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Beschen, Shane

Father and son duo, originally from Honolulu. "Uncle Abel" was the largely unheralded genius behind many advances in surfboard manufacturing during the 1950s, including what is sometimes referred to as the first "shaping machine." His first-born son, "Baby Alan," also a boardmaker, was best known as the hottest young big-wave rider of the early- and late '50s.

Little is know about either man, as most of their contributions to the sport took place before specialized surf media came onto the scene. Like his father and grandfather before him, Abel was born (1910) in Hawaii, but his family was originally from the Portuguese island of Madeira, and the family trade was shipbuilding. Gomes himself was a woodworker and carpenter, and it said that he could identify and describe every wooden boat in Hawaii. By the mid-'40s, Gomes was a foreman for Honolulu Mill Group, and not long after that became superintendent of the Honolulu Sash and Door Company.

When and where Gomes first surfed in unknown, but his woodworking skill must have been obvious very early on, which brought him to the attention of visiting California surfer Tom Blake—and right into a still-tangled bit of surf history. Blake has long been credited for both inventing and producing the first hollow surfboard. Others say it was Abel Gomes. As reported in the 1955 Makaha International Surfing Championships program:

Abel lays claim to having made the first all-hollow surfboard. He got the idea in 1925, with a cigar board he made for Tom Blake, which he had partly hollowed out. "Blake beat everyone with that board in one Ala Wai Canal race, so the next year I made the first hollow board. Afterwards, Blake made some too, and got the patent on them."

Gomes' inventiveness came to the greater public attention in 1939, after he invented what the 

 called a "downstick," designed to do a better job at telling football fans in the stadium what down was in play. "The stick flashes the same down in all directions," the paper said, "being operated by a gadget known only to Mr. Gomes, an ardent [University of Hawaii] Rainbows fan."

By this time, Gomes had moved on to making solid-wood surfboards, which were identifiable from the "scoop nose" he added to the front end, to prevent the board from pearling.

In 1950, Gomes was made one of 10 directors for the Waikiki Surf Club; the first thing he did upon election was begin work on a new mahogany trophy cases for the club's vast collection of trophies, medals, plaques, calabashes and cups. That summer, Gomes made headlines upon taking delivery on a five-ton 300-year-old koa log, shipped over from the Big Island, which Kona canoe builder Charles Mokuohai then hollowed out into a traditional 27-foot canoe for Waikiki Surf Club; it was believed to be the first canoe of its kind built since the early 1900s. Gomes himself worked on many similar single-tree canoes. Asked how he knew which tree to pick, he said, "Choose a tree for a canoe is like marriage. Sometimes it turns out good, sometimes it doesn't."

Alan Gomes, charismatic and volatile, was likely born in 1939. He was a sickly child, underwent a complicated bowel operation as an infant, and unlike his larger-than-life father stopped growing at 5' 4". His athletic talent and courage both, however, were both fully developed. At age 12, Alan was riding Point Surf Makaha, and at 14 he was a steersman on Waikiki Surf Club's championship team. In 1953 and 1955, Gomes won the junior division of the Makaha International, and in the debut issue of SURFER, in 1960, he was featured in three photos—two at small Makaha, the other at big Waimea Bay.

By that time, the entire Gomes family had moved from Honolulu to Los Angeles, allegedly because Alan had gotten in trouble with some local heavies back home. The move was by and large difficult, both financially and socially. It was in California, however, that Abel, working with Velzy and Jacobs Surfboards, did his best work as a surfboard industrialist. He first came up with a routing device, housed in a plywood box, that would foil surfboard fins in a matter of moments. He then developed what Velzy called a "shaping machine"—a router mounted into a frame that, when passed repeated across the bottom of a board, would produce foil and rocker. Gomes also came up with more efficient ways to glue pieces of balsa into a surfboard blank, and later developed a unique way of blowing polyurethane foam.

"Almost all of [Abel's] labor-saving ideas and devices would become standard practices in the surfboard industry as the years went by," surf historian Paul Holmes later wrote, "although some of them did not gain widespread favor for decades.

Alan and Abel started and operated two small businesses, Surfboards by Gomes, and Glassing by Gomes; most of their glassing work was done for Velzy and Jacobs. He had dominated the family as a star, got all the attention

Abel Gomes died in 1967, at age 57. Alan by that point seems to have been out of the surf scene. "He had dominated the family as a star," surfer and boardmaker Bob Cooper later wrote, "got all the attention, and was on a mission of self-destruction. The same energy that made him 'Baby Alan,' the darling of Waikiki, drove him to great things and then over the edge."

Surfer's Journal reported that Alan died in 1997, also at age 57, no cause given.

Gomes, Abel and Alan

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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