Remembering Billy Meng (1930-2023)

Longtime waterman, surfer, and all-around “good person” Billy Meng passed away on Sept. 15 in Santa Barbara. Meng is a key figure in Rincon’s surfing history – stories involving him are both colorful and plentiful. 

A small sampling: Meng shared a Miramar beach shack with buddy Dick Metz in the early 1950s, was thrown out of the Santa Barbara College of the University of California and his fraternity for spending too much time surfing, posed as a guardian for future big-wave rider Greg Noll so the teenager could join a year-long Hawaii surf trip and eventually turned to commercial fishing. All this before finishing up as a longtime campground host in the Santa Barbara backcountry.

Santa Barbaran Jennifer Harden has been fast friends with Billy since childhood because her father was a Meng buddy. Fittingly, she was with him at the end last month. From Jennifer we learn Billy’s philosophy of life: “If you don’t have a good attitude and sense of humor, you’ve got nothin’!” 

An illustration of his unfailingly positive outlook on everything: after losing his trailer and all his belongings to the White Fire (2013), Jennifer greeted the homeless Meng with a cold beer and a home-cooked meal. The fisherman remembered the day not as a disaster but the opposite: “That was the best meal I’ve ever had and greatest moment of my life!”  Now that’s understanding life’s priorities. Naturally, friends came together to replace the lost backcountry trailer.

If Meng’s life (and we’ve left out a lot) sounds like it might make a great book or film, you’re not alone. Inspired by the close call of the White Fire, Harden began to systematically gather Billy’s recollections of his momentous life and times. With author Peter Maguire, the two have been working on an assisted autobiography. The planned work will go a long way toward filling the gap in most histories of surfing, which have too often left out Meng. 

Here’s a tiny sample from Harden and Maguire’s unpublished work in Meng’s voice covering Rincon (aka Three Mile) about 1951:

“I told myself, ‘I’m gonna find this place called Three Mile!’ I grabbed my board and drove my ’40 Ford through Carpinteria on top of Rincon Hill and looked down and said, ‘Oh my God! Look at those waves!’ I drove down to the beach, parked on the road, grabbed my board, surfed perfect five-foot waves and was the only one out. That was the middle of October and the surf stayed up every day until June. I always had a fire going. I used to pick up a truck tire from the highway and put it on the beach (and set it alight). The sand was hot for a radius of about 30-40 feet, and you’d come out of that 52-degree water, and all you had was a wool sweater, and lay on that warm sand and it felt so good.”

This was 1950s Rincon. When Maguire called Meng a “legend,” the latter scoffed, replying that “legends” lived in the past – a state of mind he avoided. 

Instead, his credo ran this way: “Be good to everybody, be honest, and everything will work out,” he said, telling Maguire that when he died, he wanted his tombstone to read, “Billy was a good person.”

Let it be so. Goodbye, Billy.