Blueprint for surf culture & sweet summertime reading: Dale Velzy is Hawk

Blueprint for surf culture & sweet summertime reading

A Book Review:

Dale Velzy is Hawk (by Paul Holms, published by Croul Family Foundation)

by Sam Bleakley

Paul Holmes’ sparkling 256 page photo-rich cultural history of Southern Californian surfing is centred on the life of Dale Velzy. Southern Californian surfing is the template for surf culture worldwide. As spectacular surf pools, inland lakes and wavegardens offer a new wave of surfing, they will likely still be grounded in the SoCal imaginary. Holmes grew up in Cornwall - the California of the UK - where he started surfing longboards in 1963, and went on to edit Tracks and Surfer. He has a brilliant eye for the future as its shows in the historical margins of the present. Holmes suggests that the surfing culture boomed in Southern California because of a particular combination of place (climate and geography), culture (Hollywood glamour and the cult of youth), and technology (post-war aerospace industry materials). At the centre of this cultural blueprint was Dale Velzy. In the current ‘retro’ revival ‘Surfboards by Velzy’ is the real deal. A balsa Pig will fetch thousands. The shape - crisp rails and hotdogging hips - allow contemporary longboarders to emulate what Dale Velzy invented – ‘hanging ten’. Velzy first performed the manouevre at Manhattan Beach in the early 1950s.

Holmes’ beautifully produced book is the real deal in surf journalism. Paul was the last writer to get close to the enigmatic Velzy, and more than just a biography, the book represents a closely researched cultural anthology. Velzy’s personal roller coaster is not just a bareback ride through the wild West Coast, but through the birth, boom, bust and bloom of modern surfing. Painstakingly researched and brilliantly illustrated, it will become a collector’s piece. In much the same way Velzy went with fast cars, Holmes has gone the whole hog with this. Pure devotion to detail that keeps you pinned to the pages. Posted by the words, hundreds of archive photos have been stunningly remastered by designer John Bass. They become holograms to animate the gripping life story of Hawk, ‘whose keen eye could spot a quarter in the sand a hundred yards away.’ Born in 1927 Velzy ’built an empire in balsa shavings and foam dust, and lost it all even before surfing’s popularity boom of the early ‘60s,’ writes Holmes, and therefore was largely forgotten until the first retro revival of the 1980s.

In 1954, the year of the Pig, ‘a whole new surfing emerged’ - the 10 feet long wide-hipped board became the prototype of the modern longboard and the platform for early performance hotdog surfing. Where Bob Simmons made surfboards light, Dale Velzy made them turn. By that time Velzy was the hot cat that all the kids wanted to copy, surfing with flair, smoking signature Cuban cigars and driving a gull-winged Mercedes. He opened the world's first surf shop in 1949 and at his peak ran five shops and two factories, selling as many as 200 boards a week. ‘Velzy and (Hap) Jacobs promoted their label not just with team riders, but in another highly prescient way: screen printing their logo as tee shirts. It was the first time any surfboard maker had done so, and was a novelty for any business of the time.’ Velzy was a master paddleboard shaper, a great salesman, a teacher of a new generation of soon to be famous surfers, shapers and filmmakers, a real cowboy, biker and hot-rodder. He was ‘50s California personified, and the pioneer of the new hotdog era when surfers broke trim, turned, stalled, and walked to the nose. He gave surfing style. ‘I’m not saying I did it all, but I did an awful lot of it,’ admitted Velzy.

But his business suffered a wipeout when all his shops were padlocked shut, ‘By the judges order, closed for non-payment of taxes,’ and most of their contents auctioned in a tax dispute with the Inland Revenue Service in 1959. Disillusioned, Velzy left surfing for a while, having created a template for the Hollywood-based surf culture of the 1960s. He moved to Arizona to work as a cowboy. When he returned to Southern California in 1970, the shortboard revolution was just a few years old. This was not Velzy’s thing. As Holmes says ’the only thing truly short in the late 1960s shortboard revolution were surfers’ shrunken memories, (dismissing) everything that had gone before as archaic and irrelevant.’

‘And then,’ as Holmes later continues, ‘right in the middle of Velzy’s sixth decade on earth something extraordinary began to happen on Southern California’s beaches that would lead him to return to his real roots in surfing: a revival of longboarding and a growing consciousness of a rich history in a lifestyle that had forgotten almost all of its past and in which Velzy had played a huge and important role.’ It’s funny - if you do something well it becomes timeless, and sometimes priceless. All those meticulous hours (spiced with plenty of goodtimes) spent making wooden boards and custom paddleboards would pay off.

As a Cornish short-come-longboarder, I grew up in the retro revival that Holmes eloquently captures in words. By now anything with ‘Surfboards by Velzy’ was a stamp of authenticity. If you were lucky you could ride one. Ironically the first time I rode a ‘Velzy’ it was a simulcrum – a Surftech Velzy Classic 9’ 6” - vintage repackaged in a postmodern Asian made pop-out. But that’s not the point. The shape is Velzy’s own. I fulfilled a huge longboarders ambition by hanging ten on a ‘Velzy’, soon to learn that Velzy was the first surfer to 'hang ten'.

If you want to celebrate surf history, you need to understand California and Dale Velzy. He is California personified. When he died of lung cancer in 2005, Holmes says ’I was overwhelmed by a sense of crushing personal loss. I discovered that in the course of the three years since Velzy and I first sat down over coffee and vodka I’d not only come to know the subject of a book, but I’d developed a deep and special friendship with him that was untimely and all too suddenly now taken away.’