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La Jolla, 1979.
San Diego news station CBS 8 airs a story about a surfing competition at La Jolla Shores. The winner is blond-haired 23-year-old Bolton Colburn.
Reporter Gene Cubbison notes that “Colburn got more than just glory for his efforts. The first prize was a round-trip ticket to Hawaii, where he plans to go up against some of the world’s top surfers before moving on to competition in Japan.”
Colburn was going to Hawaii!
Except he wasn’t.
I tracked Colburn down. Now 71 and living in Connecticut, he told me the unvarnished truth. He didn’t want to go to Hawaii, so he sold the ticket.
As an amateur level surfer, he was pretty dominant. In the late ‘70s, he captured the California scholastic title, then the all-California amateur title, followed by the all-U.S. amateur title.
Iconic San Diego shaper G&S surfboards recruited him to ride for their team and furnished him with boards for almost ten years.
About a year after taking first place in the La Jolla Shores contest, Colburn took time off from UCSD so that he could join the professional world tour, competing in Australia and Japan.
How was his taste of pro surfing? “I didn’t really like it,” he told me matter-of-factly. The lifestyle and routine of traveling, competing, then “going to some pub at night” – and then doing it all over again in a different location. “It just wasn’t something I ended up being very interested in at all.”
Consider what the surfer and musical artist Jack Johnson recently said on the Pinch my Salt podcast: “Once I went to college, I sort of got outside of the surf bubble a little bit and realized, it’s a big world out there, and [surfing is] just kind of a small little thing. I mean, it was exciting. I always loved being a part of it, and still am. But it was nice to kind of go like, oh, that’s not everything.”
Colburn can relate. He would always be a surfer – but there were other things in life he wanted to do. He was ready for a new challenge and chapter.
After his 1980 to 1981 stint on the pro tour, Colburn returned to UCSD where he was an art history and criticism major. A year later, he got his first museum job at La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now MOCA SD), graduating from UCSD in 1984. Eventually, he landed a curator job with the Laguna Art Museum (LAM), spending 23 years there, including 15 as the museum’s executive director.
“Laguna Beach is a great town,” he said, “but it doesn’t have the surf San Diego has.” In 2003, he fused two of his passions, art and surfing, curating an exhibition at the LAM titled “Surf Culture,” which he said “was hugely popular.”
He now lives in New London, some 3,000 miles away from PB Point and the La Jolla reefs that he once surfed religiously. He describes it as “an old whaling town, north of New York, near the border of Rhode Island.”
From there he works remotely for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, where he is building a collection of Western American art from the 20th century.
“There’s not a lot known about the history of art in the Western United States, compared to the East Coast,” he said. The unique collection includes a sculpture by Ruth Asawa, a Japanese America artist who “over the last 20 years, has become a major figure in American art.”
It may seem like Colburn did a 180, from surf rat and aspiring pro to art curator and art historian. But it wasn’t as big of a leap as it may appear. Both of his parents were artists and he grew up in the artist enclave of Carmel, California. Watching his parents struggle financially left a mark on him, partly explaining why he chose a different route, becoming an art curator and museum administrator rather than a starving artist.
When his parents divorced, he and his brother moved with their mother and her new husband to Clairemont, San Diego’s first suburb. That was 1967.
“My home life wasn’t that great at the time. There was a lot of drama going on, and so I just naturally sort of gravitated towards surfing and going to the beach any way I could get there.” He wasn’t driving at the time, “so I did a lot of hitchhiking to the beach or got a ride with my brother or my brother’s friends or whoever else would take me.”
Still today, almost 50 years after Colburn won the La Jolla Shores contest, he still paddles out – well, when there are good waves, which in Connecticut is not very often.
“The thing I miss about San Diego is the range of surf,” he said. “You know, it’s unbelievable. Everything from Tijuana Sloughs up to Trestles…
…You’d have a hard time matching San Diego’s range of good surf spots with any other place in the world, if you ask me.”
Editor’s Note: Read “Cool Couple Alert”
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