Orange County Business Journal
by Dick Metz
OC Leader Board: Preserving the Endless Summer
I began surfing Laguna Beach in the mid-1930s when hardly anyone was surfing. The water was cold, we didn’t have wetsuits and the 100-pound-plus boards were not very maneuverable. I’d leave my board on the beach because it was too heavy to carry home.
In 1934, Peanuts Larson made a board in front of the lifeguard tower in Laguna Beach. In his old Model-A Ford, Peanuts would take me to San Onofre and Doheny, the only good places to ride in those days.
Dick Metz with his collection of classic surfboards at the Dana Point Hobie Store in 1985 (Surfing Heritage and Culture Center)
In 1958, I got on ships and went around the world. I didn’t travel with a board and instead borrowed them at select locations. When I reached Africa, I got off in Mombasa in East Africa and started hitchhiking all over the continent, arriving in the town of Arusha in Tanganika, which is now Tanzania, and there’s only one road. There were no gas stations, no places to eat and no towns. So, you had to carry a 55-gallon drum of gas in your truck. You had to take your own food and your water. I originally planned to go to Victoria Falls but decided to continue on to Cape Town.
The beach at Cape Town looked just like Laguna Beach with girls in bikinis and guys drinking beer and wine and cooking steaks at barbecues. I stayed there for seven months with a surfer who was a used car salesman at the Volkswagen dealership.
I eventually told him, “Well, I’ve got to keep moving and I’m going up the coast. There’s gotta be some good surfing spots.”
He said, “Be sure and look at a place called Cape St. Francis.”
I hitchhiked up the road about another thousand miles to Cape St. Francis. There was only one building, kind of a little general store and a guy who lived in it. I bought some supplies there and I asked him if I could sleep in his front yard and he said, “Fine.” He had a dog that I made friends with, so I slept there that night. The next day I walked out on the beach. The surf was fabulous, but nobody lived there. I stayed about five days. I also got up to Jeffreys Bay, another fabulous surf spot some 15 miles northeast.
When I returned two years later to California, I showed my pictures to my friends, including Bruce Brown and Hobie Alter. I said, “Bruce, you’ve gotta go where I’ve surfed.” He finally followed my trip with two surfers, Robert August and Mike Hynson, to make the film “The Endless Summer.”
The Birth of a Surf Museum
In 1999, I founded Surfing Heritage & Culture Center (SHACC). In 2003, Spencer Croul, a surf culture preservationist from Newport Beach, joined the effort and secured our first location in San Clemente. Driven by a vision to document the history of surfing, we combined and cataloged our trove of surfboards and surfing memorabilia and documented oral histories to create the foundation of the nonprofit’s institutional collection.
Our collection drew the attention of The Smithsonian Institution, which affirmed that surf culture had a place in American history when it accepted curated items from us for the National Museum of American History. Some of those items appeared in “Wave of Innovation: Surfing and The Endless Summer,” an exhibition the museum mounted in 2015.
Our donations to The Smithsonian included one of the legendary Duke Kahanamoku’s redwood boards, contributed by renowned board shaper Mike Marshall and his surf-historian wife Sharon.
When we chose a business complex in the hills of San Clemente for our first location, we were looking for enough capacity to house the world’s largest collections of noteworthy surfboards. Now, it’s time to expand to a more visible location where visitors to Orange County and local residents alike can enjoy our world-class collection. We are in the process of selecting a new site.
With the support of my philanthropic partners at the Orange County Community Foundation, we’re about to embark on an exciting new future.
What could be better than stepping out of the museum and walking toward the Pacific Ocean to see its inspiration in real time—local surfers catching waves at one of Orange County’s iconic surf breaks?
The endless summer lives on here in our own backyard.
