SHORELINES : Surfing Shrine : A museum is being planned to bring pride and recognition to the awesome waverider subculture.

And now, the history of surfing.

“It started in Hawaii,” offered Steve Unruh, staring out at the breakers from Surfer’s Point in Ventura. “That’s about all I know.”

Unruh, a 42-year-old electrical construction worker, is a bright guy. He moved here from Kansas three years ago, and he only took up surfing last year. So, like many surfers, he participates in a culture he has studied little.

“You just gotta make up your mind you’re gonna do it,” he said, Midwestern twang colliding with the Pacific breeze. Beside him lay his 9-foot, 7-inch board, awaiting action.

If all goes according to plan, a surfing museum will open before year’s end near the Ventura Pier. And if an unscientific survey of a few surfers on the beach recently is a fair indication, there’s a history-hungry, fact-poor public waiting for it.

Unruh, for instance, has learned his surfing history on the streets, on the sand and from viewing “North Shore,” a 1987 movie about an Arizona surfer in Hawaii.

The ride rather than the folklore is the real attraction, but if a museum opened here, he said, he’d be there quickly to ponder how surfing got from Hawaii to him.

As Unruh spoke, a tiny 12-year-old named Adam Virs strolled up on the shoreline sidewalk. He has been surfing for three years, and already executes 360-degree turns on his nine-foot longboard. The paddling prodigy’s hair is golden, his skin an unearthly bronze.

His knowledge of surfing history?

“Nothing, really,” said Adam, eyes cast down.

He, too, favors a museum, so that one day he might see “old surfing magazines, old surfboards, modern people of surfing.”

As histories go, surfing’s may not rival, say, Rome’s. But it has its points.

In 1885, one story goes, a pair of Hawaiian princes arrived in Santa Cruz with solid-wood boards and the uncanny ability to balance on them as the tide rushed shoreward. Another story traces mainland surfing to 1907 and a man named George Freeth in Redondo Beach.

Soon after, all sides agree, there was Duke Kahanamoku (1890-1968), an Olympic swimmer and actor from Hawaii who brought a surfing exhibition to San Diego in 1916 and in following years rode waves and won converts up and down the California coast.

Then a number of other things happened, eventually involving the following: thousands of teen-aged boys and girls; dozens of songs performed by young men with unruly blond hair; many tons of Fiberglas and wax; millions of dollars in sportswear sales, and several movies involving Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.

Then there was the rise of international professional competition, the success of a couple of magazines, the proliferation of the word radical and the instituting of museums in Huntington Beach and Santa Cruz, among other places.

Earlier this summer, local organizers of the proposed Surfing Hall of Fame and Museum persuaded the Ventura City Council to back plans for their 800-square-foot shrine. It would stand in the city-owned parking structure next to the waterfront Holiday Inn, and the nonprofit museum organization would start out paying the city an annual rent of $1. Much else remains under discussion.

Until details of the pact are negotiated and decisions are made on what they’ll display, the fledgling group’s officials are reluctant to talk publicly about their plans.

But they agree that surfing history has been an under-appreciated element in Ventura County’s cultural heritage. This might have something to do with the nature of the sport itself. The central lure of surfing, after all, may be that existential calm that waits in the middle of a curl--the quiet of the Green Room, which acknowledges no future, no past and no tourists.

Back at Surfer’s Point, Michael Shelgren, 17, was asked his sense of surfing history.

“I don’t know extremely a lot,” he said. “I know names like Mickey Dora.” Dora was a standout surfer, and mysterious figure, of the 1960s. Michael then ran down a long list of names, mostly surfing pros from the 1960s and ‘70s.

“This place does have a lot of surfing culture, but the city never does anything about it,” he said.

He and his friends on the sidewalk agreed that they were looking forward to the museum’s opening. They were asked what they were most curious about.

“Evolution in boards,” said Jerrod Wilson, 16.

“The way they changed the beach when they put in the jetty,” Michael Shelgren said.

“Recognition for the pros that have come out of here,” said Matt Shipley, 15.

The last of the group was Andrew Shelgren, 15, who stood by silently in a Raging Arb T-shirt. Someone asked what he would like to see in the surfing museum.

He looked away and shrugged.

“I don’t surf,” he said.