Pezman, continued

Craig Stecyk, 1995 Dale Velzey's early Shaping Tools Courtesy of Dale Velzey, Craig Stecyk and Surfers' Journal

It began innocently enough. As the sport developed from a sleepy, eccentric pastime of a few thousand to the fad explosion of 1959-1963 (kicked off by the Hollywood movie Gidget) the millions of new surfers needed surfboards. A garage industry, as specialized and quirky as was the act of riding the waves, tried to mime big-time sporting goods manufacturing. For a while, through the sixties, a dozen or two factories manned by surfers - who suddenly saw the opportunity to make a living around something they loved - pumped 150 hand shaped and fiberglassed, plastic foam wave riding sculptures a week into surfdom. But by 1969, the surfboard industry had imploded back into hundreds of "do your own thing" underground garage builders with no overhead and the larger more commercialized board builders couldn't compete. Skilled craftsmen could make good wages on the cottage level and even became cult figures, and that's the way it is today. Water seek its own level.

Surf trunks were another matter. These functional bits of surfing paraphernalia had a charisma of their own. Surfers used colorful and insolent style variations in their trunks to make statements about who they were. This habit was turned by some clever image manipulators and marketers into a lifestyle industry, based around the integrity of real surf trunks for sale at real surf shops, as an authentic imag e base to penetrate a mass market hungry for real stuff.

Growing out of the same surf trunk distribution network into the mass market, screen print Ts, the personal statement-of-affiliation billboards of our times, became another huge success spawned largely in the core-surf market. By the late 1970s, behind this powerful positioning dynamic, several surfwear companies were doing forty million a year wholesale mostly in these two categories of goods, and the industry as a whole was heading towards a billion dollars a year. By the late eighties those same companiesÕ sales were topping a hundred million a year each and some were going public. At that stage, little of it had much to do with serving people who rode waves. But as an image base, it remained intact and called itself the "surf industry."

The latest phase in the greening of the blue room is that the roots-paraphernalia of the fifties and sixties have become collectibles. A Bob Simmons balsawood surfboard could be called a bench mark item in this movement. Simmons, who drowned at Windansea Beach, La Jolla back in Õ54 was an eccentric Cal-Tech engineer with a withered arm who combined fiberglassed balsawood with both naval hull and aircraft wing design principles to make a lighter, sleeker surf craft. He is regarded as the father of the modern surfboard. There are fewer than a hundred of his boards in existence. As the teenaged, baby boomer surfers of the sixties have grayed, they have begun to venerate such items and they now have the cash to act on their passions. A Simmons balsa spoon shape that went for $100 in 1975 now sells for at least $8,000 to $10,000. Many other items from surfingÕs past, including printed matter, photography, period surf trunks, and of course, old surf boards by other makers, are being snapped up for such unprecedented prices that even the Wall Street Journal recently recommended a buy in this category.

In spite of all the money now involved in surfing, most of the millions of surfers in the world still paddle out solely for personal reward. The industrial aspect of it has had little effect on their wave riding. The two realms exist, still bonded at the hip, but worlds apart. This unusual element of integrity, the ongoing intensity and purity of individual experience, is what allows the sport of wave riding to outlast all its gaudy commercial attachments while continuing to serve as their engine. Surfing survives, expanding and contracting like some elemental force, from decade to decade, from generation to generation, in spite of the affectations that each superimposes on it.

Somehow, through it all, it remains free and clear.