Written by Mac Barnhardt
Old photos provided by Hal Coste, Sally Price, and Tom Proctor
Current photos by Mac Barnhardt
The Carolina Coast Surf Club is the oldest active surf club on the east coast and it wants you. Yes. You.
How so, you may ask? We'll get to that in a moment, but let’s first take a momentary step back in time…
A more innocent time when, with bountiful eagerness, Tom and Hal could hear it from the street as soon as their bare feet touched the ground. They shuffle down a sandy path towards the ocean as the tall seagrass sways in the light offshore breeze. The sound of the crashing waves is intensifying even as they can’t see them yet. Hal is carrying his new Dewey Weber Performer longboard. A new 10’ Miller is under Tom’s arm.
When they awoke at dawn, they didn't know for sure if there would be waves. The internet doesn't exist. Smartphones don't exist. Surfline doesn't exist, nor any other surf forecasting apps or services. There isn't a webcam showing them a live feed of their local break. As Will Lucas says in his east coast surf documentary, Board Shorts, “Sitting at a computer screen looking for waves will never have the same impact as walking over the dunes and seeing a perfect wave in the early morning light.” Ankle leashes aren’t hanging from Tom and Hal’s boards' tails because they don't exist yet either. They wouldn't have neoprene wetsuits for several more years.
It's the summer of 1963 and Tom and Hal are on the search. The search for waves. They crest the wide-open barren sand dune where big fancy ocean front houses now rest, and their eyes widen. Clean chest high peeling waves. Perfection. They glance at one another with a knowing smile and step down off the dunes and towards the water to paddle out.
Hal Coste working the nose on Isle of Palms in 1964
It was a pivotal year. Martin Luther King Jr had just delivered his "I have a dream" speech. Beatlemania was just beginning. Modern day surfing was in its infancy as the movie Gidget was released a few years earlier, helping to launch the massive growth of surfing as well as surfing pop culture. It also launched many more “beach movies” which made a lot of money in Hollywood in the early to mid 60s. Surfer Girl, the Beach Boys third studio album, was being released. Miki Dora was wreaking havoc as an infamous surf outlaw in California and on Hawaii’s North Shore.
Soon, the world would change. President John F Kennedy would be assassinated later in the year. At that moment though, Tom and Hal's focus is on something else entirely. Getting up early and walking to the ocean to see the conditions is how you knew if there were waves. The search was part of the experience. An experience lost now in the myriad of technology and the insatiable desire for instant knowledge at one's fingertips.
Imagine growing up on Sullivan’s Island in the 50s and 60s. "Back in the day." "Those were the days." However you want to say it. However you want to remember it. Tom and Hal were there. We weren't. And by the grace of God, or luck, or fate, or destiny...take your pick, they are still here. Which gives us an opportunity. To learn. To know. From true locals.
Isle of Palms circa 1950s
I recently dropped in (Okay, bad surf pun, I know) on Tom Proctor, Hal Coste, and Sally Price at Tom’s Sullivan’s Island home that he grew up in and still resides. They shared some great stories and reflected on those times growing up together on these local Charleston area barrier islands. They are original founding members of the Carolina Coast Surf Club and are still members to this day.
It’s easily apparent from spending time with them that they are still very close, and with their sense of humor still very much intact. There was this exchange…
Hal: Tom and I invented the cordless surf leash. It always worked.
Tom: It was for sale on the website next to the surf cam. It’s not there anymore.
(The ad said “there are cordless drills, cordless phones…why not cordless leashes?" They actually received orders)
Hal: as a goof…for donations to Tom and Hal’s Costa Rica’s adventures.
But in all seriousness, they want the Carolina Coast Surf Club to grow. A rebuild so to speak. The club has been aging and then there’s the obvious - the recent pandemic that stopped most everyone’s social activities for a time. It’s clear they want to build renewed interest in the club to continue the legacy and for new people to experience what they’ve experienced.
Tom Proctor & Sally Price
Even their website says their main goals are simple: To surf more, work less, have fun and pass this great activity on to our children and their children.
Hal mentions his grandkids are surfing now. Tom explains there's four to five generations of surfers in Charleston. “There was our generation which was the first, then there was the second, which was Norm (Godley), then third generation…and this is the reason we're doing this (wanting to grow the surf club), the fifth generation. We'd like for them to have the experiences that we had. I guess people don't really do clubs anymore.”
Alas, a club. Defined as “an association or organization dedicated to a particular interest or activity”. Is Tom right? Is a club even a thing anymore? Does the younger generation want to join a club these days?
In a world where so many experiences and connections happen online, it seems a foregone conclusion that clubs could be headed towards extinction. But that’s not really the case. Sometimes we forget that humans crave connection. Humans want to be embedded in a community. Especially in a time now, post pandemic, when people are realizing that being stuck inside their homes alone without true connections to people isn’t good for them or their mental well-being.
The National Club Association says the number one reason members resign from a club is not financial. It’s not because they age out either. It’s because they don’t feel a meaningful connection. Clubs survive and thrive when members feel their desire to be connected and to form bonds with like-minded individuals are being fulfilled. This is what the Carolina Coast Surf Club wants to provide.
And there’s the camaraderie. Tom mentions this word a couple of times. “The camaraderie of everyone being together.” It’s a real community. Community means everything.
Their membership is open to anyone with an interest in surfing and preserving the beaches and ocean. They hold social gatherings, go on surf trips, attend surf contests, and participate in community involvement through beach and highway clean-ups, and volunteering with Surfers Healing. Tom says they used to give away $500 college scholarships to young surfers…to one male and one female. They want to bring this back.
You might know the Carolina Coast Surf Club from its website that hosts a live webcam of the Isle of Palms pier. You can check in on the ocean conditions by the pier from your computer or phone. If you scroll to the bottom below the webcam, there is a daily surf report thanks to Tom and other members taking turns going to the pier early in the morning then submitting the report. Tom says he knows people who live in Mount Pleasant who didn’t know about the Isle of Palms surf cam and would drive all the way over to Folly Beach to surf. Now they can check the surf on Isle of Palms (via the webcam), surf somewhere a lot closer, and not have to drive all the way over to Folly.
They mention a young woman who recently joined the club and surfs early in the morning with other women all the time. So, it’s happening. In this post pandemic world, new members are starting to join the club again.
The club celebrated their 60th anniversary during Labor Day weekend of 2023 which, due to the pandemic, was their first event since 2019. There was a Friday night kickoff party followed by a Saturday night social at the Isle of Palms Exchange Club, along with surfing sessions in front of The Windjammer.
I asked Tom, Hal, and Sally – why start a club in the first place?
Tom: A whole bunch of us got together. It was just the camaraderie of everyone being together. I remember we wanted a sticker that meant a lot. If you saw a sticker on a car that said Carolina Coast Surf Club, that meant a lot. We were actually the first surfers. There were surfers on Folly. But Hal and I, Jimmy, Ferd, and Francis were the first ones east of the Cooper that had surfboards. The girls (Sally Price and her two sisters Lucy and Nancy) joined us in '62.
The history of the club really started 1961 with three guys from Mount Pleasant...Jimmy Bagwell, Francis Erckmann, Ferd Gregory. They sold their blood to the hospital to buy the first surfboard this side of the Cooper (River). And we all used to fight over it (a green 9’6” Malibu popout). Hal and I, and they got together. This is where we basically started the pre-Carolina Coast Surf Club. Then that’s when we got involved with Sally, Lucy, and Nancy…along with Diane, Ed, Rocky, Butch, George, the Basha brothers, Nick, and a number of others followed.
Hal: So, in '63, there were a bunch of us…started talking about forming a club so we adopted the by-laws from the Makau Surfing Association down in Florida. We commandeered their by-laws, making it our own. It was pretty active. We met right down here (in this very basement we’re sitting in at Tom’s house) between '63-'67 or '68. I joined the Marines, went to Vietnam, came back and everything had changed. Then the whole shortboard era was in evolution. All these kids were ripping around on little boards. Tom kept on surfing all the way through, but I laid off for a little while.
Hal Coste - Vietnam 1967
Hal (cont'd from above): We reformed the club in 2001. We started getting people together. Sally and Lucy called me from California. They were living in California then. I was in a video of renovations, called Homes Across America on HGTV. It went out nationwide. They saw me (on TV) in California. That was really the impetus for getting the club back together.
Tom: I had remodeled this house and Hal had helped me as a contractor. Had helped me with a lot of work. So, I said I’m going to take you to California and spend a week out there. Sally, Lucy, and Nancy are going to meet us out there…and I took Hal out and we surfed everything from San Diego up to Malibu.
Tom Proctor
Why name it the Carolina Coast Surf Club? Why not call it the Charleston Surf Club, Sullivan’s Island Surf Club, Isle of Palms Surf Club, or some other name?
Hal: Jim Sharkey, who was a hot surfer back then…we were in school, and he sketched out that logo. It was patterned after the Jacobs Surfboard diamond. We had patches we sewed on. We didn't have T-shirts back then. In surfboards, it was Dewey Weber, Hobie, Jacobs, Greg Noll. I remember when the first Da’ Cat came out. Tommy had one of those. Wished he still had that. It would be worth a fortune now.
Sally: Someone was just jotting stuff down.
Tom: We were all here (in this basement of his house). My mom was the matriarch of the club. We would come back from surfing, as cold as it was, she would have hot chocolate and biscuits made for us when we all came back here, and we'd spend hours down here after surfing, just sitting around talking. It was during one of those sessions that the name came up. We had to have the name when we came up with the bylaws. I don't remember who came up with it. We should have made it shorter!
Some of Tom's and Hal's boards
Wetsuits?
Sally: The guys had the beavertails (old front zipper dive suits). We didn't use wetsuits. We had a barrel on the beach (with a fire lit inside, to warm up by).
Hal: Rip Curl and O'Neill suits came in mid to late 60s. Before that there were beavertail dive suits.
Tom: Many of us didn't have wetsuits. We had the beavertail. Everything from here (pointing to his waist)) down was numb.
I always thought girls wore swimsuits under their wetsuits. I did not know they didn't. So, one day we're walking down the beach and playing around. Lucy comes out of the water, and I unzip the front of it and said "Oh, I guess they don't wear swimsuits underneath!"
Leashes?
Hal: I never used a leash. The wax. You bought it in a grocery store in bulk. Gulf wax. Came in a box from the Esso gas station.
Note how the leash loop used to be placed under the board, behind the fin
Looking for waves?
Hal: We just went to look.
Tom: We knew there would be a swell by the wind. The direction.
How did you know what was going on in the surfing world, in places like California & Hawaii?
Sally: Surfer Magazine
Hal: Wide World of Sports, every once in a while they would show the Huntington Beach contest every year. And films. We used to show films on the wall here in the garage.
Competitiveness with Folly Beach?
Tom: Oh yeah, it was competitive. Ronnie Shepard and I had a couple altercations and at least one fist fight on the beach after the Folly contest. “I won the contest, no I won the contest”…bam!
Sally Price
Nancy Price
Women's surfing in the early 60s?
Sally: I was so young. It was just us and a couple other girls.
Tom: There weren't many. You (nodding towards Sally) beat Mimi Munro. She was one of the hot girls on the east coast, and you beat her when they came up here. Mimi was inducted into the (East Coast Surfing) Hall of Fame.
Tom: They always kept all the guys straight.
Sally: They were like our brothers.
Lucy (Price-Jacobs, Sally’s sister, by phone): They (the boys) were trusted by our Dad.
Tom: Here we are. There would be three or four guys, three girls. One of them thirteen years old. We'd be going up and down the east coast for surf contests. Their dad knew everything that was going on. My parents knew. That just doesn't happen today I don't think.
Tom’s wife, Sheryl: The old panel van. Like a bread truck.
Hal: Merritt Burris had an old hearse for a long time.
Lucy (quoted from the surf documentary Board Shorts): Being the only female surfers wasn’t strange at all. We were just a big family. They were like brother figures to us. We just had so much fun together. We went everywhere together. We went up and down the coast to contests. We all stayed together…a tent, a car, or a hotel room. Sometimes we got lucky and got a hotel room. It was normal.
Tom (quoted from the surf documentary Board Shorts): No one messed with the Price girls…the Isle of Palms girls. They were really protected. That was more important than anything…everybody that was in this crowd and this group of people weren’t going to let this stigma that was with surfers at the time let it brand to this group of guys. We grew up in small town. We were all friends. We were all neighbors.
The Good Old Days?
Tom: In the 50's before surfing, there were seventy families on the (Sullivan’s) island. This was the poor man's place to live.
Hal: Middle class alright
Tom: Middle class. I'm serious. First people after they decommissioned Fort Moultrie, came to work at the Navy shipyard in Charleston. Many of the families came from up north like Boston, and if you know the houses from Station 14 towards Fort Moultrie, they’re small two-bedroom homes. You'd have Roman Catholic families with four to six kids living in a two-bedroom home.
My mom was working at the C and S bank (in downtown Charleston) and a customer came in. She asked him if he knew of a place that we could rent. And he said I've got a place on Sullivan's Island for $35 a month. So that’s when we moved to Sullivan’s Island.
Hal's family has been here since the 1800’s.
Hal: The Coste family goes way back. My grandfather was commander of the coast guard station over here for a lot of years. And when he retired right before World War Two, he was in real estate and insurance. And I've got an old rental receipt showing cottage rentals for $12 a month on Sullivan’s Island and Isle of Palms. Dirt cheap. You know...middle class families...a lot of Navy yard families. We thought everyone grew up on the island.
Front Beach / Isle of Palms in the '60s
the old Isle of Palms fishing pier
The old pavillion at Front Beach - Isle of Palms
Tom: We all used to hot wax our surfboards back then. My dad bought a stove and put it back there (pointing to a space in his basement that was formerly an unfinished garage) and that's where we would hot wax our surfboards. So, when we built out the basement, it took them almost two weeks to get the wax off the floor so we could put in the flooring. We used to have a lot of old photos.
Hal: We were at a bar in Costa Rica and this guy was telling us about a guy in Melbourne, Florida that we should hook up with when we get back to the States. We did and that guy was Will Lucas. He made east coast surfing documentaries…including a movie called “Boardshorts” that included us and the club. He made other movies (Waves of Reflection, Surfing at Summers End, Atlantic Avenue). Will has since passed away but he’s in the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame.
Tom: McKevlins later had the surf report, had to start mid to late 60s I think. He had a shop on Isle of Palms too for a while. You would call the number. There are still people who remember the phone number. I remember the first contest we ever did at Folly.
Hal: We saw Endless Summer there.
Tom: Bobby Basha had taken tons of photos and movies over the years. When Hurricane Hugo hit, his whole downstairs was flooded out, so all the photos and movies and everything was lost.
Hal: In big surf, we would go down to the end of the pier and throw our boards off and jump in. That was the old pier (before Sea Cabins).
Tom: Same location but was longer by 50 yards.
Hal: It was a public fishing pier back in the old days, had a little restaurant on the front right when you walked up to it. Mr. Thomas's little shack was there, bait shop was there. It was a great pier. All that area was just sand dunes, it was wide open.
Sally: You couldn't build on Front Beach. There were no houses on Front Beach (where the ocean front houses now sit between 21st Ave and Breach Inlet).
Tom: Hal and I were lifeguards there (near the pier). A lot of the surfers would get mad at us. We had to pull them out of the surf and take their boards away from them (because they were surfing close to the pier).
Tom: There was an old boy scout campground where Wild Dunes is now.
Hal: Worthmans was the old pavilion we use to hang out at. It was wide open.
Tom: The only air-conditioned building on Isle of Palms in the business district, was Jones Bingo. Everything else was open to the sand and wind. Behind it was a Ferris wheel, they had the big swings, and a railroad that went through with a train.
Hal: (pointing to an old photocopy of the area around the old Isle of Palms pier, with a boxing ring and a crowd around it) This was a Jack Dempsey boxing exhibition in 1929.
Hudson's & Worthmans stores at Front Beach, Isle of Palms
photo copy of the Jack Dempsey boxing exhibition at Isle of Palms 1929
Tom: Coming back from Florida in Mike's station wagon. We were out of money. We were just past Jax Beach. And we had just enough Coca-Cola bottles to get gas. We were right behind trucks, drafting them (to save gas). I stole a whole bunch of Moon Pies and stuffed them down in my baggies. I came home and told mama about it. She wrote a check, found out the address of the store, and mailed it to them.
And so it goes. We could have talked story for hours. Incidentally, I didn’t hear one complaint about the area’s growth, the traffic, the tourists, the development, or how things have changed. It was a grand reminder there are still true locals here that hold dear memories and are a wealth of history and knowledge. There is hope that more people will tap into this and continue to preserve their local surfing heritage before it’s too late.
Hal Coste
The surf club has clearly played a positive and central role in their lives. It’s waiting for new members to enjoy the same benefit. Just as 1963 was a pivotal year, this is now a pivotal time for the Carolina Coast Surf Club’s legacy to continue.
My wife and I had the pleasure of attending their most recent gathering, an oyster roast at Tom's house on Sullivan's Island. I clearly witnessed the community and camaraderie in action. Everyone was so welcoming to us. We enjoyed the tasty oysters while swapping stories, discussing surfboards, surfing conditions, and all the local going ons at our area beaches. We met new and younger members that will help keep the oldest active surf club on the east coast going. They will help lead the membership into the future.
We had so much fun and were so inspired, we joined the club. For $50 (individual) or $100 (family) annually, it's an easy decision. It's a lot cheaper than Netflix, so come be a part of this community.
“After we’re gone”, Tom says, “we would like to look down and see people wearing the Carolina Coast Surf Club T-shirt.” And maybe even bring back the cordless surf leash.
Check out the Carolina Coast Surf Club at https://www.carolinacoastsurfclub.org
or contact Tom Proctor at onthenose@att.net for more information.
Hal Coste
Tom Proctor