Michael Kew interviewed Renny Yater in 2005, when Yater was 73.

I grew up just prior to the Second World War, and then through it, mostly in Laguna Beach. A little bit of Pasadena, also. My folks would buy homes, fix them up and sell them, so we kind of moved around, lived in those houses, sometimes for a few years, until they sold. For some reason they started buying in Pasadena, I guess because that was kind of a hot area at the time, real-estate-wise.

A little bit at John Muir Junior College, and then Claremont College for about a year. That’s all.

Yeah, but we’ve got to back up a little. So, I got acclimated to the ocean really early. I spent a lot of time in it, around it; not necessarily interested in surfing, because it wasn’t really much of a sport then. About all we did was bodysurf in the slam-dunk beachbreak of Laguna. I was in high school in ‘44, hanging around the beach at Emerald Bay. I can't remember who it was, but one day this guy says, “You know, there’s a better place to bodysurf than this stuff you’re dealing with right here. I’m going to take you down to a really good wave.” So he picked us up one morning, about three of us, and we drove down to Salt Creek. There were trailers on the beach; it was all bare land. Anyway, the waves at the point in the summer were a lot better than the crappy stuff in Laguna. So that got me interested. And once in a while some lifeguards would come down to Salt Creek with their big planks and ride. Difficult, but they did it. That turned my head a little bit, and the guy said, “You know, this isn’t really the spot for riding boards. You ought to go around the corner to Doheny and San Onofre—that’s where it’s done.” So my dad took us down there one day and we got a look at it. I remember buying a board, a plank, I don’t know where I got it, but eventually we wound up at Doheny riding planks.

Yeah, it was one of those. All 90 pounds of it.


Redwood, balsa wood, and pine, all three.

Around 110. It took two of us to lift the thing.

No, but fins were starting to show up around then; just these little keels, an inch or two high and maybe a foot long.

You started at Doheny then started going to San Onofre, right?

Right. Guys were just coming back from the war. Some of them didn’t come back, of course. I was still young, and didn't really know any of the other guys, but the beach was slowing filling back up. Might have been a couple dozens guys there on the weekend.


Nah. Just desolate. Maybe in the summer there’d be a few guys, but in the winter there was absolutely no one. Even on the weekends there wouldn’t be anybody.

While I was in Pasadena, there was a kid who lived around the corner named Tim Lyons. We went to the same school. Tim started surfing Malibu and he ran into Bob Simmons; this is probably in ’48. Lyons came over to me once and said, “We got to go see this guy. He’s making different kinds of surfboards.” And Simmons was in Pasadena, of all places.

Yeah. His family lived on Oakland Avenue, and he was doing this stuff in the backyard. He was still in school, I think, although he bailed out of Caltech eventually. I think he was in his late 20s. Bob had a handicap, you know; he’d broken his elbow, and they set it an angle, and he couldn't bend it. So he couldn’t carry things real well, and that led to him building boards out of lighter materials. At first they were all balsa wood, but still pretty plank-like. Then he started to put scoop on the nose. If you look at the boards ridden at Malibu in that era, there were a bunch of planks with scoop in the front. Not much, just raised up maybe a couple of inches. After that he started to turn the rails down a little bit, and he kept on doing it until the curve coming off the bottom met the curve coming off the deck right in the middle. Simmons' stuff was radical for the time, no question about it.

Were those boards getting down to San Onofre, where you were surfing?

No, not really. Not at first. San Onofre was the kind of place where guys didn’t really care much about surfboard designs, the whole deal was to just have fun on the weekends. Surfboard technology wasn’t a big issue (laughs). But eventually some of those boards started showing up from Malibu, so we got to see them.

In my backyard, yes. Re-shaping, actually. I got interested in doing things to my own board, changing it, and then somebody else would see what I'd done and say, “Do that to mine.”

Sure. I mean, those boards just worked better. They'd go across the face of the wave instead of just riding straight to the beach, like the planks. Those planks were horrible.

So your actual first board was a re-shape.

In that era you couldn’t just go out and buy a surfboard.

No, not really. Velzy, I guess, started selling boards at Manhattan Pier around that time, maybe a little later. Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin were making boards, I’m going to say in ’49 and ’50, and they sold some, but very few. Those guys both spun off of Simmons. They actually worked for him for a little while. But they were very good surfers, and kind of took off on their own direction, their own way, their own style of surfing and shaping. They just had a whole different thing in mind than Bob.

Not that good. He’d just go across the face of the wave. No turning. And his boards did just what he wanted them to do. You could take off way up the point, aim for the pier, and make anything. Simmons' boards would really glide. But they didn't cut back. They just wanted to go straight. Kivlin, on the other hand, was a really good surfer, just beautiful to watch. And his boards, and Quigg's boards, boy, they were really good-riding boards. Quigg became really, really popular, especially at Malibu. His boards just worked. So pretty soon I was copying those guys’ boards more than anything.

Yeah, and I’m back in Laguna. Eventually I made a board all from scratch, out of balsa wood. In fact it’s over there at the Endless Summer bar, upstairs. That’s the oldest existing board that I’ve ever made, and I think that’s about ’53.

I dove for abalone. You still couldn’t really make a living making a surfboard. You just did it. Somebody would buy the materials and you’d make a board for them, more or less for the experience. Or you’d make $20 above the cost of the materials. Hobie’s boards sold for, I think, $60.

Hobie started in ’54, in his Dana Point store. Before that he was making boards in his backyard on Oak Street in Laguna. I glued up a couple boards in the press he had there in his garage.

Not then, not really, no. I was just still doing my own boards, for nothing. Hobie claims he made 100 boards out of that garage. I don’t think he made that many. But even if he did 50 there, that’s a lot of boards for that time. Then his dad asked, “Do you really want to do this?” And Hobie says, “Yeah, I think we can make some money.” So they bought a piece of property on Pacific Coast Highway, in Dana Point, poured the foundation and built the whole thing for less than $20,000. Property included. And Hobie was right! He had more orders than he could fill, right off the bat. He was set up to do six boards a week, but if you didn't get your order in by the middle of June, you weren’t going to get a board until the end of the summer.

Yeah, he had four of us working. Jimmy Johnson glassed, and Bobby Patterson too, except he wouldn’t show up sometimes. So Hobie started nagging me, saying “I gotta get someone in here to glass these things, I can’t depend on Patterson.” I said, “Okay, I'll do it, show me how to glass.” And he did, and I went down to work for him in the summer. It was still a summer-only deal. Orange County just died in the winter. Hobie would be down to one board a week. He used to dive during winter to make money. Surfing was still kind of a summer thing for most people.



I started working there in ’55 or ’56, in the summer. And in winter I’d go out and fish lobster.

Which ultimately led you to Santa Barbara.

Yeah. I originally came up here for that purpose. That was a few years later.

Bill Meng and I came up. One afternoon I was at Velzy’s shop, where I was working in the late ‘50s, and Bill came in and said, “You know, we ought to go up to Santa Barbara.” He'd gone to city college here, and he was telling me how bitchin’ the place was. So we drove up, and started looking at the fishery and the lobster fishing, and we said to each other, “You know, we could do good up here.” So that’s what we did. Bill and I came up, and Farallon Fisheries gave us a yard and a truck and all this gear. We started in I think it was the ’59–’60 season.

Did you know of the surf potential here at that time?

Oh yeah, because I'd been coming up to ride Rincon in the winters.

Do you remember your first time at Rincon?

I drove up with Simmons, when I was still really young. He came and got me one cold morning and says, “Today I’m going to show you a really good surf spot.” We drove in the dark, arrive at Rincon, and it’s pretty good size. High tide, nobody out. This was 1950, I guess.

Well, it was over my head. Too much. I didn’t even go out. I mean, it was such a pretty wave, but with those surfboards? Ugh. Also, you know, it was cold. Simmons didn’t even go out at first. We waited until the afternoon, when it was more warmer. Somebody else finally showed up and paddled out, and then Simmons went out. I watched.

Had you been to the Ranch before you moved up here?

Yeah. If you had a reason to enter, Hollister would let you in. They had all these clubs up here, just to get into the Ranch. An archery club, a diving club, horseback riding, and then surfing. Hollister wanted people to be able to use it; there were so few people up here at the time, it didn’t make a difference. It was still a working cattle ranch back then. That’s all it was. So the place was wide open, just a dirt road and nothing much else.

Let’s see. It was Phil Stubbs, Hobie, myself, and Joey Cabell, probably in ’58. Rincon had been good, but it was starting to get crowded—like 12 guys. Somebody told us about this area up at Conception, so we decided to have a look. This was before I moved up here. We slept in the park in Carpinteria, as I remember. Got up, drove in, kept seeing good waves but continued driving ’cause somebody said Cojo was the place to go to. Made it to Cojo and it was so little (laughs). It was winter. Wrong season. Then as we were driving back out, it was real low tide at Razors and Drakes and all those place—too low. So we didn’t surf that whole trip. Ended up back at Rincon (laughs).

So you could drive through from Hollister to Bixby back then?

Yeah. Of course, it was all real harsh dirt. It took a long time to get up there. But they didn’t even have the gates closed between the two ranches. There was no reason to. The gates would just be open.

So the lobster fishing, that was mostly a winter deal?

Mostly, yeah. So I needed some summer work, and I thought, Well, I could make some surfboards. Dick Perry, another guy I knew from working at Velzy's, he was up here too, and he knew how to glass. So the two of us rented a place down on Anacapa Street and started making boards for local guys. All eight of them (laughs). We flooded the market! Actually, I still had a few guys who stuck with me after I left Velzy's, and they would come up to our new place. This is 1959, around there, when we were getting into foam.

What was your relationship with Velzy like?

Good, real good. He showed me a lot about how to use tools. It was good. He was a good craftsman. He showed me how to really shape surfboards. Hobie didn’t, because he didn’t need to. He just hired me for one reason: to glass. I shaped a board or two down at Hobie’s, but that wasn’t his purpose, to train me to shape.

So Velzy was your primary shaping mentor.

No, just balsa. Do you know anything about the history of foam?

Well, Hobie and Gordon Clark took a year off to develop polyurethane foam blanks. They started up a little R&D place in Laguna Canyon and taught themselves how to pour foam blanks. There were a lot of problems. It was horrible, in fact. Every blank had these big bubbles, I mean 

 big ones. That’s why all those early foam boards were colored, to hide the mistakes. There was nothing you could do about it. Just fill the holes, and cover the board with pigment. You had to. But anyway, for a while there Hobie wasn't making boards, so Velzy sees what's happening and he just said, “Alright.” (laughs) He had all the business for about a year, and I mean 

. Everybody was on Dale to make their boards. So first he hired me to start glassing, because I knew how to do that. But it still got so out of hand, and I ended up training a couple of guys to do the glassing while I helped Dale with the shaping. That went on for a couple of years.

Even so, there wasn't enough work to make a living just from building boards?

Nope. I was still fishing in winter. In fact, it got to a point where, between crab and lobster, I could actually do it year-round.

Yeah. Nobody made money on surfboards. Hobie did pretty well, Velzy did okay, but nobody else.


I went with Severson in the winter of ’60–’61, when he did 

Did you continue going to Hawaii throughout the ‘60s?

For a few years. Oahu first, then I started to go over on to Maui, probably In ’63. A good friend of mine dove black coral over there, so I went over to see him. Got to surf Honolua Bay with nobody there. The next day a Chinese guy came out. He said, “I’m the only guy who lives on the island who surfs. All the other guys come from Oahu. I’m the only one who lives here.” He had a Weber. Wrong board for the right wave. Not that mine was any good either. It was terrible. Somewhere I've got a whole bunch of shots of Honolua with nobody in the water, just perfect waves.

Yeah. It’s an easy place to ride by yourself.

What were some of your other experiences in Hawaii?

I had a hard time on the North Shore the first year because it was so big, then at Makaha I got hit by my board, on the ankle. That was a harsh winter; it was big. A lot of us guys from California, we'd take the wrong boards over, then you'd realize it once you got there.

No, I made a new one, styled after the board Pat Curren had.

Well, he'd been going over there for a few years by the time I first visited. He was building boards for Waimea.

Yeah, well, I maybe surfed two or three fifteen-foot waves. Harsh place to surf, really harsh.

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