The heart of the story involves the years in which Heldreich and her daughter, Durand, became pioneers of international women’s surfing, competing in Makaha and traveling as far as Peru in order to promote the sport in 1960. More than anything, Wave Woman is the account of a powerful mother-daughter relationship that pre-existed second-wave feminist validations of them.

It was the author herself who, at twelve years old, first travelled from the mainland to Hawaii in 1952, when her Aunt Jane and Uncle Smithy bought her a ticket to make a summer visit. However, it was Betty who trusted her daughter Vicky’s enamored reports, made an exploratory journey herself, and then persuaded a reluctant husband to uproot the family of four and their small business in order to start a new life in Oahu. It was Betty who sculpted a life for herself and her two daughters, when she refused to tolerate her husband’s ongoing infidelities. From that point onward, Betty, teenage Vicky, and the younger Gloria were never far from the ocean nor the adventurous people who dedicated their lives to it even before it was fashionable to do so. Durand’s narrative is generously punctuated with photos, maps, poems, and memorabilia, giving it the intimacy of a family scrapbook at the same time that it chronicles the shifting zeitgeist of the twentieth century in America.

Eventually, Durand herself would renounce surfing, although not the ocean nor Hawaii. On November 11, 1959, the author tried to save the life of a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed nineteen-year-old from Coronado, California, who had traveled to Makaha with friends to hone his surfing skills and had fallen in love with Gloria. Paddling out into the waves with Durand, Frank Brandley, without the glasses he always needed, was hit in the temple with the tip of a heavy balsa wood board. He was knocked unconscious and, before he could be rescued, drowned. I, his niece, was six months old.

Buy the Book: Click Here


Edith Frampton, Ph.D.
Department of English and Comparative Literature
San Diego State University

Select Publications:
http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/3.toc
http://dorislessingsociety.wordpress.com/doris-lessing-conferences/

https://literature.sdsu.edu/people/bios/frampton.html

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