David Lee Scales spoke with Tom Parrish in 2013. A portion of their interview ran in SURFER Magazine, a longer version was posted on the US Blanks website, and a full audio version was featured on Scales's Surf Splendor podcast.

I grew up in Lake Arrowhead, California, up in the mountains, which was really fun. There was hardly anyone there when I was a kid. It was waterskiing in the summer and snow skiing in the winter. Those were the two activities. And then at some point my parents bought a house in Newport Beach, and that’s when I started surfing.

Near the River Jetties. I’d just let the whitewater bash into me. It was a nightmare. And then it was the influence of the surf movies. I’d see movies of Hawaii and the big waves and that really captivated me. And so the day after high school I moved to Hawaii.

Did you have any relationships in Hawaii? Or friends that could help you get grounded?

Art “Kammie” Kam and his family helped me a lot when I first arrived, but even so, moving out to the North Shore and being on my own was a big challenge. When you’re young, you don’t really consider all the consequences. You see something that you feel strongly about, and you just figure everything will work out.

I was already making boards in California, just stripping the glass off old longboards and reshaping the foam. Then I went to Clark’s (Clark Foam) in Laguna Niguel and bought 10 reject blanks. I shaped those and gave them away to guys in the neighborhood. By the time I moved to Hawaii I'd made about 50 boards. That first winter after high school I got set up on the North Shore and somehow got a job with Surfline Hawaii. Fred Schwartz ran the place, and after awhile I said I wanted to shape, and he told me, “We’ll start you out with three boards." It cost $65 in materials to make a board from beginning to end. That was money out of my pocket. Back where I was living, I set up a little shaping room in a shed, then converted a spare bedroom into a glassing room (laughs). Outside, just out in the open, was where I did the sanding and polishing. So I tried my hardest and I brought the first three boards in and Fred goes, “I can’t believe you put our stickers on these! Get them out of here!” I was devastated. That was all the money I had. But then Fred said, “I’ll give you one more chance. Bring three more next week and if those don’t work, we can’t do this.”

Yeah. I somehow got the money together and thankfully the next three boards were acceptable, and so I was the bottom guy on the roster for a few years. And at the time, Surfline Hawaii was the biggest shop in town. Lopez was shaping there, and Brewer, and Barry Kanaiaupuni and Reno. Everyone who later went to Lightning Bolt was at Surfline, including Randy Rarick who stayed on with Surfline after Bolt got started. I was stoked just to be the low guy on the totem pole. And then when Gerry and Jack started Lightning Bolt, there was an exodus. Everyone wanted to be with Bolt.

Were you there right from the beginning as well?

No, at first they didn’t have room for me. It took about a year. I stayed at Surfline Hawaii and continued to improve as a shaper, and then about a year later I talked to Jack Shipley, who was co-owner of Bolt with Gerry, and he made room for me at the bottom. But Gerry, Barry, and Reno were all such great surfers, and shaping boards was just a way for them to spend more time in the water. So I saw it as my opportunity to work hard. I took making boards as seriously as they took surfing.

What was your relationship like with those guys as fellow shapers? Were they mentoring you?



At that point, I hadn’t really caught anybody's attention. They weren’t able to fulfill their demand as shapers. Because of them, demand for Bolt board was incredibly high; way more than the three of them could fulfill, so at first I was just covering that overflow. In fact, I was still glassing boards.

Isn't that about when Jeff Hakman came into the picture for you?

Yes, Jeff brought a new Brewer by to get glassed. We got to talking, and he let me try making him a board, and then a few more. Jeff was so intent on getting what he wanted from his equipment, and so willing to go through board after board, that it forced me to improve fast. It made me more versatile and taught me to process and translate feedback.

That must have been huge to have Jeff using your boards at that point in time.

Oh yes. Once people saw him riding my boards, it shot me up to a whole other level. That was when Gerry, Barry, and Reno began to notice my boards. Then Bolt came out with a Jeff Hakman Model, which further boosted my credibility.

Now we're up to around 1975. That’s when I really started working with and becoming friends with Gerry. He had a Bolt shop on Maui and we had an arrangement where, for 10 days out of the month, I would go to Maui and he could come to Oahu. He’d do his Oahu boards in my shop and I’d do my Maui boards in his shop. We’d just swap lives. For those 10 days, we’d trade houses, cars, and shaping rooms. Imagine that! I was in heaven, living on Maui, driving Gerry Lopez’s car and working in his shaping room. It felt like being God’s right-hand man; the very best of times.

Gerry was sort of a Brewer disciple, yes?

In the beginning, yes. Gerry learned from Brewer, but it didn’t take long before he developed his own style which was really nothing like Brewer’s. Gerry, of course, was more interested in Pipeline whereas Brewer was more oriented towards Sunset; kind of a more all-around board. Meanwhile, Jeff was always a Brewer guy, so I had these two very different influences—but they were the two that I liked the most. Through studying both, I found what seemed like a middle ground. And in that middle ground I was able to put together a solid client base of hot locals like Charlie Smith, and from there it went out to great surfers from all over the world, including all of the Aussie and South African guys who were coming over for the pro contests.

Shaun and Michael Tomson, PT, Ian, and Rabbit, and so many other. Were any of those guys taking your boards back home with them?

Rabbit took a few, with but for the most part the boards I made stayed in Hawaii.

Did you have a shaping philosophy, or was there any overarching method to what you were doing?

No, not really. I never looked at my job as being the Messiah of design. I viewed it as being an interpreter. I enjoyed working with good surfers, and I let them take the lead. I almost never tried to influence people as to what they should be riding.

When Gerry pulled out of Bolt, most of the rest of us left too, out of loyalty to him. I really focused on custom work and also retained a clientele of local Hawaiian surfers. I’ve never been a production shaper. It was always one board at a time, usually for better surfers. When you’re shaping for the hot guys, the work is more custom, and the boards take longer so I just took my time and built one at a time.

You’re known for the single-fin pintail that Bolt popularized in the ‘70s. Does that follow you to this day? Are people still ordering that same design?

There is some of that. A few surfers, who have quivers full of thrusters or quads, want to ride something different to feel the forward glide a single fin offers. For the most part, however, board design has changed so much since then and the narrow tails are not all that relative to how people want to surf today. Then of course the collectors want the single fins as wall-hangers.

Tom Parrish (2013)

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