Inside Surf City : Skip the Beach and Catch the Waves at This Little Huntington Beach Museum

It has been featured in Street Rodder, Sunset and Playboy magazines and has captured the attention of “Late Night With David Letterman.”

Its gift shop sells tiki necklaces, dancing raisins and “Surf’s Up!” fruit snacks. Notable artifacts include a car hood ornament and an electric guitar.

Welcome to the Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum. Lovingly dedicated to Duke--as in Duke Kahanamoku, not John Wayne--this 2,000-square-foot museum is proof that there’s room to honor two Dukes in Orange County, also home to John Wayne Airport.

The tiny museum, which commemorates the sport and culture of surfing, offers a condensed look at surfing from the early 1900s to the early 1960s. (Artifacts from the late ‘60s to the present are being stored at a city facility until a larger museum is built.)

A bust of Duke Kahanamoku (1890-1968) greets visitors at the entrance. The Olympic swimmer-turned-actor from Waikiki has been dubbed “America’s Father of Surfing.” On a 1916 exhibition tour, Kahanamoku introduced the sport to the San Diego area, and in the early 1920s, he surfed under the Huntington Beach Pier.

Kahanamoku wasn’t the first surfer in the United States. That distinction belongs to George Freeth, born in Honolulu in 1883. In 1907 he was persuaded to go to Redondo Beach to help promote the largest saltwater plunge in the world. Advertised as the “man who could walk on water,” Freeth attracted thousands of people who witnessed this astounding feat.

As the display notes, Freeth would “mount his big, 8-foot-long, solid wood, 200-pound surfboard far out in the surf, he would wait for a suitable wave, catch it and to the amazement of all, ride onto the beach while standing upright.”

Ann Beasley, 59, vice chairwoman of the museum board and a founding member, is a walking, talking, driving advertisement for the museum. Beasley--who wears an identification badge in the shape of a wooden surfboard and drives a Cadillac Fleetwood with plates that read SRFMUZM--welcomes each visitor with a friendly smile and a tale or two of surfing lore.

She likes to tell guests about the significance of what seems at first glance to be a surfing trophy sitting on her desk. The “trophy” is actually a car hood ornament of a young surfer sliding under a huge wave.

Shortly after the museum opened, it publicized its need for donations, Beasley said. “A gentleman came in with (the ornament). He said: ‘I’m not a surfer and I’m not a collector, however I had this in my garage for several years and I believe it belongs in your museum,’ ” Beasley says.

It was put in a back room and forgotten until a woman who had handled publicity events for Kahanamoku visited. The woman told Beasley that Kahanamoku was the only person she knew “who had a likeness of himself as a hood ornament on his automobile.”

To authenticate their find, the museum asked Kahanamoku’s widow for photos. Sure enough, there was Duke posing with his Lincoln convertible, the pewter ornament of himself on its hood. The ornament had been stolen from his car in New York in the 1960s.

Another museum piece--a neon poster from “Endless Summer”--highlights a Huntington Beach boy, Robert August. Filmmaker Bruce Brown chronicled the exploits of August and another Southland teen-ager as they searched for “the perfect wave” in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii. The poster was reproduced in neon colors, the first time such a process was used, Beasley says.

The showpieces of the museum are the wooden boards, known as “longboards,” which are as long as 12 feet and as heavy as 135 pounds. Featured are surfboards by Bob Simmons, who put his college degree in aerodynamics to work in building his boards, and Tom Blake, an innovative designer of hollow surfboards.

A music wall displays original album covers of 1960s surf-rock music: the Beach Boys, the Surfaris, the Fantastic Baggys and an Orange County group, Dick Dale and His Del-Tones.

Surf-rock pioneer Dale, known as the “King of Surf Guitar,” donated the first electric guitar he ever picked to the museum at its opening in 1988.

Thieves broke into the museum on Super Bowl weekend in 1989 and stole the guitar and a VCR. The theft attracted much media attention, including an inquiry from the Letterman show. The museum advertised a $1,000 reward with no questions asked for the guitar’s return. Five months later a woman led police to the instrument.

Beasley proudly notes that in its first six months, 3,000 people from 41 states and 22 countries have visited the museum.

Although the museum is in the heart of “Surf City, U.S.A.,” no one thought of developing such a place until the mid-80s. The project didn’t really get rolling until 1987.

“We needed something to be proud of,” says Natalie Kotsch, a Huntington Beach real estate broker and museum co-founder. “We were already Surf City with a kind of negative connotation. So you take lemons and you make lemonade . . . and you do something for your community.”

A Surfing Museum Foundation board was formed, and its 11 members held their first meeting on Feb. 19, 1987. Nearly a year and a half later--on July 30, 1988--a small temporary exhibit opened on Walnut Street. Locally donated items from the ‘60s and ‘70s were displayed--primarily boards from Newport Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and Sunset Beach.

When downtown redevelopment brought the wrecking ball down on the building six months later, the board searched for a new site--and found it on Olive Avenue, the former Safari Sam nightclub.

The collection was kept in a city storage yard during the remodeling, which cost $90,000 and was financed through city redevelopment funds and private donations.

The museum, with a collection that spans 80 years, made its debut on June 16, 1990. But the Art Deco building will not be its permanent home. The foundation hopes to raise money to build a 10,000-square-foot museum in a pavilion at the new Huntington Beach Pier, now under construction and expected to be completed next spring.

“Our job is to archive everything, everything there ever was about surfing,” Kotsch says.

That’s an ambitious plan, considering that the museum has no grants or paid staff. Among the museum’s goals: to collect every film ever made about surfing and related subjects, to create a living legends theater documenting folk heroes and legends and to computerize its research for easy access by visitors.

Victoria Shuttleworth, 38, of Huntington Beach calls the museum “a very professional display.” She has been there several times, and she returned on a recent Saturday with a friend from Hong Kong.

“I think it’s great because it shows all the positive sides of surfing and the history of it,” Shuttleworth says. She says the museum “helps the kids who think of (surfing) as just something that they’ve latched onto to show them that there’s a history and there’s been a development in it.”

Simon Lisiecki, 40, and his wife Petra, 35, recently moved to Huntington Beach from West Germany. They had read about the museum in Playboy and decided to pay a visit. Says Simon, who surfed as a teen-ager: “I didn’t really know there was so much history behind surfboards.”

Visitors can learn more about the history by purchasing a book in the small kula (or gift gallery), which also sells such souvenirs as T-shirts, holograms, surf music, even plastic bags containing “an authentic piece of the Huntington Beach Pier in commemoration of the pier demolition ceremony.”

Because of its size, don’t expect to spend more than half an hour touring this museum--unless, of course, you can persuade Beasley to tell her fascinating stories of Kahanamoku’s stolen car ornament or the neon colors used in “The Endless Summer” poster or the theft and recovery of Dale’s first electric guitar.

In that case, you could be there for hours.

Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum, 411 Olive Ave., Huntington Beach. Off Main Street two blocks northeast of Pacific Coast Highway. (714) 960-3483. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Admission: $1. Exhibit running indefinitely: “Heroes of Lifesaving.”