But I guess the fondest memory, probably, was when we were surfing at Canaveral Pier and we had gone in some orange grove and gotten oranges and put a fire on the beach .... at Cocoa Pier ... We were sitting around that, getting warm after a day of surfing, and eating oranges: fresh oranges off the trees.
Juggling a military job and surfing must have been a little tricky. The base is a good distance from the beach, how did you manage that?
We would all have to chip in a dollar so we could get gas money to get to the beach. Sometimes I would work graveyard shift, which was midnight until seven in the morning. We'd get of work - I say we - my roommate Jerry Bowles. He was from California, so he was a big influence. We would get off work at seven o'clock in the morning and drive to the beach, an hour away, surf all day, come back and go to work that night. We would not get much sleep that whole period. But...we'd steal a few hours here and there when planes weren't taking off....
But in the spare time over there at the hanger area I would skateboard. I had my green fatigue uniform on, hat, pants and jacket and all that stuff, and I had green tennis shoes, so I was still official, in uniform and skateboard in the hanger all night.
I remember during that era too, it was the opening of the Sebastian Inlet Bridge. We were there for that dedication. I remember driving down A1A towards Sebastian, and looking at the bridge - is it raining real hard ..? And the closer we got, we could see it was spray coming over the bridge. The waves were so big, that they were breaking and the spray was blowing over top of the bridge. That day we surfed: there's a little cove inside on the North Side. We surfed 4 and 5 foot waves peeling into that little tiny cove.
You talked about the Royal Castle, what is it, and what is it known as today?
It's known today as RC's. At that point in time it was just a hamburger stand. They had good, cheap ... hamburgers... It was a good place to eat; good breakfast too. Most of the kids around there ... were dependents from the Air Force Base. And as surfers do, we met somehow, and ... started surfing together in front of the Royal Castle. There was nothing there: palmetto bushes. We had a club, we called it the Makai Surfing Association.
As your time in the service came to an end, and your thoughts turned back to Delaware, how did this affect your plans for surfing?
I think I started making plans with Pat O'Hare, of O'Hare Surfboards, in Cocoa Beach, before I got out of the service, to come up here to open a surf shop in Rehoboth. I made plans with him, and brought some boards back. A friend of my father built this building and we started the Surf Shop East there in Rehoboth. It was decorated quite nicely and a pretty neat surf shop - when I was in there it looked pretty neat. Most of the time I was in the water .... I thought I could sell surfboards more in the water than I could things in the shop. That was sort of the demise of that. But it was an interesting endeavor.
I remember going to Florida one time in an 18 wheeler from a local canning company. We went down there and on the return trip we loaded something like 18 boards up on an 18 wheeler and brought them back illegally, I guess. I don't know anything about the shipping part, but the guy didn't want to stop or get stopped because he had these surfboards on that weren't part of his shipping manifest....
What was the time frame when you had your shop, and whose boards did you handle?
The Spring of 67 the shop officially opened. Pat O'Hare - I sold his boards up here first. Back in those days you sort of had to write letters to the manufacturers of surfboards and surfing equipment and all that stuff and ask basically how you would go about selling their equipment. I wrote to Greg Noll, and Hanson, and Hobie and everybody else. Greg answered back very quickly and he said I'll give you a good deal on the boards if you'll carry mine exclusively. So that's how that started with Greg, and I guess he and I have been friends for 35 years now.
Pricing was certainly a little different in those days.
Pricing was completely different. I don't think there was any margin, and what margin you had was usually eaten up in repairs because the shipping service back in those days was horrible. You would jump up and down if you got a board in that wasn't dinged or a fin broken ...... But it was like any other time, when you knew you got a shipment of boards in, everybody would gather around the shop and watch you pull them out of the box. It was high anxiety .... for the shop owner.
During that period there was a whole evolution of surfboards and surfing styles, tell me a little about that.
Yes, the evolution is what it was called. That was pretty much the end of the longboard era. And then we started getting shortboards. I got a call from Greg, he was shipping me this super short board, it was 7'11". It was called the Bug, the Greg Noll Bug. He shipped that, I got it and it must have been in the Fall or something, because I immediately took off to Florida and took it down there to try to ride it... There was this big storm surf. That thing was horrible. The board was good it was just trying to go down from a longboard to a shortboard in those conditions.
Pretty soon we started getting a lot of shortboards. It was different then, because you never knew what you were going to get in. You never knew - it could be this shape, it could be that shape. It was amazing. Everybody was trying different things, and trying to come up with the right combination of fins and shapes... And of course we had different pre-requisites here on the East Coast for a good surfboard. So, it was not only the evolution of shortboards throughout the world, it was on the East Coast also: trying to get a specific board that would work back here. We went through many models and designs. It was a very interesting time; glad to be a part of that.
When we would get a shipment of boards in from Greg Noll, we never knew what was coming in: what shapes, if they rode, if they wouldn't ride .... And all the Spear things they sent us one time ... they even had Greg Noll Hawaii Surf Center on them ... as decals. They had just built hundreds of them and didn't know what to do with them ... they were basically destined for Hawaii, and we ended up with them back here.
