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Thought I'd better add some disclaimers:
* All of the tales I'm spinning are based upon facts of some sort.
* Most of the tales will be at least 50% factual.



A Bit of Booger Board History - as I remember it -
Bill Andrews, April 3, 2003

A friend of mine - Neal Miyake - has written a very good piece on Body Boarding:

Neal's Piece

I'll get back to his comments - if I get his permission - in Part II of my way wordy opinion piece.

I have to preface this piece by stating: Hind-sight is always 100% perfect!

A way long time ago - late '60s early '70s - Tom Morey worked for Gordon and Smith Surfboards, as I did - and Skip Frye, Mike Eaton, Dick Brewer, and the list goes on and on - this was a pretty "Magic Time" - at least in my surf world.

I ran the old Pacific Beach Surf Shop and Morey worked with Larry Gordon on "new stuff" - R & D?.

We sold, err, tried to sell, Morey designed surfboards with vent holes that went thru the boards - ?for lift? - and boards with "stepped bottoms" as well as, very short for the times, ~ 6' long - very thick, surfboards with hard down rails and concave decks.

These boards actually evolved into - ta da -

The G & S Waterskate


We tried boards with step decks, flex tails, lotsa fins, no fins, "Slip Checked" bottoms, slick bottoms, etc.

We also had the first Morey Boogie Boards -

I'm not the expert on the evolution of the boards - I guess I should read Neal's piece a little more carefully - but I became pretty expert at putting the things together.

We sold the kits - for about $30??

The customer would have to glue the top and bottom skins on to the core, and trim it etc...or we would do it for them for a fee.

We also sold the finished boards for $ ????.

I liked the boogers for a number of reasons:

1. We rented them out. We replaced our Converse Surf Mat Rentals with Boogie Boards - plus - no inflation necessary -

2. We sold them to beginning surfers who wanted something "better than a surf mat, but not quite as good as a surfboard."

3. As I remember, the mats were very expensive - maybe twice the cost of a finished Boogie Board?

(If I had known then, what I know now, about the Sponge Popularity, I would have treated Morey, and his inventions, a bit differently)

I hated them - the boogers - because:

1. I had to deal with Morey and his eccentricities.

2. When we assembled the boogers, we used contact cement. I was having enough troubles keeping my employees sober, much less encouraging them to sniff glue.

I'm not sure when their - the boogers - popularity really boomed, but I'm sure it was many years after their introduction at PB Surf Shop.

I think what was important back then, was, that the Boogie Board was replacing the surf mat in a stand-up surfer's learning process.

It was still uncool NOT to be a vertical surfer, and the booger stage was perceived as just being a stepping stone to becoming a "real surfer."

Then, all hell broke out!

Surfboards were getting smaller, and had multi-fins.

The old single-fin "longboards" were used for rentals, cut down, or s**t-canned.

It became much more difficult for the average beginning surfer to learn how to stand-up, 'cause the boards were getting really short, really quickly.

It was so uncool to be seen with a "longboard" that guys that weighed-in at 200 plus pounds were trying to learn on a 7' long, 18" wide Brewer Pintail - that was a "longboard."

Well, it ain't easy for a guy that size, or even quite a bit lighter, to learn on a small board - so - a lot of the beginners just stuck to their boogers.

I think that's when the tide changed - forget vertical surfing!

Boogering was / is easy - ? too easy ? - inexpensive - and boogering was gaining peer-group acceptance at most beaches.

End of Part I - WHEW!

Later,

BA

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