Simone’s Story
by Simone Riddingius
Throughout my young life in the 1970s, my parents always took my brother and me camping. Since we lived in Temple City, California, it was crucial to get out of town to escape the rat race of living inland. In the spring of 1972, I wasn’t yet a surfer but in my high school library, I found a copy of a Surf Magazine which I slid into my PeeChee and kept it close so I could look at it everyday. When I looked at the pictures I just knew what my destiny would be.
My mom had picked up an old longboard at a garage sale for about a dollar and somehow got it home. I had a friend at school who claimed he could make a short board out of it, so I thought that would be a good idea. I would show up at the beach with this weird looking board that only had a layer of cloth and a single layer of resin and probably no fin. But I was proud since I didn’t know any better.
We would often camp at the beach in San Clemente or Carpinteria. In the summer of 1973, on one of our Carpinteria camping trips, I met a lifeguard named Denny Aaberg. He was pretty cute and it turned out that he surfed too. He would come to our campsite and my mom would be cooking dinner, and he would play his guitar.
Surf camps and lessons were nonexistent in those days, so I was really lucky that Denny offered to give me some surf lessons and get me closer to the surfing lifestyle I dreamed about.
Denny did what lifeguards do, he saved my life in a way, because without that early influence, I might have become something other than a surfer. And I wouldn’t trade all the waves and memories I have had for all the money in the world. It’s really true that “only a surfer knows the feeling”.
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