Steve Yarbrough's interview with Pat Curren ran in the August 1993 issue of Surfing magazine. Curren was 60. This version has been slightly edited.


I grew up bodysurfing and bellyboarding in Mission Beach. In the early ’50s, I moved to La Jolla and got really serious about it. At Windansea, Buzzy Bent, Tony Cromwell, Buddy Hall and the Ekstrom brothers were all riding these huge 11-foot balsa-redwood planks. Buzzy was one of the first to change over to the Joe Quigg chip, which was all balsa, and smaller, about nine feet long, 23 inches wide, with turned-down rails. Later Joe got into turned-down rails, trying to get some rocker into a pretty flat bottom.


I began shaping boards in 1956. I was walking down the beach at Waikiki and a guy at a rental board place asked me who had made the board I was carrying. I said I did. He asked me to make 20 rental boards. So I rented a shop in Haleiwa and got into it. Back in California, I worked with Al Nelson and Dave Cheney, building boards for people we knew. This was before stickers. We used a rubber stamp, “Nelson Surfboards.” The guys that put no money down on their boards got theirs first. If they paid in advance they had to wait. That was pretty standard in the industry. These were all still balsa boards. We could buy 1,000 board feet of balsa from General Veneer for about $350. They'd deliver it to the Windansea parking lot. We’d go look for a vacant shop or just shape on the beach if we couldn’t find one. Finally, we moved into a garage, but Cheney stayed back on the beach. One summer we got kicked out of three shops in three months because of all the mess we made. A few years later I tried to start up some legitimate shops, but they never really did much.


I think the best period for surfing was the ’50s. I pretty much gave up by 1962. Hawaii got too crowded. Then I got back to it again in 1980 when I moved to Costa Rica.


The best board I ever owned was made by a Hawaiian guy named Freddie Noah. In 1959, I sold it for an airplane ticket. It was a full-on gun, 10' 7", redwood and balsa. It weighed 35 pounds. The buyer kept it till just recently.


When my son Tom was about 18 months old, I would lie on my back and hoist him into the air being careful not to smack him against the ceiling. He would do a perfect lay-back somersault and I would catch him. Even then he had balance and style. I never pushed Tom into surfing. He was on the beach all the time, though.

One summer in Haleiwa, when he was six, we were watching the buoy kids—the Hawaiians would tie a buoy to the back of other kids and let them frolic in the surf with dad’s board. Tom saw that, borrowed an old six-foot balsa, goes out there and wouldn’t come in. Eventually Tom comes up to me and says this kid wants to sell him the board for $10. I told the Hawaiian boy he’d better go talk to his dad about it. Well, Tom comes back a little later and I can see he's down in the mouth. “What’s wrong?’’ I asked. “They want $20,” he says. “It’s only $10 more, Dad.’’ I looked at the board. It was really beat. But I went for it and that was his first board. A little later I built him one myself. I measured Tom and measured the board out according to what would be a 9' 6" for me. It was a six-footer. So he started on a mini-longboard. By the time he was 12, Al Merrick picked Tom up and treated him right. About the only advice I ever gave him was to stick with Al.

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