Sonny Vardeman's recollections - circa 1955-56
Scott L. Thomas
[Taken from "DA BULL, Life Over the Edge," (c) 1989 by Greg Noll and Andrea
Gabbard]
[Sonny Vardeman recalls: Greg Noll, Steve Voorhees, Bing Copeland, Mike
Bright, Rick Stoner- circa 1955-56]
In 1955, when we graduated from high school, we were finally old enough to be
lifeguards, and several of us took the test together. Greg had lied about
his age a couple of years before and got in ahead of us. This was during the
Korean conflict, and the government was drafting heavily out of our senior
class. Greg joined the Coast Guard Reserves. Meanwhile, I took my first
trip to the Islands that October, with Steve Voorhees, Bing Copeland, Mike
Bright and Rick Stoner. To avoid the draft, Voorhees and I joined the navy
at Pearl Harbor. Copeland and Stoner went into active duty in the Coast
Guard.
After a service break of a couple of years, some of us came back and went to
college. Greg continued with the lifeguards and making surfboards out of his
garage. Greg was a pretty curious guy. He'd learned a lot from watching
Velzy and Bob Simmons. He was constantly on Velzy's tail, watching his every
move. This is how he learned about shaping balsa-wood boards.
Greg built me a couple of balsa boards. There was such a demand for
surfboards then that you'd have to look someone up and beg them to build one.
Materials were hard to get, even if you knew where to get them. The labor
and skill involved in building a board wasn't easy.
Bing Copeland, Rick Stoner, Mike Bright and I started messing with
surfboards, too, in my folks' big, two-car garage in Hermosa Beach. Bing and
Rick shaped while Mike and I glassed. It was a bad scene. We had sawhorses
lined up and down the alley, and my dad was getting mad as hell. He finally
kicked us out, saying, "You guys are running a commercial enterprise down
here. If you're going to be in business, find yourselves a shop." This is
how Bing's and Rick's shop on the Strand evolved. They became partners.
By that time, Greg had outgrown his garage operations and had gone up on
Coast Highway in Manhattan Beach and opened a shop in 1956, after he and
Beverly had gotten married. They were in Manhattan Beach for a brief time,
then they set up shop in Hermosa, on Pier Avenue and Coast Highway.
I started a fiberglassing shop with Mike Bright, called Surf Fiberglass. We
specialized in fiberglassing and did work for several surfboard makers,
including Greg, Dewey Weber and Hap Jacobs. As their businesses expanded,
they eventually started doing their own glassing. In the sixties, I jumped
in with my own surfboard shop in Huntington Beach. Throughout the sixties,
Huntington Beach was hot. The sixties were surfing's boom days.
Part of the reason for the boom was that surfing had caught on on the East
Coast. Hobie and Dewey did promotional tours on the East Coast and came back
with hundreds of orders for surfboards. During that time, each of their
shops was turning out hundreds of boards a week.
Then it began to slow down. After shipping thousands of boards to their
Eastern accounts, the East Coast shops got a little careless with their
accounts. Some of them started making their own boards. In the later part
of the sixties, East Coast business turned sour. At the same time, the
Vietnam War was escalating and all the young men went off to war. There was
a general downturn in the surf business. A lot of the board manufacturers on
the West Coast were severely hurt. Jacobs and Bing sold out. Greg hung on
for a while and eventually dissolved in the early seventies. By that time, I
also had closed up shop and gone back to lifeguarding full time.
["DA BULL, Life Over the Edge," (c) 1989 by Greg Noll and Andrea Gabbard -
Sonny Vardeman's recollections, pp. 34-35]