Gidget the All-Powerful

The Rebel Next Door

Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

Summer on the Inside

Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted

Surfing the Newsstand

Process of Elimination

Oil City Showdown

The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards

Technicolor Surf Boom

Heroes and Villains

Blackball Blues

Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

Flight of the Larrikin

Bob Evans Means Business

Midget Wins It All

But Will it Play in New York?

Houses of the Holy

We Own the Sidewalks

Beautiful from any Angle

Duke's Big Contest

Can You Handle the Penetrator?

Girls, Don't Panic!

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

An Invincible Summer

Ten-Year Boom

On a slow weekday afternoon in 1957, three years after Hobie Surfboards opened for business, a resin salesman walked into the shop and handed Hobie Alter a small white chunk of synthetic material about the size of a cigarette pack. “It was hard and dense,” Alter recalled. “You could just barely dig your fingernail into the surface.”

Polyurethane foam was just then coming onto the commercial market. Like nearly every other petrochemical product of the time, it was developed during the war; in this case, by German engineers in search of a replacement for rubber. Unlike polystyrene foam (better known as Styrofoam), which was nearly impossible to modify or reshape once it came out of the mold, this new material could be cut with a saw and turned dusty beneath a planer or sandpaper—almost like a very light, dry wood. Even better, it bonded with polyester resin instead of dissolving the way Styrofoam did. Later that same afternoon, Alter dripped some resin on one side, came back later, and smoothed on a patch of resin-wet fiberglass on the other side. That night at a Laguna Beach party, he pulled the block out from his pocket, held it up like a winning Lotto ticket, and said to his surf buddies, “This is it, boys. The future of surfboards, right here.”

Alter meant it, but he wasn’t as confident as he sounded. Bob Simmons, after all, had made dozens of foam-core boards after the war without much luck. Alter had built one himself, but the material shrunk inside its hard fiberglass skin until it actually rattled like a seed in a gourd. There were also economic considerations. The surf market was growing, but Alter wasn’t actually sure if it was big enough yet to justify the cost of developing a new core material—the all-balsa board itself was still pretty new, for that matter, having hit the beaches just a decade earlier.

But those nice, light, board-ready strips of balsa were getting hard to find. The supply (most of which was shipped in from Ecuador) had always been fairly tight, but as airline manufacturers began to use balsa as an interior lining, more and more was going straight from the lumberyard to companies like Boeing and Lockheed. In Southern California, General Veneer Manufacturing was the boardmaker’s go-to source for balsa, and by 1957, as both the stock and quality dropped, the battle for wood was on and it was every man for himself. One afternoon, as Gordie Duane from Gordie Surfboards was standing at the General Veneer counter to make a purchase, Dale Velzy fishtailed around the corner in his Mercedes, hit the parking brake in a cloud of dust, walked in, and without so much as glance at the stock paid cash for every available stick of balsa in the yard. Balsa-blocked, Duane drove home empty-handed.

Hobie hoped this new foam could fix the supply problem, and he talked about it with Gordon “Grubby” Clark, his newest and brightest factory worker. Clark was a surf-world oddity: a hot-rodder and ex-army man, with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, he didn’t pick up a surfboard until college. Before hiring on at Hobie, he worked a graveyard shift in the Huntington Beach oil fields. Afterward, Clark would occasionally drive his battered pickup to Dana Point and, before going surfing at nearby Trestles, grab a couple hours sleep in the Hobie parking lot. He got a lot of early-morning waves that way, and picked up “Grubby” as a nickname.

Clark quietly suggested that Alter stop talking about foam to outsiders. If they played it right, Clark said, this was something that could change the boardmaking dynamic completely—in their favor. But it was going to take a lot of work. Polyurethane foam was highly temperamental stuff compared to balsa, affected by both heat and humidity, and if it shrank or expanded at all during the manufacturing process, or after, it would ruin the board. Alter began a foam-testing process. Using an empty one-quart ice-cream container, he poured in small amounts of the polyurethane ingredients, mixed, let the yellow-brown gloop rise up like a muffin, then put it on the roof of his house to see how it responded to sun, heat, and fog. He did this over and over, each time changing the ingredients slightly, looking for a product that would be best suited for boardmaking. The results were encouraging. Most of Hobie's test chunks were throwaways, but the best were clearly both tough and stable enough for surfboards.

Foam composition wasn't the big problem, however. The real issue was that the product wasn’t commercially available in the shape required by surfboard makers. Christmas tree ornaments and other little decorative gewgaws were made of molded foam, but to built a surfboard you needed a slab measuring about 11 feet by 2 feet by 6 inches. To get that slab you'd need a big, heavy, expensive custom-built mold.

Near the end of 1957, Alter and Clark launched a secret R&D project. They rented a small beat-down factory space in Laguna Canyon, a few miles up the coast from Hobie Surfboards, and blackened out the windows. Bankrolled with $8,000 of Alter’s savings—the better part of everything Hobie Surfboards had earned up to that point—Clark installed himself in the Laguna factory and did nothing but work on foam. He was unsalaried and bunking down in Alter’s guest room. There was no formal business arrangement for what might happen if and when the blanks were actually in production, but both men thought of the work as proprietary to Hobie Surfboards.

Clark’s knowledge of chemistry and engineering meant the two men weren’t flying entirely in the dark, but they were essentially clever and determined DIY hobbyists taking on an industrial-grade project. As Hobie recalled, when they began pouring foam into a scaled-down test mold the results were nothing but “a huge mess.” Six months later, Clark had burned through the seed money, Hobie was getting an ulcer, and they weren’t any closer to making a full-sized blank.

They decided to continue nonetheless—mercifully unaware that the polyurethane surfboard in fact already existed, and had for over a year.

Dave Sweet of Santa Monica was a highly respected mainland boardmaker who never quite made it to the first rank, at least in terms of sales. The power difference between Sweet and Alter, in fact, was big enough that Sweet himself actually went along with the idea that he’d tied with Alter in the race to market. “I worked on it for many years,” Sweet later told a surf magazine reporter, swallowing hard, “and came out with a foam surfboard the same month Hobie did.” Not true. Sweet had in fact made his first successfu foam board in 1956, six months, give or take, before Hobie laid eyes on that little foam sample.

Sweet began shaping boards on the beach at Malibu a few years after the war and helped Matt Kivlin and Joe Quigg with the development of the Malibu chip. In 1953, the same year he earned a USC Business Administration degree, Sweet painstakingly shaped a board from a thick block of Styrofoam, sealed it, glassed it, then finished it with an opaque coat of resin in order to keep the core material a secret. The board had a nice lively feel in the water. But the project had been too labor intensive, by far, and Sweet continued making balsa boards.

Less than a year later, like Hobie, he came across a chunk of polyurethane foam, and recognized immediately that 

 was the stuff. Sweet became obsessed, dropping virtually everything else in his life to work on a polyurethane blank-molding system. He drained his tiny savings account and put all the money into materials for a half-size clamshell mold, which he built himself and installed in the living room of his basement boardinghouse flat in Hollywood. There were no long wave-filled visits to Hawaii for Sweet. No drunken Saturday nights at the surf movies. He surfed locally, made a few balsa boards, and thought about chemical ratios and reactions. He couldn’t afford to buy in bulk, so he’d order the necessary chemicals every other week or so, pour the latest formula into his mold, and keep his fingers crossed.

It was a fast, dirty business. Hunkered down over a cardboard bucket, Sweet would mix the base chemicals with several catalysts, an expanding agent, and an emulsifier to stabilize the foam as it rose. He’d then pour the rising dirty-white batter into the lower half of the mold, clamp down the top, and step away. In a heat-generating rush the mix would blow out to roughly twenty-five times its original size, filling and pressurizing the half-sized surfboard-shaped interior; 30-minutes later, the blank was ready to pop out of the mold.

Sweet produced about twenty blanks in his boardinghouse room—all duds. Most were pocked with balloon-sized air pockets, and they went directly from mold to garbage can. Some looked good enough to be fiberglassed, but soon the foam would delaminate, shrink, or bulge. Going all-in, Sweet sold his car, borrowed money from everyone he knew, and for $12,000 had a full-sized steel-and-fiberglass mold built by an aerospace firm called Techniform Metal Curving. For about six months in 1955, while the mold was still at Techniform, Sweet and a pair of company engineers mixed and poured blank after blank and got nowhere. It was frustrating and occasionally dangerous: the mold would creak and groan if the interior pressure got too high, and on one occasion the steel latch bolts exploded from the hinges and ricocheted like bullets off the factory walls.

The Techniform workers gave up. Sweet took the mold to a Santa Monica industrial shop and starting working alone. Air bubbles were his biggest problem. The foam was supposed to expand evenly, but trapped air would rise to the top as the blank cooled, and each deck was filled with an assortment of craters, pits, and holes. Sweet finally solved the problem by simply making a thicker blank, then stripping off the the top inch of air-pocked foam with a power planer. Not an elegant solution, but good enough. In late 1956, deep in debt, exhausted but triumphant, Sweet was riding and selling polyurethane foam surfboards.

For all of 1957, and halfway through 1958, Hobie Alter and Grubby Clark continued their secret trial-and-error foam project in Laguna Canyon in the sincere belief that they were en route to a surf-world manufacturing breakthrough. It’s hard to believe that among the tiny guild of Southern California boardmakers Alter hadn't heard of Sweet, and the fact that Sweet had already invented the very thing Alter was working so hard on. But Sweet admittedly wasn’t doing a lot of business. “At that point," he later said, "I was selling boards on the beach.”

In mid-'58, Alter and Clark built a concrete-and-steel clamshell mold similar in design to the one Sweet built with Techniform. Trapped air, again, was a constant plague, and holes and bubbles in each new blank had to be cleaned up with builder’s putty. But the surf-world had cracked the polyurethane code—cracked it twice, in fact. And the next few blank-making innovations, thankfully, came a lot easier and faster. An air-absorbing paper lining was added to the mold’s interior, which left a bubble-free blank. Inserts were developed that allowed for a smaller, or thinner, or more bowed product, as needed. Finished blanks were bisected vertically, and a thin strip of wood—a “stringer”—was glued in for added strength and rigidity.

As foam hit the market, all the disadvantages of balsa suddenly became obvious. It took hours for each balsa blank to be glued, clamped, sawed, and “hogged out” (rough-shaped) before it was ready to be crafted into a board. That, plus wood blanks varied in weight, depending on the balsa strips. In contrast, a polyurethane foam blank took roughly forty minutes to mix, blow, and cool, and with added molds, they could be produced in multiples. Plus, foam was consistent; each blank weighed about 12 pounds. Commercial boardmakers had been using power planers for a few years, which made shaping wood surfboards a breeze compared to the hand-tool era that had just passed. But wood was wood, and foam was itself something close to 90 percent air. “After balsa,” Alter said, “foam was like shaping a stick of butter.”

The two materials felt different underfoot. A polyurethane board flexed slightly and came out of a each turn with just a bit of twang. It took some getting used to, but most surfers thought the new boards were a little more forgiving, a little easier to ride, and just that much zippier.

Foam’s other great advantage, of course, was that it solved the supply-and-demand problem. California lumber yards didn’t have enough balsa to service a boardmaking trade that was growing by the month. Polyurethane molds, on the other hand, were relatively easy to build, and foam-making chemicals would only get cheaper. Surfing’s first population boom was just around the corner. Plastics, not wood, would fuel the explosion.

Unlike Dave Sweet’s muted rollout in 1956—which consisted mostly of Sweet loaning his new polyurethane board out to friends— Hobie Surfboards’ foam debut in the summer of 1958 was big news up and down the coast. Hobie believed this was a once-in-a-lifetime business advantage, and rather than introduce foam gradually, he made an abrupt switch from balsa to polyurethane, and held forth clearly and earnestly, on the beaches and in his showroom, about how this new space-age product was surfing’s wave of the future.

Hobie Surfboards’ fast-expanding customer base mostly took to the new product right away, but the change from balsa to foam wasn’t going to happen overnight. Surfers had occasionally moved fast on a new development (like the pig board), but they’d also proven stubbornly resistant to change—the fin, a surfing design concept roughly equivalent to the invention of the wheel, was introduced in 1935 and mostly ignored for the rest of the decade. Wood was the only core material the sport had ever known, and Dale Velzy, badly caught out by Alter’s switch to foam, told anyone who’d listen that the new stuff wasn’t as good as wood. (It may have been Velzy himself who first disparaged the new Hobie boards as “speedo-sponges.”) Boardmaker and big-wave surfer Greg Noll agreed. “It just felt shitty,” he later said about his first reaction to foam. “It didn’t have a good smell, it had no life. It was just . . . available.” To Hobie's great frustration, Phil Edwards, the best surfer in California and a longtime Hobie Surfboards supporter, refused to give up Baby, his favorite balsa board. “We had a saying,” Edwards later recalled. “Good on wood, spastic on plastic.”

Foam had two marketing problems. One was aesthetic. The decks of each blank were all marked with hole-filling putty, which had to be masked beneath a nose-to-tail coat of pigmented resin. Because dark pigments pull in heat—in extreme cases, causing a board to blister and swell—Hobie’s new foam boards were offered mostly in “Easter egg” pastels: yellow, light blue, pale green. They didn’t look “tough,” and that was a problem for some surfers. (An alternative color option was the “swirl”: two or three additional pigments were dripped into a bucket of resin, then poured across the board in such a way that it turned into a double-sided 10-by-2-foot de Kooning-like abstraction.)

The second problem was more complicated. Dave Sweet had sold a half-interest in his mold to his brother, Roger, who in turn went into business with actor-surfer (and 

 star) Cliff Robertson. The blanks made by Dave Sweet were the best around. The new Robertson-Sweet company, on the other hand, produced a line of cheap low-performance “popout” boards, available mostly mostly in sporting goods stores, which sold well but damaged foam’s reputation among hardcore surfers.

But these were temporary setbacks. The Robertson-Sweet company folded within a year. Air-bubble problems were fixed, and boards could be glassed “clear,” or single-colored, or multicolored, or pinstriped—whatever the customer wanted. By the end of 1958, Alter and Clark had three molds up and running in their Laguna Canyon factory and were meeting Hobie Surfboards’ blank quota without breaking a sweat. Walker Foam, Foss Foam, and a Sydney-area boardmaker named Barry Bennett were all making blanks by the turn of the decade. Board prices were steady at about $100. Even wood-loving Dale Velzy came around and was plowing out foamies by early 1959. That year, nearly all of California’s top riders switched from balsa to foam—with the exception of Phil Edwards and some big-wave riders, who stuck with balsa for another two or three years because wood was almost unbreakable in heavy surf.

For Hobie Alter and Grubby Clark, the switch from wood to foam was nothing less than a sweepstakes win. Alter moved fast and consolidated his gains. In the winter of 1959-'60, during what was traditionally the slowest part of the board-making season—when most shops had maybe a dozen boards in inventory—Alter quietly throttled up production until he had 170 new Hobies stacked like cordwood in a Dana Point warehouse. He took out a small “Surfboard Sale” ad in the 

, offered $20 off every board in stock, and in two days cleared out the entire supply.

A year or two later, newspaper and magazines began calling Alter the “Henry Ford of Surfing.” He never embraced the tag; he had just enough residual counterculture pride not to. But he never disavowed it, either.

Grubby Clark was a surf-world oddity: a hot-rodder and ex-army man, with a bachelor’s degree in engineering.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

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