Posted on: Monday, May 30, 2005

Dale Velzy, pioneer surfboard shaper

By Myrna Oliver
Los Angeles Times

Dale "The Hawk" Velzy, the pioneering master shaper of surfboards who helped popularize surfing along the California coast, has died. He was 77.

Velzy, a longtime smoker, died Thursday at a hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., of lung cancer.

A surf break on O'ahu's North Shore was dubbed "Velzyland" after Velzy in the 1950s.

"I can't tell you strongly enough how he was the original surfer-cowboy-hot-rodder in Southern California," said Allan Seymour, who had known Velzy since he was in eighth grade and now produces a vintage surfboard and memorabilia auction. "When we grew up, you couldn't get a higher compliment than, 'You're a Dale Velzy guy.' "

A pioneering surfer off Manhattan and Hermosa Beaches near Los Angeles, Velzy was the first to put a brand on his surfboards, establishing him as surfing's first commercial surfboard shaper or builder.

His most famous board, The Pig, hit the waves in 1955 and is now a collectible, or what Velzy called "wall hangers," priced at more than $3,000 each. Another Velzy specialty was The Bump board.

In 1960, when he ran five shops and two factories and sold up to 200 boards a week in the made-by-hand industry, Velzy was considered the world's largest surfboard manufacturer.

Born in Hermosa Beach on Sept. 24, 1927, Velzy started hopping on older surfers' boards as a tyke, and by age 8 acquired his own surfboard carved by his lifeguard and dory-building father. With the woodworking tools of his cabinet-maker grandfather, Velzy and his dad started shaping boards.

"I got into building boards like that," he once told surfing historian Craig Stecyk, "shaping down old planks into smaller, lighter boards I could use."

Velzy would adapt his technique over the years as boards changed from wood to polyurethane foam and from long to short and back again. He shaped boards for such legendary surfers as Duke Kahanamoku, George Downing, Mickey Dora and Harry Robello.

Nicknamed The Hawk, as he carefully explained, for his keen eyesight and not for the shape of his nose, Velzy served in the Merchant Marines during World War II and then worked as a lifeguard.

He began repairing and reshaping surfboards commercially in the family garage in 1949, and soon set up shop. He took his itinerant business to Venice and then Hermosa Beach where in 1953 he joined Harold "Hap" Jacobs to produce custom boards under the Velzy-Jacobs label until he bought Jacobs out in 1959.

"Custom built" was a term of art with Velzy. Although he designed boards to order, if the customer was late on pickup day, Velzy thought nothing of selling that very board to anybody who showed up with money. The original customer would also get a board that made him happy, if not the one designed for him.

"Velzy has always been fast, and he's got loads of style," Jacobs told the publication Legendary Surfers.

Style he had, all right; Velzy drove glamorous cars dated beautiful girls, sported tattoos, slicked-back hair and a handlebar mustache, wore diamond rings and smoked expensive cigars.

In 1956, with money flooding in as his boards surfed out the door, Velzy befriended young surfer and photographer Bruce Brown, whom he had hired to sweep up the shop. Velzy helped launch the surfing-movie genre by giving Brown $5,000 to buy camera equipment and fly five surfers to Hawai'i to shoot his 1957 "Slippery When Wet." It was about that time that a North Shore break near Waiale'e was nicknamed "Velzyland."

Brown made more surfing documentaries, including the commercially popular 1964 "Endless Summer" and its 1990s sequel.

Velzy may have been an innovative craftsman and stylish salesman and surfing promoter. But a businessman he was not. When his manufacturing operation peaked in 1960, about a year after he bought out Jacobs, officials landed on him for unpaid taxes. His shops were padlocked and most of the contents auctioned.

Near financial ruin, Velzy went on shaping boards — but as an employee of others, including Hobie Alter in Dana Point, Calif. Velzy continued to teach youngsters the craft in his Surfboards by Dale shop in Newport Beach, and eventually made Velzy boards again.

Twice divorced, Velzy is survived by his longtime companion, Fran Hoff of San Clemente, Calif.; a son, Matt of Makawao, Maui; and a daughter, Malia Cohen of Thousand Palms, Calif.