I just bumped into this, on the internet. This was an interview I did in 2009, about a month after my quad bypass heart surgery. I was doing some searches about the history of my last name, when I bumped into this clip. I thought some of the members might find it interesting. A search on the thread title will take you to it. (I think)
Thanks for the tip-off on this Bill; I’m looking forward to watching this tonight. I also noticed the people who interviewed you did a bunch of other multi-part interviews too with the likes of Greg Noll, Mike Hynson, Mickey Munoz, Robert August, Hap Jacobs, Rich Harbour, Terry Martin, Renny Yater; the list goes on and on and on… It’s a bit of a smorgasbord of old-school surfer/shaper interviews. For those interested, here’s the webpage listing them all for your viewing pleasure: https://www.youtube.com/user/BoardRoomFilms/videos?disable_polymer=1
What blows me away most of all though is it seems like this Youtube channel is a largely undiscovered gold-mine of such information; only 253 subscribers and most of the clips are 100 views or less. To be fair it seems like most of the footage was only uploaded in the last 5 months or so, but still…
Needless to say, the binge-watching begins tonight!!!
Thanks again Bill and to all the others from your generation who gave their time to do these interviews; it’s very much appreciated.
What a great guy, straight shooter, telling stories that he didn’t need to, so many things about Velzy, Jacobs and the prime movers of the time.
He described the great atmosphere of surf culture at that time and how the businessmen and personalities mixed and moved the industry forward, or backwards in the 50/60/70/80/90s…
Freakin amazing insight into American surfboard building culture. But I do like his declaration that an Australian, Bob McTavish, invented the short board.
I was in Ventura when Mctavish showed up and really got the Industry Shortboard thing going. Money-Pope Surfboards on Front Street. From week to week, you never knew what you would see in that shop. Of course there were shortboards around previous to that, but Mctavish really got it going in the Industry.
There are a bunch of these videos on Vimeo too. I watched them there a couple of years ago. They are on this user account: https://vimeo.com/fivesix
Well geez. If you’re going to talk about these youtube clips, might as well talk about the documentary they are coming from. It’s called ‘Boardroom - Legends of Surfboard Shaping’. And it came out in 2009. Has anybody heard of this? Here’s a link: https://www.boardroomfilms.com/