Newport’s Russell Surfboards celebrates 50 years of stoke

In the beginning, Russell Surfboards was a teenage boy and a bread truck.

Now, 50 years after it opened its permanent retail shop in Newport Beach, it’s still going strong — on the same corner a block from the Newport Pier, with the same commitment to being decidedly do-it-yourself.

On a recent afternoon, current owner J.P. Roberts pulled out a late 1960s price sheet, tattered with age, that advertises any size board for $120. “All boards are handcrafted from the finest materials available,” it declares.

It was the Russell way.

Roberts spent years under the tutelage of the shop’s namesake, the late Robert “Russell” Brown. To know about Russell Surfboards is to know about Russ Brown, and Roberts likes to tell the story:

Brown was about 15 years old when he started shaping boards in his dad’s garage in Los Angeles with a buddy. Brown’s father didn’t like the wood, resin and foam detritus and told the boy to take his mess elsewhere. He did, settling at an old naval shipyard across from Newport Pier.

Most surfboard craftsmen have a specialty — shaping, sanding or laminating — but Brown was a jack of all trades. He worked on his boards after school and peddled them out of his truck.

The young craftsman graduated from high school with his life’s work well in motion. In 1967, at age 19, he started manufacturing his boards in Costa Mesa. He found a retail spot a few miles away at 2301 W. Balboa Blvd., where his successors sell boards today.

“Can you imagine a kid today, 19, opening his own factory in Costa Mesa and a retail shop in Newport, from scratch?” Roberts asked.

Brown died in 2011. Roberts said Brown’s wife got offers from interested buyers with deeper pockets, but they wanted the brand’s name. Roberts could promise to keep the legacy — the way.

“We try really hard in here to keep that story alive,” he said.

A respect for tradition seeps through every pore of the shop. Vintage Russell boards hang from the ceiling and a patchwork of curling photos of memories and friends over the decades are taped to the wood-paneled walls. They sell apparel and wetsuits, but only with the Russell logo.

The inventory is primarily boards, still handcrafted in Costa Mesa. Six employees, including Roberts, handle all operations.

Another of them is Ryan Reynosa. His dad surfed, and he grew up in Brown’s shop in the 1990s.

As now, big “lifestyle” brands were nowhere to be found inside the shop. It wasn’t Brown’s way.

“It says a lot about your morals if you just deny money,” Reynosa said.

The shop was at 2301 W. Balboa for its first couple of years before moving across the street, next door to the Crab Cooker restaurant, until it was displaced in 2010 by a condominium project. Coincidentally, however, the original shop space reopened, and the boards went back to their original home.

The shop caters mostly to locals, but visiting surfers will pick up boards and ride them in Mexican, Costa Rican or even Mediterranean waters (they send some to a shop in Israel).

Roberts said surfboards started being mass-produced in the 1990s and early 2000s, but preferences have swung back around to quality and artisans. Reynosa compares sessions in the factory to a warrior hewing his own arrows.

Roberts understood Brown’s way. Now it’s his.

“I like to think Russ would be stoked,” he said.

hillary.davis@latimes.com

Twitter: @Daily_PilotHD