Surfers in Search of the Perfect Museum

San Diego has its Aerospace Museum and rightfully so, what with the region’s contributions to man in flight.

San Diego also has contributed to man on surf, but when’s the last time you saw a surfboard on historical display in San Diego County? That’s a shame because surfing is an important part of our local lore and life style, old-time surfers say.

So there’s a campaign underfoot to establish a surfing museum, perhaps in Encinitas, where old men can reminisce and young kids can gawk at how the sport of surfing has evolved over the decades.

Just as most kids today have to go to a museum to see an open-cockpit biplane, so too in the relic class are 12-foot-long, 100-pound wooden planks laden thick with varnish, the surfboards of yesteryear. Today’s boards are half the length, a fifth the weight, made of fiberglass and foam, and serve not only as surf riders but as a slick canvas of sorts for airbrush artists. These days you don’t make a surfboard, you create one.

“There’s a tremendous amount of history to the sport of surfing that’s largely gone overlooked, and it’s unlikely that a major museum--whether of history, of man or of art--is going to take much interest in it. If we want to display the history of surfing, we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” said Stuart Resor, a 43-year-old architect by weekday, surfer by weekend.

Resor and a dozen or so friends are seriously pursuing plans for a museum, and have enlisted the support of Jane Schmauss, owner of George’s Restaurant in Encinitas, in setting aside a corner of the restaurant to display surfing memorabilia until a full-fledged museum can be established.

A larger museum could display the history of surfboards--from the huge planks to balsa boards to the modern-day short boards with their interchangeable fin boxes and special step shaping. Resor even has a 15-year-old motorized board from the East Coast that apparently flopped as a forerunner to today’s jet ski. The museum also would display photographs and the evolution of surfing clothes, show surfing films and videos, and have displays explaining how surfboards are designed, constructed and decorated.

It’ll take $100,000 or more to get the museum established, Resor estimated. He’ll be looking for grants and corporate assistance from the surfing industry “because we don’t see pulling this off with handouts from surfers at Swami’s.”

Resor & Friends already have their eyes on a possible museum building: it’s owned by the San Dieguito Water District at the junction of Interstate 5 and Santa Fe Drive. The idea will be discussed by the district’s board of directors on March 21.

The building? A surplus, million-gallon water tank.

Can’t fault ‘em for their logic.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Seems that Catholics are getting bumped out of one of their own holidays.

St. Patrick’s Day is next Monday, but at the Escondido Country Club, a “St. Patty’s Day buffet” is being dished up on Friday instead, with all the traditional fixings anchored by corned beef and Irish stew.

Never mind that Catholics are in the middle of Lent, and are expected to abstain from meat on Fridays until Easter.

‘Spose they can come back Monday for leftovers.

Wedding Songs

In our Music Department, we bring you these related items:

- KGTV (Channel 10) reporter Susan McBride, a serious music student with 14 years of piano lessons and four years of voice training to her credit, is honeymoon-lighting these days as a wedding vocalist.

“The money’s in broadcasting but the fun’s in singing,” she says. “And I’d rather sing at weddings than smoky bars where people argue and ignore you.” (Presumably at weddings, they’ll do neither.)

She’ll sing just about whatever the bride and groom request, but the other day she backed out of doing a piece by Kool and the Gang.

She said her first wedding was terrifying. “I don’t mind having an audience, but usually they’re at home behind their TV sets. Seeing them face-to-face was frightening.”

- Escondido Fire Marshal Ernie Liebman sings on the side, too--with a Southern gospel group known as The King’s Men and as a baritone soloist, both at weddings and funerals.

Liebman, 47, has been singing since he was 19. “It used to be, I’d do more weddings than funerals,” he said. “Now that I’m getting older and most of my acquaintances are married, I’m doing more funerals than weddings.”

Stomach Education

The latest in hospital public-education programs comes from Pomerado Hospital in Poway. In conjunction with National Nutrition Month, the hospital is offering guided lecture-tours of a local supermarket to explain how to read content labels and buy foods with low fat, sodium and cholesterol levels.

The hospital says shoppers are guilty of picking out items on impulse without thinking in terms of their health.

Don’t know about you, but we’re not guilty of impulse buying. We plan every single purchase of those Cadbury’s cream-filled chocolate Easter eggs.