Stairway to aquatic heaven: How San Diego’s first and only ‘surfing coordinator’ brought stairs to Garbage Beach ...Middle East

“San Diego City built a staircase at Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and Ladera Street.”

— from Kathy Blavatt’s San Diego’s Sunset Cliffs Park: A History, written for the Ocean Beach Historical Society

There are other entry points to the beach below Sunset Cliffs, but none of them are as easy to navigate as the Ladera Street Stairs. 

Hundreds, maybe thousands of people use them every week. Families come to check out the tidepools, bringing young kids and old folks who might have trouble otherwise. And of course, there are the surfers, who use them to reach the break at Garbage Beach.

There is no mention of Doug Smith in Blavatt’s account of those stairs. And even after Adam Bloomberg and the Garbage Beach Surf Club held an event on March 29th of this year to honor Smith’s contribution to the stairs’ creation, you could be forgiven for never having heard of him. They intentionally kept publicity to a minimum, handing out only a few fliers to the regular Cliffs crew in order to reduce crowds and allow easy access for Smith and his friends. 

“If we had advertised, it really would have been out of control,” said Bloomberg. (I learned about it from local surfer Richard Aguirre while I was out riding my bike.)

The sun had yet to break through the Sunday-morning marine layer as a group of thirty or so cheerful surf enthusiasts spanning three generations gathered by the stairs. Small, surfable waves could be heard crashing below while seagulls cawed above. A man named Smitty, 76 and a longtime friend of Smith’s, told me that before the stairs went in, it was hard getting down the cliff. “You’d have to hand someone your board and hang onto a rope,” he said. “We had big heavy boards back then.” 

The stairs were in place by the time event organizer Bloomberg arrived from South Africa in the early ‘80s, but that doesn’t mean things were easy.  

“When I first got here, it was rough,” he said. “You know — it was really local… so you kinda had to earn your way in. But Doug was nice to me when other people weren’t. He invited me to his house to watch some fights with his kid and all the younger generations. And then, I surfed with him over the years and we got to know each other. Eventually, somebody told me along the way over the years that he was responsible for the stairs at Garbage.” 

Recently, Smith pulled up at the bench above the stairs, and Bloomberg turned to some of the locals hanging out at the spot and asked if they knew who Smith was. They didn’t. Bloomberg thought, “Man, while he’s alive, he should get the recognition. That piece of history should be kept, for sure.” 

When his kid heard the story, he said, “Hey dad, you just unlocked something! Nobody ever heard that before.”

‘We lived a lot on clam chowder’

Doug Smith was born in Ocean Beach on St. Patrick’s Day: March 17th, 1935. Already, his family had been in the neighborhood for three generations. His grandmother owned a horse stable where the 7-11 on Bacon and Voltaire sits today, just blocks from the beach. As for Smith, “We lived on Long Branch on the 4800 block, and then we got a one-bedroom beach bungalow on the 5000 block. There were seven of us living there. Cars couldn’t get out into the sand; that was the beginning of the beach. But now it’s homes and a parking lot.” 

A large tidepool would often form at the end of Long Branch, and young Doug would collect pismo clams there. “I could look at the sand and tell the spots where they were. I got pretty good at it. Luckily, that helped us survive through the times, because a war [WW2] was going on then, and things were expensive. So we lived a lot on clam chowder.”

He remembers the Navy firing artillery from PB Point down the shoreline past Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, and Ocean Beach. “You could see tracers at night, and all the explosions in the sky. A plane would pull a sleeve that was about 15 or 18 feet long, and they would fire at the sleeve. I often thought, ‘Gee, that’s kind of risky for the pilot!’”

Down below, Doug took up surfing. “I didn’t get any assistance from anybody. I came from a big family, and I never owned a board. I always was using somebody else’s surfboard…a lot of friends had boards, they were always willing to share, and so that was my opportunity.” 

A self described “beach nut,” he happily recalls his years with OB lifeguard legend Mouse: “All the diving we did for abalone, lobster, surfing. Yeah it was a good life. Just a clean, good, fun life.”

He became an OB lifeguard himself, working from 1954 until 1975. “I worked with a really good crew, and a bunch of really great guys, good camaraderie. I loved the life, and if I were to start all over again, I would become a lifeguard again. I love the outdoors. 

“It was very professional and really kind of a rewarding feeling to be a part of it all. I gave lectures in the local high schools on rip currents and ocean safety. They’d come down and surf as part of their PE class. I developed the inter-high school surfing competition,” which still takes place today, along with a surfing safety school for kids. 

But his biggest contribution to local surf culture is the stairs.

Good surf, poor access

At the ceremony, a few old friends told stories of the old days, and offered expressions of gratitude to the guest of honor. Then Doug Smith, 91 years old, adorned with a luau and a kukui-nut necklace, stepped confidently up onto the bench and delivered a brief speech.

“Well, I’ll first say that San Diego has some of the finest surf in the whole coast of California,” Smith began. “Some of the other cities have surf, but one thing that’s unique about the surf here at Sunset Cliffs is that it’s all reef break. Of course, reefs create the size of the surf, and also create the shape of the surf. And that’s what makes the surf in San Diego so unique.”

Back in the ‘60s, San Diego had good surf but poor access. “A lot of surfers cut their own trails, and they were really, truly very dangerous. I was a lifeguard, and a position came up known as the ‘Surfing Coordinator.’ I put my name in for that and I got the position…

“I was sitting at my desk one day, and thought about the uniqueness of this area right here, where we have two breaks side by side — one for the goofy foot going left, and one for the other break, for surfers going to the right, known as a regular foot. Being a city Surfing Coordinator, I sat down, took a piece of paper and a pen, and I wrote up a requisition to request the city to put in a set of stairs.

“And it wasn’t very long before I received a notice from one of the secretaries at the clerk’s office that it was accepted, and I was very grateful for that. It was such a shame, again, to think that we had all this great surf here and really no safe way to go down.”

Five years later, the position of Surfing Coordinator was dissolved due to lack of funding, and Smith went back to lifeguard work. But the position’s first and only occupant had done what he set out to do. “They got going with the project, and they amazed me how fast they did that,” especially given the site’s tricky topography and composition. “Thanks to the city of San Diego,” he said.

The crowd, however, was there to thank the man who got it all started. They applauded and cheered for Smith, who was flabbergasted at the turnout. “So I… uh, gosh, I’m just, I’m overwhelmed, I’m just overwhelmed. I would like to thank the brothers of the Sunset Cliffs Surfing Association for making this possible. I feel like I don’t deserve this. Thank you all for being here.”

Before I left, I thanked Doug again for his efforts to get stairs put in at my favorite place to surf. We shook hands and he wrapped both his hands around mine. With a big, heartfelt smile, he looked me in the eyes and said, “Keep surfing.”

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