“A Gomes Family Saga,” by Bob Cooper, ran in the August 2012 issue of Surfer’s Journal. This version has been shortened and slightly edited.

Once again, I direct our focus to the Velzy and Jacobs shop on the border of Venice and Playa del Rey, where the usual suspects from South Bay and Malibu merged to catch up on happenings in the SoCal wave-riding culture. V and J’s unique feature was that it was solely a board-riding place. You couldn’t buy a drink or a ham sandwich there. All you could do is hang and talk surf, look at the same pictures, hope someone interesting would drop by, or ask whoever was working, usually Hap, inane questions. He’d stop what he was doing and answer, ever-smiling, but wishing there were fewer interruptions.

I remember when they got a whole lot of new pictures from the Islands, all shot by Waikiki local Clarence Maki. The yellow manila envelope that arrived contained 8 x 10 glossies, and the waves were big. One that really stood out showed a huge peak with this speck dropping in from the apex. A quick judgment would have been 30-foot. I worked for the Gomes family for two years before Alan told me it was him, where it was (Makaha Bowl), and what it felt like paddling into that thing. And by the way, Alan, fully grown, was about 5'4". He's even smaller in the picture, though, because he was just 12 when the shot was taken.

This was the most interesting family I’d ever been involved with, my own being really conservative and dull in comparison. Mama Gomes ran the tribe; nobody crossed her or questioned her decisions. She was five-foot at most, had a bad heart, and was constantly on the verge of popping an artery—but she never stopped giving orders and pulling ears. She had a house full of men, and the language was loud and colorful.

Pat, Alan's brother, was the youngest son by about five or six years. He was calm, gentle, unassuming, kept his place, and shook his head at the antics of Alan and Papa Abel. Papa had a big stomach, big mouth, big teeth, big voice, and a big laugh. He smoked constantly and was always in your face—he had no sense of personal space. After a morning’s worth of cigarettes, you didn’t want an intimate conversation with Papa. As for the Gomes family coming stateside in the 1950s, when none of them wanted to, it seems to have been a matter of life or death. If Alan would have stayed, his father explained, he’d be dead. It seems Alan couldn’t avoid mischief or bad company.

Papa was a genius, but his heavy-pidgin accent and mannerisms were so confrontational to haole sensibilities that you had to spend a lot of time in his presence in order to appreciate his talent. He worked at the Honolulu Sash and Door Company when all the catamaran building was just beginning with Woody Brown and Alfred Kumalai. Papa's ancestry was Portuguese. The Gomes family was from Madeira and they were shipbuilders. Papa knew every boat built in the Islands and had a hand in building most of the famous catamarans and trimarans, some of which still work the Waikiki tourist trade to this day. Being in the lumber business, he was in charge of the woodpile from which all the surfboards came. He would select light and nicely grained pieces and store them for special customers. Thirty or 40 years after the fact, he could recite to me the sizes of wood, and who got this or that piece, and what it was used for. He knew everyone on the beach and in the harbor, and he could always find something to rave on about, be it spoiled kids or past glories.

After the Gomes family moved to California, they started a surfboard fiberglassing business, called “Glassing by Gomes.” They were doing all the work for Jacobs, who was just down the road. I worked for Abel, foiling fins by hand, and man it was labor-intensive. Fins were glassed on permanently so they had to be perfect. The job paid one dollar per fin, which was decent money, but everyone hated doing it.

Abel came in one day and tried his hand at foiling fins. Standing in his pile of cigarette butts, he completed about four, tossed them in the pile, then stood back for the rest of the day looking intently at where he’d just been working. The next day he showed up carrying a big box with a slit in it, and an electric cord snaking out from the bottom. He plugged it in and the sound was like a Tasmanian devil on steroids. He picked up a fin blank and shoved it into the slit, then watched the box eat it and spit out sawdust. Papa contemplated for a few moments, remarked that it needed “some adjustments,” and took the box home.

The next day it was a perfect act—a foiled fin emerged from the box. Now we all wanted to do it for fun. His said something like “don’t go near the slit,” and that was enough to ensure caution. When we asked him what was in there he said, “I’m not telling! And dat’s dat!” Meaning the subject was closed.

Another example of Papa's ingenuity: the Gomes’ wanted to blow and sell their own blanks. Why not? This was the late ’50s, and business was booming. But blowing foam meant you had to make a mold. Abel said he’d build one out of wood. Now, I’d seen what foam did to Velzy’s fiberglass mold—blew it up, basically—but held my tongue. Alan would come to work all closed mouth, nothing volunteered. “How’s the mold?” we’d ask. “When can we see it?”

Then one day he comes in with a hunk of good-looking foam. “Blew it in the garage last night,” he said proudly. The next day more pieces arrived and we glued them up and headed off to Hap’s shop to do some shaping. We were leaving for the Islands in two weeks. It would be Alan’s first trip home in eight years, and it was critical to show the boys back home what he’d been up to. Blowing them away would be even better.

On a morning of no significance, there was a contraption lying on the sidewalk. Stepping over it I asked, “What’s that thing out front?” Alan said, “That's the mold.” I did a U-turn and went back to look. Closer examination revealed this thing was indeed made of wood, but it was wood like I’ve never seen. Plywood at least six inches thick had been bolted to a framework of light construction just to hold the shape. The thick plywood contained the shape and looked like it could contain the force of an atomic explosion. Somehow, this thick plywood had been molded to the shape of half a surfboard. You had to blow the top and bottom halves and glue them together, but the whole thing was so simple and so beautifully executed in nothing but timber and huge bolts.

The question was obvious. “How did you bend six-inch-thick plywood and where did you get it?”

These two incidents increased my appreciation of Abel Gomes immensely. Up until that time, his character was defined by being the buffoon at the receiving end of Alan’s abuse. Father and son yelled and swore at each other constantly.

Now, back to the question we’d been wondering about since the late 1950s. Why did the Gomes family move from Hawaii to California? After all, back in Hawaii, they’d been well off and well-liked. In California they had to start from scratch, suffering loss of face, loss of status, and loss of income. They moved stateside with money from a fire sale held when they bailed Honolulu. After paying cash for a house in West Los Angeles, five years later they received a notice from the City of LA reclaiming their property to use for a freeway on-ramp. With the last of their money, they started the glassing business.

As best as I can tell, Abel felt he had no choice. He had to make the hard decisions, and getting out of Waikiki was the the hardest of all—but necessary.

None of this was good for Alan's health. For all of his incredible charisma, Alan had been a sickly boy, and while in California was getting sicker from the chemicals. As an infant he’d had a kinked bowel, and the operation to fix that left a huge scar that went all over the place. I think his poor health, in fact, had a lot to do with his wild temper and bravado. He once got into it with a Malibu bully named Eddie Sullivan, a real negative presence, a guy we all walked softly around, and afterward Alan didn't come to work for a week. To be Alan’s size and go up against a guy like Eddie was bordering on insanity.

Anyway, as I said, the return to Hawaii was a big deal for Alan, and we ended up with three others in the party. One of them was a professional musician who had cut an album called 

. He had a single mom that he hadn’t seen in five or six years who worked a switchboard at Tripler Army Hospital. We stayed with her when and if we got home nights. The day headquarters was Freddy Noah’s house in Waikiki. Freddy was working at Aloha Airlines and was married to the top model in Hawaii. She had posed for one of the best posters I’d ever seen, and I still see it around.

After a day or two, I was starting to understand the esteem with which the Gomes’ were held in the Islands, and what it took for Papa to bail out. Lots of friends meant lots of invitations, and I remember one late afternoon, after surfing for hours at Makaha, we followed a car full of Hawaiian friends to the outskirts of Waianae to what looked like a house with a big gravel yard. The only giveaway was the neon “Primo” sign blinking in the window. This was the bar. Everyone piled out except me. Alan was a good host, and when he saw I wasn’t in the group, came back to assure me that they’d “have a couple and we’d be on our way.” But really I knew it wouldn’t be just a couple. I stayed in the backseat and closed my eyes while they went inside.

I only woke occasionally, when a fight broke out and one of the participant’s bodies slammed the car. The action went on all night with screaming and swearing from women and men, and I never even raised my head to look. At about 3:00 our crew climbed back in the car and we managed to get home okay.

The next morning was the beginning of the Makaha contest. Some of the guys just moaned and lay in bed. Alan was a starter in the event, so was I. We both had early heats and we both bombed out, then watched the rest of the day slide into a great sunset.

That trip was proof to me of the importance of the Gomes family and the huge sacrifice Abel made to get his family away from danger. I knew, by then, that it was all about Alan. He could be soft, considerate, charming, yet still implode at some unknown trigger. One of those triggers was Hap Jacobs, our main employer. Hap just seemed to bug Alan, which led to Alan purposefully goading Hap with lousy service and disrespect. It took years, but Hap finally lined up another glass shop with someone who was more stable. Alan was burned out. Abel, meanwhile, was tired of fighting. It was time for him to look after his sick wife and his younger son, Pat, who had for years been waiting on the sidelines for his share. Alan had always dominated the family. Alan was the star, and got all the attention, even with all the self-destruction. The same energy that made him “Baby Alan,” darling of Waikiki, drove him to great things and then over the edge.

I was working for Yater in Santa Barbara and was out on Stearns Wharf. Yater mentioned that Alan was working on the remodel of a restaurant there, fiberglassing the bar, so I went to see him. He seemed different—much quieter and resigned to a steady paycheck. Sandspit was right across the harbor, and Alan could look right into the waves peeling down from the jetty. He told me that if he wasn’t on the clock he’d be right in amongst it. After a mutual wish for good luck, we parted.

During a later visit to Velzy, I queried the whereabouts of Alan. Velzy knew everything. He gave me an address I couldn’t follow up on, no time, and the next word came from George Downing that Alan had died.

[Note: Abel Gomes died in 1967, at age 57; Alan Gomes died in 1997, also at 57]

“A GOMES FAMILY SAGA,” BY BOB COOPER (2012)

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