Ben Marus interview Hang Ten beachwear cofounder Duke Boyd in 2005; Boyd was 70.

My real first name is Francis. I changed it because of the TV show. [Francis was the name of the talking horse in the popular "Mr. Ed" TV series.] It was just too much to go through the laughter each time I met someone new.

I was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1939, but at the age of two we moved to California, and then at 10 we moved to Hawaii. This was 1946. After the war there was a big need for civil servants so my stepfather put in the paperwork and they approved him and we all jumped on a boat and sailed over there. I spent my youth barefoot, running around the islands and doing all the different kinds of things that you do in Hawaii when you're a kid. I jumped at Waimea Falls and camped at Pupukea. Life was very very good!

I went surfing at Waikiki in 1946. I wasn't doing anything but laying down on the board and holding on tight, but that's the beginning of my surfing life. I was hooked.

The aftermath of the war was really obvious. They were still removing the barbed wire from the beaches and driving POWs around in trucks.

No, we lived at Pearl Harbor, or actually just outside the gate at Hickam Field. I attended Pearl Harbor Intermediate.

Do you remember what you wore in the water as a kid growing up in Hawaii?

 trunks and Hawaiian-flower bathing suits. These were light cotton shorts that were flimsy and basically didn't stand up to a young kid's energy. They got tore up really easily.

No, the guys that knew what they were doing would go out to Makaha to get their trunks custom made by a guy named M. Nii. I'm not sure but I think he and his wife were Japanese, and they worked in an old place with rats running around. But all the movie stars and surfers would drive out there and these Makaha surf trunks, which were a little high in the back and they came around the middle at belly button level. So those were what replaced the old woolen swimsuits you'd see from before the war. I never did understand wool. I still don't.

Someone needs to be thanked for getting rid of wool.

Wool didn't make much sense but you have to remember that we were coming from a very conservative time. The war really changed things. Not many years before the war started you weren't even allowed to see the ankle of a woman, much less any leg.

I lived in Hawaii, as a kid, for about four years. We left came back to California in 1949. I attended Ventura Junior High for two years before moving to Panama

Yes. I attended Balboa High School, then went on to Canal Zone Junior College. That was 1954. I got a football scholarship at Utah State and went there for a quarter where I red-shirted. In 1955, when I turned 20, I left Utah State and joined the Army, just in time to be a Korean Vet and get the GI Bill.

Why did you do that? Quit college, I mean?

I'd run out of money and everyone at that time had to serve their country. So it seemed like the best move to make.

My first year in the military was spent in Georgia, then I got transferred to Europe and served in Paris.

When I signed up I was gonna be in administration. A clerk. I figured I could avoid being shot if I stayed away from guns, but when I went to the Augusta base, in Georgia, the administration slots were all filled up. So because I was a college athlete they taught me how to do judo. I ended up being a judo instructor for the Military Police. And I said thank you very much. I wore sweat pants and tennis shoes my entire time in Augusta, instead of a uniform. It was a lucky time in my life.

Paris was wonderful. I caught it when it had the remnants of Hemingway so it was still extremely romantic, prostitutes were still allowed to run the streets. It was kind of a loose moral city, and being a young man in Paris at that stage in life it became something to remember.

No, no, no, no. We were the liberators still and had not yet run out our welcome.

How many years in the service altogether?

About three. I got out early because they were getting rid of service personnel. I was a private by the way, for the entire time. I came back to California in 1957 and that'ss when I started surfing again. I was a young surfer going to college who loved to surf. I got my first board from the Velzy shop. He rooked me on a junky board, took my money, and laughed. As only Velzy could do.

No, San Clemente. Most of my surfing was by myself. I wasn't hanging around with any of the guys down there. My first real encounter with surfers was when I went into the Ole Shop in Seal Beach and talked to Mickey Munoz, Steve Pezman and Corky Carroll. These guys were really hardcore surfers. I've always been sort of like the waterboy in that world. I was basically an average surfer who enjoyed it, loved it, and got to hang with the elite surfer guys.

Where did you like to surf most back then, back in the late 50s?

I surfed in Huntington and eventually lived there. I surfed Trestles a lot, and a little bit in Seal Beach. I'd go down to Mexico and surf, and up north to Rincon. I surfed from Santa Cruz to Baja for about 10 years.

Before you started making your own trunks, what were you wearing through the 50s?

California beach shorts made by Jantzen and Catalina.

That was probably around 1959 or 1960. I was at Long Beach City College, then Long Beach State. Life was surfing and school, that's where my head was at the time, but I also needed money. I was an Art minor so I thought I would design a jacket for surfing. After surfing you'd put on this jacket, it was lined with flannel and had three-quarter sleeves and big, boxy pockets, with a big hood. It was a pretty good thing for surfing and still is.

Yes and no. The trunks came first. After running around for a while I found a manufacturer who would make them for me. I made an appointment to see this lady named Doris Moore who was in Long Beach. I brought in my artwork, with the jacket, and showed it to her and she said, "What about these trunks?" She pointed to some trunks I'd drawn as an afterthought. And I said, "What about them?" She said, "I won't make the jacket right now but I would like to make the trunks." She told me to go and have samples made, then she'd price them, and I'd go off and make the rounds and try to sell them.

And that's exactly what happened. I sold enough to show there was interest and it grew steadily from there.

So you stumbled into the rag trade basically because you were in college and you needed money.

Nothing more to it than that. At the time, I was planning on becoming a teacher. When I look at my surfing, and my time with Hang Ten—I scored big time.

Probably History and Art and I hoped to eventually coach sports.

Were you working on a teaching credential at Long Beach State?

I was working on my Masters when I stumbled into Hang Ten. I was just designing to make some money. Back then surfers would get their trunks from what were called cotton shops up and down the coast. These shops were basically mothers who would make these trunks custom for each surfer. They would ask how long the leg should be, and if they wanted a wax pocket, or stripes, things like that, and fit those ideas into patterns they already had. Those little mom shops were all established by the time I came along, so I just took what every surfer wanted and added a little of this and a little of that.

The only trunk that was being produced for surfers was by a company called Sandcomber, and they were not a real surf trunk. They were too short and a little too tight. The trunks I designed had more of a rise in the back of the trunk which would give it a longer torso, and was lower in front. The young guys in those days—I guess like young people these days, too—wanted to wear their clothes low around the crack of their butt. In surfing that didn't function so well, but by raising the back and lowering the front you still got the low sexy long torso look.

As our design and marketing progressed, Doris Moore asked what label we should put on the trunks. Back then I didn't know you had to have a label. That's how naive I was.

How many names did you go through before you decided on Hang Ten?

My first thought was Boyd Trunks, but nobody liked that. Me included. Then one day we were talking and Doris asked, "What is the surfing equivalent to a hole in one in golf?" I said, "Well, obviously it's hanging ten." And she said, "That's a good name," and I agreed! But actually, it was a very corny name. Not very cool. I knew it wasn't cool, but I also knew that it very commercial, was good. I was learning.

Doris Moore sounds like she knew what she was doing.

Oh, she did. Doris was a brilliant businesswoman. And if you want a little history on her, she was a lady who made dickey collars. They were little fake shirt collars that go on top of sweaters. Every girl wore them in the 50s, from Mamie Eisenhower on down. But when the Kennedy administration began, dickeys were out. That was the time I approached her about the jackets. I was just lucky she was not doing dickies anymore because she was the queen of the dickie business. And she would not have left a going concern to take up the risky surf business.

Where did the seed money for Hang Ten come from?

Partly from me. I didn't have any money in the beginning, obviously, because I was trying to make money for college. But after going out and selling the trunks, I made a little and I invested it back into the company.

We began in a garage in Long Beach, did that for a couple of years, then went big into licensing Hang Ten could never have grown out of the small facility that we had. In 1963, we licensed to a pair of gentlemen named Bob McAlister and Scott Thompson. They owned a company called Don Rancho that was making boys trunks. So we ended up putting together a 20-year licensing program for Rancho to make Hang Ten. They had the money and the facilities and that allowed us to extend our surfing sales force to Hawaii and Florida.

That East Coast market must have been huge.

Yes, Florida was really the key to Hang Ten's success because it was just wide open to new surfing ideas from California.

Do you remember the point where you realized Hang Ten could be something substantial?

First of all, you have to realize I had zero background in terms of fashion and manufacturing and business and all the rest of it. Nothing. I was a college kid, not long out of the service. I designed things strictly from my understanding of the surf world. But that ended up being a huge advantage because once I was doing it, I didn't need a translator. The other designers didn't surf, right? So while surfing was getting so big, so fast—I mean, for three or four years there I couldn't design anything that was not successful. Everything I did worked! I thought I was some sort of design genius. It wasn't till after a few years, when Hang Ten began to expand and I had a few failures, that I finally began looking around and paying attention to what other people in the fashion world were doing. Before that, it was all instinct. I was just doing it to support myself. I didn't know I was going to change the world and become a gazillionaire.

But that's what happened. People loved the surf look.

What we brought to fashion was the concept that laying around the beach and going surfing had a lifestyle value all its own. Because prior to that anybody who had a good suntan was a bum. I mean, seriously, people looked down on us. Before surfing it was all still clean, crew-cut hair, Ivy League, all that. When you watch 

 and Cliff Robertson admits, "Oh yeah I'm a surfer, a beach bum," it was like saying "I'm mentally ill." But at the same time, Cliff Robertson was the cool one in that movie, right? It was like, "Wait a minute! I want to be in the sun and ride waves, too." It just looked so cool, and it changed the way non-surfing people looked at those of us already on the beach. Hang Ten was based upon the fact that girls loved boys who went surfing.

Hang Ten wasn't the first trunk company, but it was the first to go big.

That's right. Sandcomber was before Hang Ten, then Birdwell and Katin. But we went beyond just custom trunks and tried to compete with Jantzen and other huge companies.

In 1960, time trunks were made of canvas and heavy twills which were stiff and would soak up water. They were better than wool but hardly suitable for surfing. I began to change that by using nylon for quick-drying. That was new, yes. Eventually, we got to a point where we moved into knitwear and then to yarn-dyed knits and t-shirts and that ended up bringing more volume than our surf trunk line. Not everybody needed a pair of trunks. Everybody needed shirts.

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