When I began surfing in 1962, six surf labels decorated my bedroom door. Gordon & Smith, Hobie, Hansen, Dewey Weber, Jacobs and Bing. I knew nothing about surfboard design and so was influenced primarily by the color of the board and if it was featured in Surfer Magazine that month.
There was Lance Carson, hanging ten in a way that prompted Bruce Brown to say, “He could eat a ham sandwich while there.” (This is a slight misquote, but you get the idea.) Because the Jacobs team wore red nylon trunks, I had to have a pair of them. On my 14th birthday, my mom drove me through Hermosa Beach in search of the shorts I quickly wore out. A few years later I bought a Jacobs Lance Carson Model at the Jacobs shop just because Lance was behind the counter. I loved that board.
The Bing Donald Takayama Model caused me to split my allegiance. As with most models at that time, this one was hand-shaped by the person whose name it bore, Takayama himself. Jacobs would complicate matters further by featuring Paul Strauch Jr. in the “cheater five” stance he made famous.
Jacobs had won my heart until David Nuuhiwa, a rail-thin Hawaiian kid with long, black hair flowing, took over. Nuuhiwa surfed as naturally as a Slinky moving down a set of stairs, and when he floated to the nose, a new style of poetry was born. Images of the “David Nuuhiwa Noserider,” and later, the “David Nuuhiwa Lightweight” occupied every portion of my developing teenaged brain.
I was living 25 miles inland at the time in a town called Montebello. We were surfers, stranded beyond our natural element and would do anything to get to the beach. (I once walked to the sand and home again in response to a challenge.)
When Bing opened a surf shop 15 miles to the south of us, in Whittier, I walked there, touched the rails of the most beautiful art pieces I had ever seen, and walked home.
Some of my friends, the dearly departed George Lanning and Al Nelson among them, shaped for Bing in the mid ’60s. Around that time there was a photo in Surfer of Nuuhiwa holding a chrome-planted Skill 100 plainer. The photo prompted the ever-controversial Lanning to lead his fellow workers in a strike where part of their demands were that each of them received a chrome-plated plainer. You can imagine how that ended.
It’s been several years since Bing Surfboards invaded Leucadia with some of the finest looking longboards ever built. Under the direction of shaper/designer Matt Calvani, Bing is once again worth tramping 30 miles on foot for. While some of the boards are picture-perfect replicas from the ’60s, others take advantage of board design improvements over the last half-century. Cruise by Bing’s Coast Highway shop and dream a little on the prettiest resin lollipops you’re very likely to see, or ride.
Happy Resurrection Sunday, dear friends
