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Deaily Pilot
Man with links to Wedge tragedies pays tribute
By Michael Miller
When Bob Rogers was growing up on the Balboa Peninsula, the Wedge signified danger — represented by the ambulances that would wail by his house, transporting surfers who had lost their lives or suffered neck fractures after taking on the surfing spot’s fierce, volatile waves.
Rogers surfed, but he never attempted the Wedge. His parents would order him to take his board a quarter-mile down the peninsula. Ironically, though, the Wedge also signified safety for Rogers, and he remembers why every time he gazes at the placid harbor entrance on the other side of the jetty.
“All that misery, all those years ago,” he mused last week, standing on the sand at the peninsula’s tip. “And now it’s all peaceful, nice. You would never know this was the scene of a tragedy.”
The tragedy in question took place 88 years ago when a 15-year-old boat operator — Rogers’ first cousin once removed — died in an accident in the harbor entrance. The rocky surf overturned the boat, and the victim’s father spent the next decade campaigning for the government to dredge the entrance and build stronger jetties to protect boat traffic from the waves.
Once the new jetties were in, one of them gave birth to the Wedge — a coveted and feared surfing location for decades, where waves ricochet off the rocks, meet incoming waves head-on and sometimes cause the water to contort upward like a hyperactive dancer. Meanwhile, the boats sail in and out unharmed.
The story of George Rogers Sr., who exhausted his health lobbying for a safer Balboa harbor and, in a grim coincidence, ended up dying of a heart attack on his boat at almost the same spot where George Jr. died, is hardly a forgotten piece of Newport Beach lore. A stone monument under a tree near the Wedge, erected in 1936, bears the heading “Harbor Improvement” and pays tribute to George Sr. for his efforts.
Still, the businessman’s grand-nephew suspects that many who pass by the monument know little about the man it celebrates — or the son whose death ended up changing the motion of the tide itself. So when Rogers’ documentary, “The Wedge: Dynasty, Tragedy, Legacy,” premieres May 23 on PBS SoCaL Plus, he hopes to enlighten at least a few.
“This show is a labor of love,” said Rogers, who scripted, narrated and helped to produce the half-hour film. “Doing this show makes no economic sense whatsoever. This is something that I just really wanted to do. I wanted to share the story with people. Also, so many cities have great stories about the things that shaped those cities, and so often, they don’t have any way of remembering them or telling them.”
‘An iconic surfing spot’
With only a small crowd around the jetty on a recent Wednesday morning, Rogers paused to explain how the Wedge works. The one surfer in the water provided a visual aid.
“See, this guy’s surfing the bounce wave. And when the bounce wave crosses the incoming wave,” Rogers said, trailing off as
the water surged and the surfer promptly tumbled off his board, “that’s the peak.”
It’s true that the Wedge has resulted in its share of 911 calls. But Rogers, who lives most of the time in Los Angeles and still owns his family’s old house in Balboa, often wonders how many lives his great-uncle saved on the other side of the rocks when he helped change the harbor’s confines.
As a child, Rogers often passed by the stone monument and heard about George Sr. and his son, but the story had little resonance for him. Later, he began to listen to relatives’ accounts more closely, and when he set out in the late 1980s to write a book about his family’s history, he delved into archive footage and interviewed relatives who were alive more than half a century ago.
The story, then: George Rogers Jr., the older son of a wealthy entrepreneur, was expected to inherit the successful rock-and-gravel enterprise that his father and uncles had started at the turn of the 20th century. Polio crippled him at a young age, though, and when the tide capsized his boat in the harbor entrance shortly before his 16th birthday, his condition prevented him from escaping the wreck.
At the time, the harbor entrance was considered a prime surfing spot. According to Rogers, John Wayne was among those who came to test his mettle. From that day in 1926 onward, however, George Sr. sought to destroy the trap that had taken his son. Ten years and roughly $2 million in federal aid and bond funds finally achieved that goal.
Perusing his family’s collection as well as others at UCLA, the Sherman Library and Gardens and elsewhere, Rogers assembled the best collection of artifacts he could gather. He found a reel of the footage showing the harbor entrance’s reopening in 1936, when the governor rode on George Sr.’s yacht; old photos and films showed people surfing in the harbor entrance in the pre-Wedge days.
Rogers even found a picture of his father in the boat that took George Jr.’s life, although his father wasn’t on board the day of the accident. Another clip, showing a storm brewing over the peninsula, may not have been shot on the day itself, but it provided a visual cue for the documentary.
While Rogers’ book was self-published and had little readership outside his family, he sought a wide audience for the documentary. Film is far from a hobby for him: He serves by day as founder and chief creative officer of the Burbank-based BRC Imagination Arts, which creates visitor experiences for theme parks and other locations, and he’s been nominated twice for Oscars for Best Live Action Short Film.
He found a receptive audience in Ed Miskevich, the station manager of PBS SoCaL, who saw the Wedge story as having appeal well beyond the tip of Balboa.
“First of all, it’s a story about an iconic surfing spot, and really, when you think about Southern California and the surfing culture that grew up in this past century, the Wedge has become an iconic location for people who are surfers,” Miskevich said. “People of my generation, when the swells would come, every kid with a surfboard would say, ‘I’m going to the Wedge,’ and that didn’t matter where you lived in Southern California. It was the place to go to go surfing.”
Dredging the past
The news release claims that Rogers’ documentary “at last explains the moving and personal story behind the cryptic rock monument at the Wedge, at the end of the Balboa Peninsula — long a mystery to those who pass by.”
It is a mystery to some because of the lack of witnesses to the events of nearly a century ago. Rogers said one of his great-uncle’s grandchildren is still alive, but because of the man’s age and health, he declined to use him as a resource for the film.
To those who know the town well, however, George Rogers Sr. left an enduring legacy. Gordy Grundy, president of the Newport Beach Historical Society, wrote in an email that the revamped harbor entrance not only created a safer boating environment but also changed the city’s culture.
“From a historical perspective, the jetties of the new harbor entrance were a blessing and a boon to the sport of surfing,” Grundy said. “Bittersweet, the Wedge was formed and the legends began. The Newport harbor entrance offered the best surfing site in the entire world; experts and legends agree. The construction of the jetties made the perfect break vanish. Ground zero for the new sport no longer existed and surfers dispersed along the coast.
“If the jetties had never been built, what would Newport look like now? A dodgy, unsafe bay. A tourist town as the worldwide mecca for surfing. Unrecognizable, Corona del Mar would be all about parking, cheap hotels, hostels and amazing burrito joints. It would be a very cool circus, hardly like the genteel present.”
As Rogers points out in “The Wedge,” that present has buried a great deal of the past. In a segment toward the end, he rattles off a voice-over list of things that no longer exist: the company his great-uncle founded, the yacht George Sr. named “Memory” in tribute to his son, the waterfront home where the Rogers family lived for years.
Still, he carries all that with him. At the Wedge last week, he pointed out the spot in the harbor where — he thinks — both George Sr. and Jr. met their deaths. He noted that a concrete stretch by the jetty served as a filming location for many of the people whose footage ended up in his documentary.
Then he noted the nondescript stretch of sand between the Wedge and the stone monument, with the harbor, navigated by a slow yacht and smaller boats, extending below it.
“Right about here,” he said, “is where they set up vigil.”
The Orange County Register
Film on PBS explores how Newport’s Wedge surf break came to be
By Laylan Connelly | lconnelly@scng.com
The president of Union Rock lost his oldest son, George Rogers Jr., in a boating accident off the coast in Newport after massive waves slammed the shore during a big swell in 1926. So he’d dedicate his life to extend rock wall jetties out toward the ocean, to block big surf from capsizing boats coming in and out of the Newport Harbor.
Little did Rogers Sr. know how much he would change this small slice of the Orange County coastline.
A film that focuses on the Wedge’s tragic past will air on PBS Friday, showing how the rock jetties were built and eventually spawned the world-famous surf break called “The Wedge.”
The movie, called “The Wedge: Dynasty, Tragedy, Legacy,” was created by Bob Rogers, who spent nearly 20 years compiling information on his family’s past.
“Although it’s personal, it’s personal in a way that touches many people’s lives,” said Bob Rogers, who grew up just houses away from the Wedge and is Rogers Sr.’s great nephew. “It’s really a family story, about life and death and serving causes bigger than oneself.”
ONE WAVE DIES, ANOTHER RISES
The area in Corona del Mar was once one of the best surfing spots along the California coastline, drawing surfers such as Duke Kahanamoku on long wooden boards to the area to put on exhibitions.
But the area was also dangerous for boats trying to enter the harbor, especially during big swells. Kahanamoku, an Olympic swimmer considered the father of modern-day surfing, saved eight lives in 1925 after a fishing boat accident when rough seas hit.
George Jr., who developed polio at a young age, decided to take a boat ride on a day he shouldn’t have been out in the ocean.
“It flipped over. His iron leg braces took him straight to the bottom, his body was never found,” Bob Rogers said. “(Rogers Sr.) decides he’s going to do whatever it takes to kill the monster that killed his son.”
Rogers Sr. sold his business and focused his life on making the harbor entrance safe, lobbying Washington and Sacramento.
Small rock jetties existed, but weren’t much good to block strong surf. The rock jetty extensions in the mid-’30s eliminated the famous surf break at Corona del Mar – compared to the smooth rides of Waikiki – but also formed a much different wave, the Wedge, a beast of a wave that arises after one wave reflects off a rock jetty and joins with another wave to double in size, sometimes up to 30 feet.
Just a month after the re-dedication of the harbor entrance, Rogers Sr. suffered a heart attack while on his boat named in honor of his son, The Memory, while near the Newport Harbor entrance. He died at almost the exact location as his son, almost 10 years to the day.
DANGER STILL LOOMS
Much of the film is created from photos and footage from the Rogers family’s archives. The film shows 16 mm film footage of the early transformation of the Los Angeles road system, shipwrecks, early longboard surfing in the treacherous Newport Harbor entrance and the opening of the modified harbor in May 1936.
Today, the Wedge is a place where thousands of stunned spectators stand on the sand and watch in awe when a big south swell is on the horizon, cheering on body surfers, bodyboarders, skimboarders and surfers all hoping to get their piece of the wild Wedge.
The rock jetties might have stopped big waves from entering the harbor entrance, but danger still looms at the Wedge.
In 2007, a pair fishing on the rock jetty were swept away by big waves and killed.
Local surfer Tim Burnham, who also has a documentary in the works called “The Dirty Old Wedge,” almost died after taking the biggest wave of his life in 2009, when 35-foot waves showed. Shortly after, a man from Lawndale named Monte Valentin tried to body surf the big waves and died after getting slammed into rocks. No one could get to him in time to help.
“This place, it’s fun,” Burnham was quoted as saying in a previous story. “But it will kill you if you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing.”
Contact the writer: lconnelly@ocregister.com
Changing Tides
By Jenn Tanaka | jenn@coastmagazine.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: August 1, 2014 at 7:00 AM PDT
Documenting The Wedge
The Wedge in Newport Beach attracts surfers and body boarders from all over the world. Known for its enormous waves, with swells as high as 20 feet, this Orange County landmark is steeped in local history. One family in particular finds its ancestry intertwined in the construction of The Wedge.
When Bob Rogers first decided to write a book about his family, he delved into the photo collections of his mother and father. “Both my grandmothers were the family photo thieves,” jokes Rogers. Meaning that each woman borrowed pictures from other relatives and conveniently forgot to return them. “We inherited all the photos from both families.” But this image hoarding had a purpose. “My mom wanted to put together the family history,” says Rogers. “She just didn’t have to tools to do it.” So Rogers took on the task himself. In the late ’80s, he decided to write a book about his heritage.
“I wanted to capture their stories. It all started with lost relatives that you can’t talk to any more,” he says. “I wanted to ask them what was life like back then.” But, of course “you don’t make that commitment until all the people you need [as resources] pass away.” At first, Rogers’ busy career as a filmmaker delayed him, but after 19 years, he compiled two books – a two-volume set to be precise, more than 1,000 pages long. Instead of recording the dry genealogy, Rogers sought out the interesting stories. “I wanted the flaws,” he says. “Which one was the alcoholic? Which one was a wife beater? Who has a mistake on their tombstone?”
Scrounging through old photographs and archived stories from relatives, Rogers discovered a truly compelling story. “It was something that people not related to the guy would actually find interesting,” he says. In Newport, “there is this rock monument that everyone walks by to go surfing. The monument doesn’t really say anything about the man himself.” That man is Rogers’ granduncle, George Rogers Sr.
Growing up on the Balboa Peninsula, Bob Rogers often walked by the statue near The Wedge on his way to surf calmer waters down shore. While he knew that this man named on the rock was related to him, Rogers knew little about the details behind his family’s legacy. The bronze plaque only mentions his granduncle’s service to the city of Newport Beach. Not one word about the tragedy that spawned what is regarded as one of the most iconic surf spots in California.
The story began 88 years ago. Rogers’ first cousin once removed, George Jr., was a privileged 15-year-old boy residing in Newport. His father, a wealthy entrepreneur and president of Union Rock, gave his son a Dodge Water Car speedboat. George Jr., who was paralyzed at the waist down by polio, walked with crutches and wore braces on both legs. Despite his condition, the boy was not frail. According to a close cousin, George’s father had hopes that his son would eventually take over the business and replace him as the family patriarch.
In June of 1926, young George and four other boys boarded the speedboat. They had plans to motor to Catalina. Since his disability prevented him from standing at the wheel and the boat had a very high front, George Jr. sat sidesaddle on the rail to see over the bow. But the rocky waters proved too fierce. The tumultuous surf caused by the failing jetties overturned the boat. Family members recall the waves that day as being unusually large. While the boys were turning back into the harbor, a wave crashed down and they were flung into the ocean. The other boys survived, but George Jr. died at sea.
After his son’s sudden demise, George Sr. was grief-stricken. He dedicated the next decade of his life to campaigning the government to build stronger jetties. Captains needed help safely navigating the harbor, he argued. Something had to be constructed to protect the boats from these catastrophic waves. George Sr. vowed to fix the harbor as a remembrance for his son. In the end, this dedicated man not only improved Newport Harbor, but he also unexpectedly created one of Orange County’s most beloved surf spots.
In his documentary The Wedge: Dynasty, Tragedy, Legacy, Bob Rogers captures this local story. “It’s real and it’s history,” he says. “Newport needs to understand its past. I’m not making a dime out of this. But I believe in it.” Rogers, who is the founder and chairman of BRC Imagination Arts, decided that film was the best medium to share his story. The Academy Award nominee and now an elected member of the Academy Board of Governors partnered with PBS SoCal to uncover the mystery behind the cryptic rock monument perched at The Wedge. For everyone involved, it’s a true labor of love.
