remembering's

 I always wanted to share my memories with our family, but we never seem to take the time to do it. Who wants to listen to some frail old man? Very few do...

So I am going to write some down here and if they want to, they can read them or not. Here is one from the 1940's and 1950's. Surfing was just starting to become a mainline sport in the late 1940's and we had a few surfboard shops starting up in Manhattan Beach. In these years, Manhattan Beach was very much a laid back lazy town with most citizens having jobs in the aircraft industry, centered around the small airport (LAX) about 10 miles to the north. No celebrities lived here...yet, and housing was affordable. At the time, Manhattan had no palm trees but they did have a volunteer fire department, 2 police cars and one motorcycle cop. The city also had sand. It was everywhere. From the beach to Pacific Ave, it was all sand, north and south. So much sand that the city sold barge loads of the sand to Honolulu to add to the sand of Waikiki Beach. 

Back to the surfing scene...when we walked down Center Street (later Manhattan Beach Blvd.) on our way to the pier, there were 2 surfboard shops and the manufacturing took place in an empty spot of sand between the other buildings nearby. At the time most boards were made from Balsa wood and some lengths of a hard wood included to give the board some strength. The shaping was all done by hand, rasping and sanding the soft Balsa. When you walked by, you could see Balsa Wood dust in the street, on the sidewalk and on parked cars. After shaping, the board was covered with Fiberglas. A few years later it was polystyrene beads replacing the balsa wood dust as the sanded and rasped the Styrofoam that replaced the Balsa Wood. Soon after that, those little buildings were not big enough for the volume of boards they were making and they moved them inland to bigger quarters.  

Surfing grew in popularity and in the 1950's, a subculture was formed at our high school; Surfers! You had to wear levi's and a white t-shirt with a Pendleton shirt left open. White tennis shoes or go-heads completed the look. Luckily, my grandmother (Nana) worked in LA at the J.W Robinson store where she got a discount and I soon had 3 or 4 of the expensive shirts to wear.