Surf Nostalgia : Memorabilia Is Riding a Wave of Popularity
The host of the rummage sale didn’t know what he had, but Allan Seymour did and gladly paid the negotiated price of $85 for the Bob Simmons balsa wood surfboard hanging in the rafters of the garage.
Simmons was the first surfboard builder to combine balsa and fiberglass construction to save weight and increase maneuverability. He was killed by his own board in 1954 while surfing at Windansea in San Diego.
Seymour of Capistrano Beach put the balsa stick under his arm, went home and called a friend.
“I have something you want,” he teased and hung up the phone.
Later that day Seymour, a promoter for Action Sports Retailers in Orange County, sold the piece of wave-riding history for $1,800. It was a giant windfall and an indication of how popular collecting old surfboards and artifacts of the sport has become.
“Memorabilia is certainly getting popular,” said Seymour, 47. “There are a lot of guys in their late 40s now who have the money to buy a woody wagon--the type of car we dreamed about when we were kids but couldn’t afford. The ultimate accessory is a board for the back. Just the visuals are enticing enough. They are beautiful--like owning an old sailboat.”
Surfers and museum curators are buying up surf books, art, movie posters, old swim trunks, patches, decals, complete sets of Surfer Magazine, surf music and old boards in an attempt to preserve the sport’s history and culture.
A complete set of Surfer Magazine, published since 1960, will fetch upwards of $5,000, and initial editions that sold for less than $1 are worth $100 to $200. Posters for early surf films such as “Going My Wave,” “Cat on a Hot Foam Board,” and “Slippery When Wet” are worth hundreds of dollars. The price for rare surfboards, particularly those made in the late 1940s and 1950s, can approach $3,000 if in good condition.
Memorabilia are becoming so popular that surfing greats such as Greg (Da Bull) Noll and surfboard builder Dale Velzy are also making replicas of surfboards that sell for $1,000 to $2,000 apiece. They are wall hangers but incorporate the same materials and workmanship of the earlier wooden boards.
One of the largest collections of rare surfboards is owned by T.K. Brymer, proprietor of the Frog House surf shop in Newport Beach. He has 60 rare models, including a 1956 Wardy and a 1955 Velzy-Jacobs. Both balsa boards are in showroom condition.
Brymer also has a Weber Performer with a huge scooped-up nose; a Dive ‘n’ Surf Tunnel Hustler, and a Duane pop-out, a mass-produced board with a metal-flake finish that was guaranteed not to ding. He estimates that his collection is worth $15,000 to $20,000. “It’s a labor of love,” Brymer said. “Collecting is something you do with your heart, not your brains. I’d gladly travel to Tucson to pick up a board if it is real nice.”
Seymour owns 10 to 12 boards, including two balsa models made by Hobie Alter in the 1950s and a Greg Noll board from the same period. Alter later became one of the greatest commercial successes in the industry by designing an inexpensive catamaran sailboat called the Hobie Cat.
“The people who made all this are rapidly going away,” Seymour said. “That is one reason why I got into it. It is a vanishing art form. One hundred years from today, if people look back, they will have a different perspective. They will see that a lot of thought went into these things.”
Every collection is different and shaped to the tastes of the individual. Some buy only surfboards endorsed by certain greats, such as the Hobie Phil Edwards model or the Jacobs Donald Takayama model. Others buy surfboards that represent a key advance in design.
Still others don’t care much about boards and would rather collect memorabilia such as surf music, posters and books.
Peter Townend, 37, a former world champion and current associate publisher of Surfing Magazine in San Clemente, has collected every Surfer Magazine except for four. He has 300 surfing books and 100 record albums of surf music from the 1960s. The surf albums are worth anywhere from $30 to $50 each.
For those who can’t afford to collect their piece of surfing past, museums have opened. An assortment of guitars, colorful movie posters, dog-earred record covers and vintage surfboards make up most of the current collection at the International Surfing Museum at 411 Olive St. in Huntington Beach.
Now that the museum is housed in a spruced-up, 1930s-era building, exhibit director Don Strout says that trustees can concentrate on obtaining “breakthrough memorabilia”--items in surfing history that helped change the sport.
One board on display is a 1951 Simmons made of balsa wood and lined with redwood. Simmons’ name was enshrined in the International Surfing Hall of Fame in 1966. Two others were built in the 1930s by Tom Blake, a groundbreaking surfer who was the first to hollow out his boards.
Young surfers have to learn about their sport’s history, says Steve Pezman, publisher of Surfer Magazine and an adviser to the museum. Pezman asserts that young surfers do not know that the sport originally called for respect and humbleness in the water, besides speed and aggressiveness.
“There’s too much competition in surfing nowadays,” Pezman said. “The new guys have to know about surfing’s original appeal when average Joes learned how to play and dance in the ocean.”
Times staff writer Lily Eng contributed to this story.
