Honorary Chairman of Long Board : Flower Power Drives Collector’s Wave of Surfing Nostalgia

Rusty Wink can’t explain it.

When he spots an old surfboard with psychedelic print, he flips out--totally.

“Whenever I see a board with paisley or flowers, I go nuts,” Wink said with a shrug. “I just gotta have it.”

Some people have the same feeling for butterflies. Others collect stamps or coins. Wink, a 35-year-old union sheet-metal worker from Laguna Niguel, has joined an emerging cult of collectors drawn to the craftsmanship of early surfboards.

But unlike many of his fellow members of the LCC--the Longboard Collectors Club--Wink collects only surfboards from the late 1960s. Even more exclusively, he is interested in the kaleidoscopic boards with the paisley patterns, the “acid drips” and tiger stripes that were the signature of the era.

“Part of it is I just like the colors, the drab olives, the oranges that say 1960s,” Wink said. “It’s flower power.”

Nostalgia is the force driving most of the hundreds of relatively new surfboard collectors, said surfing historian Allan Seymour of Capistrano Beach.

Retail stores like San Diego County’s Longboard Grotto now specialize in old long boards. There is a renewed fascination in early surf artists like Rick Griffin and Bill Ogden and the old “surf music” albums and posters dating to the time Gidget and Moondoggie were “hangin’ 10” at Malibu.

Most of the collectors tend to be men in their 40s and 50s who are reaching back to their younger days, Seymour said.

“It’s kind of like getting your first car back, the one you had in high school,” said Seymour, 50, who admits to having the bug himself.

At a sports convention in 1989, Seymour put on a show called “The Surf Pioneers” and invited many of the old-timers of surfing, a get-together he believes jump-started the interest in surfing’s early days.

The old long boards, which had drifted out of fashion in the 1970s in favor of shorter, lighter models that inspired more radical maneuvers, started to become popular again.

“That’s when the tide changed, when it stopped going out on long boards and started coming in again,” Seymour said. “In one day long boards that were considered ‘logs’ and ‘tankers’ all of a sudden were collectible pieces.”

Now the old foam boards can fetch up to $2,000 from collectors while the old wooden boards that date back to the 1930s can double that price, Wink said.

Like the other collectors, Wink scours garage sales and classified ads, looking for the colorful 1960s boards in good condition. Their new popularity makes them much more scarce today, he said.

“They’re out there but they’re becoming much harder to find,” said Wink, who has been collecting boards for five years. “You can always find the beaters, but not boards in mint condition.”

Among the more notable boards in his collection are a Mickey Dora “da Cat” model made by Greg Noll Surfboards, a David Nuuhiwa lightweight made by Bing, a Corky Carroll Super Mini made by Hobie and a 10-foot-2-inch Greek Eliminator, for which he was recently offered $1,000.

“I turned him down,” Wink said.

Yes, Wink is a surfer and has been riding boards for 22 years. But unlike the nostalgia buffs, he most often rides the more modern short boards.

“I surf a short board and go out there and haggle with the guys at Salt Creek,” said Wink, who grew up in Long Beach, where his family owned the old Wink’s Fish and Chips restaurant. “That’s really what I learned to ride.”

But every so often, when the surf is small or he’s in the mood, he pulls down one of his 25 long boards from the rafters and racks in his garage and paddles it out.

“It’s a whole different way of surfing and a whole different mood,” Wink said. “It mellows me out.”