South of downtown LA, a mosaic of incorporated cities and embedded neighborhoods straddle the banks of the Los Angeles River, spilling downstream toward the Orange County line. Their names are inked across the underbelly of LA like tattoos: Vernon, Nevin, Florence, Cudahy, Watts, and so on. Commonly called Southeast Los Angeles, this area is known to administrative officials as the Gateway Cities Region. A little over a century ago, this land was a sparsely inhabited plain of farms, dairies, and orchards. Today it is one of the most densely populated and industrialized urban districts in the United States.
There are twenty-seven independent municipalities all told in the Gateway Cities Region. Among the first to incorporate was Compton, in 1888. Among the last was Hawaiian Gardens, incorporated in 1964. Intervening decades saw the addition of Bellflower, Downey, South Gate, and Huntington Park, to name a few. Driving the streets of the Gateway Cities today is to be confronted with a frequently brutal interplay between industry and human habitation.
Two million people live in neighborhoods whose borders are defined by freeways, factories, freight yards, and massive warehouse complexes. One hundred years of automobile infrastructure weighs heavily on the land. Domestic refuge does not come easy in this place of hard work and little privilege, seemingly as distant from the Southland’s affluent coastal enclaves as the earth is to the moon. Many things come to mind, but a carefree life spent riding a surfboard at the beach is not one of them. Yet it was here, on the blue-collar streets of Vernon and South Gate, in the midst of the Great Depression, that the surfboard industry was born.
Vernon is where Pacific System Ready-Cut Homes was located. South Gate is the home of General Veneer. The two cities are stacked one atop the other, a few gusts downwind from Skid Row in downtown LA. Both firms were in the business of acquiring and processing wood.
Pacific System Ready-Cut Homes opened its 25-acre mill and factory at 5800 South Boyle Avenue, where Vernon meets Huntington Park, in 1908. Founded by Brene Barker and William Butte, it grew to become the largest manufacturer of prefabricated kit houses in the world. General Veneer launched its wood processing facility in an art deco office building and workshop on Otis Street in South Gate in 1931, about 30 blocks south of Pacific System. Founded by Douglas DeWitt, it grew to become a major supplier of composite materials to the aerospace industry.
The first threads of popularized surfing in the 1930s eventually led both businesses to get involved in making surfboards, though on slightly different timelines and levels of commitment. They shared expertise in wood, proximity to surfers in California and Hawaii, and an opportunity to exploit them as a potential revenue source. Only in California could the idea of entering an unproven market during a global economic catastrophe seem like a good plan. Nevertheless, under the murky shadow of the Depression, the surfboard industry sputtered to life in Los Angeles.
By the time General Veneer opened for business in 1931, Pacific System Homes had been building and marketing surfboards for two years. Meanwhile, across town in Venice, another woodworking concern, the Thomas Rogers Company, began producing Tom Blake’s line of paddleboard/surfboard hybrids under commercial license in 1932. But Pacific System Homes was the first.
They pioneered the market, launching the world’s first full-scale surfboard brand, the Swastika Hawaiian Surfboard Company, in 1929. It must be stated that the seemingly irredeemable decision to brand the first commercial surfboards with a swastika had nothing to do with Nazi ideology. Pacific System chose the swastika for it’s ancient and multicultural associations with health and good fortune. They ceased using it in 1938 as it became permanently associated with the Third Reich, changing the brand name to the Waikiki Hawaiian Surfboard Company.
Craig Stecyk wrote eloquently about the historic debut of the world’s first surfboard company in “Pacific System, Birth of the Surfboard Factory” [The Surfers Journal, Volume 6, Number 4]. Stecyk details how the stock market crash in October of 1929, and thus the advent of the Depression, forced Meyers Butte, the son of Pacific System’s cofounder William Butte, to leave his studies at Stanford University and go to work at the factory mill on Boyle Avenue in Vernon.
Young Butte had an interest in the Hawaiian sports of paddling and surfing, as demonstrated by George Freeth, and thought surfboards might be a good way to diversify the company output. Pacific System’s prefabricated home sales boom of the Roaring Twenties may have been silenced by the Depression, but its metaphorical echo, Meyers Butte’s surfboard company’s output, continues to reverberate. As Stecyk put it: “Things we now take for granted, like production boards, standardized models, advertising, nose blocks, tail blocks, composite cores, offset stringers, and t-band center sticks were all inaugurated on Boyle Avenue.” To this it can be added that Pacific Systems cut the first paychecks to the first surfboard production crew in history. Among those on the payroll were Pete Peterson, Calvin Clark, and Lorrin Harrison.
Meyers Butte hired Peterson in the early 1930s to build the Pacific System surfboard line. Only a handful of boards had been made on the premises prior to Peterson’s arrival. They were solid redwood slabs and very heavy, and Butte realized that reducing weight was crucial to marketability.
Peterson immediately did just that by using pine in combination with redwood in Pacific System production boards. Then, on a trip to Oahu in 1932, Peterson noticed a surfer at Waikiki riding a board made of an unfamiliar blond wood. Intrigued, Peterson inspected the board on the beach and was amazed to find it was less than half the weight of his redwood plank. The rider of the mysterious board told Peterson that some surfers from Florida built it using an imported South American wood called balsa.
For Peterson, the “discovery” of balsa was a revelatory moment that would have historic consequences for surfing. He returned to the mainland enthralled with the potential of light surfboards, found some good balsa in the lumberyards, and made a 12-foot plank, varnished with a hardwood deck patch. It weighed 20 pounds. He followed this with a series of varnished-solid balsa planks with veneer deck patches, some of which weighed less than the first board.
The extreme lightness of these early boards was due to the high quality of the wood Peterson selected and because the only added weight was a thin, hardwood veneer and a few coats of varnish. They performed like a dream, but, unfortunately, they were just as ephemeral. Balsa sucked water like a sponge, and varnish lacked the durability and strength to properly seal a board. Peterson’s solution was to add redwood for strength.
He crafted redwood noses, tail blocks, and rails to strengthen the boards, which brought the weight up to about 45 pounds. These balsa and redwood planks went directly into the Pacific System line of commercial production boards. He continued making light, solid-balsa boards for himself and a few others, but they were the exception, not the rule.
In spite of Butte and Peterson’s efforts, Pacific System could not generate enough income from surfboards to be viable—there simply weren’t enough surfers to support such a business. When the United States entered World War II in 1942, Meyers Butte closed down the Waikiki Hawaiian Surfboard Company and joined the Navy. Pete Peterson followed his employer to war and was inducted into the United States Navy on February 18, 1943. The first surfboard factory, like so many other casualties of the Depression and WWII, closed its doors forever.
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While the onset of WWII ended the era of Pacific System, it opened the door for General Veneer. Douglas DeWitt came to South Gate in 1931 after spending four years as a worker building the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River in New York City. Arriving in Los Angeles, he found the effects of the Great Depression to be severe. Buildings and warehouses stood vacant. Many were broken into, serving as shelter for the multitudes of down-and-outers trying to survive on the streets.
DeWitt found an empty office building with an attached workshop on Otis Street. The landlord let him move in and start his business rent free, happy enough to have a good tenant around to protect his property. DeWitt’s business was balsa wood. He was an importer who processed wood for model airplanes. He took advantage of the low overhead provided by his landlord and carefully grew his business during the 1930s, expanding into custom doors for homes and commercial structures.
Pacific System and Tom Blake’s surfboard ventures were experiments in commercial product branding, complete with advertising campaigns, media partnerships, celebrity endorsements, and sales and distribution strategies. General Veneer was a different animal altogether. It never engaged in real branding or its required activities. DeWitt first dabbled in surfboards in the 1930s, when he built paipo/alaia belly boards for the Royal Hawaiian and Moana hotels in Waikiki. These boards were made to order under private label contract from the resorts. Known as “hotel boards,” they were loaned to guests for playing in the surf and for surf lessons from the local Waikiki beach boys. The boards were also sold in souvenir shops.
Each board had a decal featuring a royal Hawaiian crest bracketed by the words ALOHA HAWAII. A banner beneath the emblem read, UA MAU KE E A OKA AINA I KA PONO, which translates as “The Life of the Land is Preserved in Righteousness,” a motto with origins dating back to the Hawaiian Monarchy. The Smith-Morse Company on Santa Fe Street (now in the LA Arts District) printed the decals in the late 1930s. DeWitt’s expertise in fashioning parts for model airplanes is evident in the hotel boards’ construction. They are hollow, made of perfectly cut and matching pieces of veneer, just thick enough to provide the necessary strength. The boards are 5-feet long, 18-inches wide, and 1.5-inches thick. Grip handles are cut through each about a third of the way back from the nose.
In the late 30s, General Veneer began making full-size custom blanks for surfers who would then shape them into planks. The customer would select a desired wood combination, place an order with General Veneer, and they would glue up a blank. While Pacific System had offered a finished product, General Veneer provided a service to individual craftsmen.
One such customer was Lloyd Baker in San Diego, who was a friend of Peterson and one of the best plank riders in the area. Baker would specify balsa and redwood combinations for General Veneer to glue up into plank blanks. Redwood was always on the rails. When the order was ready, he’d drive up to General Veneer, pick up the blanks, and bring them back to San Diego where he would shape and varnish them in his garage.
With the arrival of World War II, DeWitt invested in a steam-heated plywood press and began developing light plywood in combinations of spruce, maple, and birch. Wartime aviation production facilities were churning out airplanes at breakneck speed, and demand for plywood was high. General Veneer went from being a low-key producer of home and leisure products like flush doors, belly boards, custom surfboard blanks, and model airplanes, to a full-scale manufacturer of aviation-grade plywood and interior-balsa paneling for the aircraft industry.
Los Angeles was similarly transformed by the war. It boomed, producing 17 percent of America’s total war production. More than 40 percent of military aircrafts made during the war were built in LA. In South Gate, DeWitt’s neighbors at the huge General Motors plant put the M5 Light Tank on the assembly line and finished them at a rate of 500 per month. Meanwhile, General Veneer cranked out plywood for their main customer: Douglas Aircraft. At the massive Douglas Aircraft facility in Santa Monica, 40,000 men and women worked shifts around the clock building the A-20 Havoc and C-54 Skymaster.
Two of those workers were Gard Chapin and Bob Simmons, both of whom were ineligible for military service and worked in the Clover Field plant as machinists during the war. The conflict disrupted the surfing lives of Peterson and scores of others in Los Angeles, separating them from surfing and board building. The opposite was true for Chapin and Simmons. They worked the assembly line at Douglas, built boards together, and surfed the empty lineups of wartime Southern California.
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The postwar emergence of the laminated balsa board in the late 1940s is a story about four men during the immediate aftermath of the great global conflict: Joe Quigg and Bob Simmons under the towering influences of Pete Peterson and Gard Chapin. One storyline runs from Peterson to Quigg. Another from Chapin to Simmons. At times, these lines intersect and become one. At times they veer off in different directions.
The winds of war had blown Pete Peterson and Joe Quigg off to serve in the Pacific, but when they returned they helped bring about major advances in surfboard design and construction. Balsa was the material that fueled postwar progression, but none of it would have been possible using varnish or Shellac. Ultimately, it was the use of fiberglass lamination on balsa that changed everything.
After surviving active duty, Peterson returned to Santa Monica where he pioneered surfboard lamination in 1946, developing a hollow fiberglass board reinforced with a stringer. He used another board as a mold to create the shell, a balsa and redwood plank. Once he’d pulled the fiberglass shell off the mold, he laminated it with fiberglass and resin. This laminated prototype, an almost accidental byproduct of the hollow board, set the example that Simmons and Quigg followed in the years to come.
Peterson’s focus had been lightness, achieved via balsa. But from a hydrodynamic design perspective, his boards were still flat-decked, round-bottomed planks—a basic design that had been popular for decades. Chapin, on the other hand, was not as concerned with reducing weight as he was with improving design. His boards were heavy redwoods, sometimes in combination with balsa. What set them apart were his design modifications. Chapin applied flat bottoms, foiled rails, and crude camber to his planks. As the undisputed king of redwood performance surfing, his secret weapon was design, not lightness.
Simmons and Quigg met for the first time at Malibu in 1944, when Quigg was on leave from the Navy. He remembers Simmons wrestling with a large and heavy modified redwood plank. That meeting marked the beginning of one of the most influential and important relationships in surfing history. Their 10-year friendship swung wildly back and forth, between harmonic collaboration and contentious rivalry. In spite of their differences, the two improved on Peterson’s lightness (Quigg) and Chapin’s designs (Simmons) by wrapping it into one laminated balsa package with vastly improved hydrodynamics and usability.
Like Peterson, Quigg had always been a proponent of lighter surfboards. He learned to surf in the 1930s on one of Peterson’s early, varnished balsa boards—one of only a handful of surfers to do so. Quigg had been aware of the benefits of balsa all his life, and had a direct connection to Peterson. Simmons, conversely, came up under Chapin and was an advocate of heavier equipment.
Quigg helped change Simmons’ mind by building a series of light balsa boards in 1947. Simmons, for his part, helped open Quigg’s mind to flatter bottoms, foiled rails, and thinner tails. Among Quigg’s milestones during this period was the famous superlight balsa/redwood varnished board he built for Darrilyn Zanuck in 1947, and a varnish and fiberglass combination balsa board with a pine center strip, pine rails, and a glassed-on fiberglass fin, which was considerably lighter than the boards Simmons was making at the time. Simmons, meanwhile, was developing his sophisticated dual keel hydrodynamic planing hull designs and expanding his use of fiberglass lamination. Crucially, both innovated the use of fiberglass to attach fins to their boards.
Simmons eventually shed his Chapin-era affinity for heavy boards and embraced lightness as pioneered by Peterson and advocated by Quigg. In late 1948, he made a series of light, solid, balsa-laminated planing hulls with balsa purchased from General Veneer. In fact, Simmons became a regular customer of General Veneer during the second half of the 1940s, befriending Douglas DeWitt’s eldest son, Dick, who became an avid San Onofre surfer.
By then, General Veneer’s facility had expanded to include more than 25 acres, thanks to the wartime plywood boom. Balsa was still a big part of their business, though for paneling and flooring used in building real airplanes instead of models. Dick DeWitt saw the potential of selling balsa to his fellow surfers, however, and he coaxed his father into stocking milled balsa of a suitable length for building surfboards.
The next evolutionary phase of board construction involving General Veneer products occurred in 1949: a collaborative production of plywood-decked, balsa-railed, Styrofoam-core “sandwich” boards by Matt Kivlin and Bob Simmons, with later assistance from Joe Quigg. Simmons purchased the plywood and balsa from General Veneer and the Styrofoam from Dow Chemical. By this time, fiberglass and resin were readily available at Thalco on 8th Street near downtown LA, in what is now Korea Town. Marketing fiberglass as an all weather seal for boats, Thalco emerged via the partnership of Brandt Goldsworthy (“the Godfather of Fiberglass”) and Ted Thal, who were lifelong friends of Peterson and his original source for the materials.
The sandwich board venture was partly initiated by Kivlin. The idea was to produce a superior lifeguard rescue board and market it across the country. Kivlin was studying architecture at the time and built a production jig. Simmons had a shop, a planer, and the expertise to design the boards and use the jig.
Simmons glued the boards up using two-part glue that would later be used by Grubby Clark on foam. Kivlin shaped the balsa rails, which was his first experience with shaping. Predictably, Kivlin and Simmons took them up to Malibu to “test” them. It’s not clear if they ever sold any as lifeguard rescue boards, but they were an immediate sensation as surfboards.
At 45 pounds, they were relatively light. Throw in Simmons’ wide, stable planing hull design and the result was a user-friendly surfboard with a novel, poppy buoyancy thanks to the Styrofoam core, along with subtle flex from the composite construction. Kivlin and Simmons were inundated with orders for sandwich surfboards. Quigg was enlisted to help with the lamination and shape the balsa rails.
Over the course of a year, about 100 sandwich boards were built before durability issues, coupled with a lack of maneuverability (inherent in full-scale, extra-large Simmons planing hulls), led to their rapid obsolescence. The final nail in the sandwich coffin was a series of very light “easy rider” balsa boards that Quigg and Kivlin built for female Malibu surfers. These “girlfriend” boards were the forerunners of Quigg’s Malibu Potato Chip, which would become the most popular design of the early 1950s.
After the sandwich shop closed, Simmons, Quigg, and Kivlin went their separate ways. All three returned to making boards of solid balsa. Some of their finest work was in the years that immediately followed the sandwich experiment. Simmons also continued down his own path, refining his dual keel planing hulls and spending much of his time in the San Diego area.
His main source for balsa was General Veneer. Along with Gard Chapin, however, he died in the midst of this golden era of the balsa board—Simmons in 1954, Chapin in 1956 Famously, Miki Dora marks their deaths as events of great significance on his timeline of modern surfing eras, ominous milestones heralding the end of the Genesis Period and the beginning of surfing’s slide toward cataclysm.
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Bearing witness to the entire evolution, from Pete Peterson’s Pacific System planks through the revolutionary work of Simmons, Quigg, and Kivlin, was a surf-rat kid in the South Bay named Dale Velzy. Velzy would take balsa production to its zenith, capitalizing on the innovations of his predecessors while adding innovations of his own. Predictably, one of the common threads, in terms of materials, was his use of balsa from General Veneer.
Born in 1927, Velzy started surfing as a boy. By the time he was a teenager he was cutting down and reshaping redwood planks at the beach. He later served as an ordinary seaman for the Merchant Marine during World War II, touring extensively in the Pacific, sometimes with a surfboard. In Dale Velzy is Hawk, biographer Paul Holmes describes Velzy making the jump from reshaping old planks to building boards from start to finish: “During one leave in 1945, he began making original boards from scratch, not just reshaping old planks. Purchasing balsa and redwood from General Veneer in South Gate, Velzy glued up blanks, and using the standard tools of saw, adze, drawknife, and jackplane, he carved one board for himself and another for Larry Felker.”
Velzy met Simmons for the first time in 1946 while surfing at PV Cove. Simmons was on one of Chapin’s flat bottom planks. He had modified the rails and glassed a plywood spoon on the nose. This was Velzy’s first encounter with fiberglass and he immediately recognized its significance.
Simmons graciously informed him that fiberglass was available at Thalco in downtown LA. This was one of many instances where Velzy absorbed the innovations swirling around him, adopting what was useful and ignoring the rest. In 1950, he launched his own surfboard retail outlet, Velzy Surfboards, in Manhattan Beach. By 1954, he controlled a retail dynasty, with shops in Hawaii, Malibu, and Venice.
Velzy’s early 1950s surfboard empire was built on balsa from General Veneer. Dick DeWitt, the surfer of the DeWitt family, managed his account. Velzy bought more balsa from General Veneer, by far, than anyone else. Wood quality varied greatly in weight and density with each import from the Ecuadorian tree farms. DeWitt gave his best customer privileged access to the best wood.
Velzy’s shops were therefore stocked with his version of the Malibu Chip, and they flew off the racks. Quigg’s “easy rider” rocker was the secret ingredient. Rocker was achieved with help from nature prior to being engineered into synthetic blanks. Quigg had sought out pieces of balsa lumber that had naturally warped into a gentle curve. Velzy did the same. It took five pieces of naturally curved wood to glue up a rocker blank.
Dick DeWitt passed away in 1998, but his younger brothers Bill and Ed survive him. Now 78 years old, Bill DeWitt remembers Velzy’s flamboyant style, pulling into the General Veneer compound in a Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing with a cigar clenched between his teeth. He has vivid recollections of riding shotgun in Velzy’s dune buggy as a young boy, tearing up and down the arroyos behind San Onofre.
Bill also remembers when his older brother Dick helped out a 16-year-old kid from Laguna looking to buy balsa so he could learn to make surfboards. The kid was Hobie Alter. He was too young to meet General Veneer’s credit requirements, but Dick DeWitt waived the formalities and opened an account for Alter.
It was Walter Hoffman who sent Alter to General Veneer. Alter was attempting to surf Brooks Street on a paddleboard when Hoffman paddled out on a Simmons sandwich. Hoffman saw the poor kid struggling on obsolete equipment, paddled over to him and said, “I used to have one of those. You ought to have a real surfboard. Here, try my board.”
Alter caught a few waves and was astounded by how easy the Simmons was to ride. Hoffman offered to make him one or tell him how to do it. Alter said he wanted to build one himself. He ran home and grabbed some paper and a pencil. Returning to the beach, he wrote down the places Hoffman recommended for purchasing surfboard materials: Thalco Fiberglass in LA, General Veneer in South Gate.
In 1950 Alter began purchasing balsa from General Veneer and started shaping boards in his garage. He progressed quickly and soon had plenty of orders for custom boards. In 1954, his father bought a small lot on the PCH in Dana Point, where Alter built a factory and retail storefront for Hobie Surfboards.
Velzy now had major competition, for both customers and access to decent balsa from General Veneer. In 1954, he introduced the wildly popular Pig design, increasing the need for large quantities of balsa. In addition to Hobie, more surfers up and down the coast began shaping and launching their own labels, further squeezing the resource. Greg Noll, Bing Copeland, and others who came up as Velzy shop rats had embarked on the early stages of their own shaping careers. In the San Diego area, Pat Curren, Mike Diffenderfer, and Al Nelson were all building boards with General Veneer balsa. By 1957, demand on the General Veneer balsa supply was becoming unsustainable. There simply wasn’t enough surfboard-grade light balsa to go around.
Hobie shrewdly found another source: a model airplane builder named Ken Adams in Anaheim. Adams agreed to import surfboard-length balsa at Hobie’s request. The quality was good, and Hobie was freed from his dependence on General Veneer. Before long, Velzy found out about Hobie’s secret new supplier and started buying balsa from Adams as well. With Velzy and Hobie buying from a new source, quality balsa was once again available to ordinary surfers and smaller independent shapers through General Veneer.
“Getting quality balsa was a big deal,” recalls John Elwell, describing the experience of buying General Veneer balsa with Chuck Quinn in 1950. “The shipments that General Veneer received were small and quickly picked over for the highest quality pieces. First come buyers had choice selection. Those that came later had to buy leftovers. We were very excited and serious about this. Simmons had agreed to shape our boards, but he insisted we get the balsa ourselves. Chuck Quinn and I waited for a shipment to arrive in the summer of 1950. We called weekly. We waited a couple of months. When it arrived we were the first to show up when the doors opened. We had driven a long distance and had been waiting for months for the shipment to arrive. We were novices at it, but they were kind and considerate to us. There were hundreds of pieces in the shipment. We went through it all looking and lifting it for lightness. We sorted it all out in piles of heavy, medium, light, and ultra light. We looked for even grain.
“Balsa is not all the same. There are a lot heavy pieces with knots, irregularities, and different color grains. They were of different lengths. We needed enough balsa for several boards from 9 feet to 10’6″. Selection was careful and intense. Getting down the final pieces was tedious, requiring repeated examination and lifting. Simmons could identify and pick out the best pieces in an instant. He didn’t think lightness was that important. Density of balsa wood varies. Bob said a little more weight does not make that much difference in performance. The boards were to be glassed anyway, with two coats of glass. Simmons used a displacement equation for every custom board to the load of the rider. He knew by the density of the balsa what each board would weigh when it was finished. He used the dense-heavier pieces on the rails.”
“At first we’d get together and go up to General Veneer and pick through the supply up there,” says Pat Curren, recounting his experiences buying balsa with Al Nelson in the mid 1950s. “Then we’d come back and make our own boards in somebody’s garage, in somebody’s yard, at the beach, wherever. Later on we started building boards for other guys. Al would go down to Windansea and collect deposits from guys who wanted a board, get 350 bucks together, send the money up to General Veneer, and the truck would deliver it to the Windansea parking lot.”
“The deal was you had to buy a thousand feet to get a price break,” says Nelson “That was three bundles, roughly enough for 18 surfboards. So we’d get the money and order the three bundles and everyone would be waiting for it. General Veneer would deliver it in a truck down to the beach, kick it out, I’d pay the guy, and then everybody would be milling around trying to grab the best pieces for their board and stacking them. Sometimes I had a shop. Sometimes I didn’t. If not we’d just take ’em to somebody’s garage and start gluing ’em up and away we went. That’s the way it was done. Kinda unique, but it worked.”
By 1957, General Veneer had been supplying Southern California board builders with raw materials for 20 years. Over the course of those decades, board design and construction had been revolutionized. The surviving archive of surfboards made with General Veneer materials tells a story of creativity and innovation carved from wood by a pioneering generation of surfers.
The fabled age of balsa—Dora’s Genesis Period—lives on in the legacy of Peterson, Chapin, Quigg, Simmons, Kivlin, Velzy, and a host of others. From the sleek pintails of Quigg and Kivlin, to the dual-finned planing hulls of Simmons, to Velzy’s Pig, to the early Waimea guns of Pat Curren, to Al Nelson’s 5’6″ twin-fin, the origin story of the modern surfboard is carved in General Veneer balsa. Each board was a page, each shaper wrote a chapter.
If the surfers of the Genesis Period glided nobly on boards of golden balsa wood, however, the hot dog surfers of the Cataclysm Era rode frantically on synthetic polyurethane foam. Both Simmons and Quigg had been on a quest for a synthetic replacement for balsa since 1946. Simmons went as far as building concrete molds and blowing his own foam blanks at his uncle’s ranch in Norwalk. Quigg shaped and glassed a 4-inch scale-model foam board in the 40s. Dave Sweet toiled in solitude to crack the secrets of foam. The benefits of a synthetic were clear to them all. Balsa was a limited resource. Its quality was inconsistent. The supply rarely met the demand.
Despite their pioneering efforts, the spoils of cornering the foam surfboard market would go to neither Quigg nor Simmons nor Sweet. As the saying goes, “Success is when opportunity meets preparation.” For Grubby Clark and Hobie Alter, secret preparations synched perfectly with opportunity. They solved the foam riddle just as the Gidget surf-craze swept the nation. It was 1958, and the age of balsa was over. Hobie switched to foam and began producing boards by the thousands. “With balsa,” he said, “we never could have kept up with the demand.”
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Firestone Boulevard, South Gate, 2019—Just west of the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River, a bright and busy new shopping center bustles where a massive steel-pipe factory once stood. A little further west is General Veneer, spreading out over 25 acres on both sides of Otis Street. Turning right off Firestone and down Otis Street is like going back in time. The sparkling mall may as well be in another universe. A huge industrial pipe spans the street between the old warehouses and factory workshops. The pipe is signed with foot-high black letters as it was in Simmons’ day: General Veneer Manufacturing Company. The little two-story office building where Douglas DeWitt founded his model airplane business in 1931 still stands on the south side of Otis. It has housed the General Veneer offices for 88 years and counting, through three generations of the DeWitt family.
Surrounding the office in all directions is a labyrinth of workshops, warehouses, storage rooms, and freight yards. The sense of history is palpable in the cavernous netherworld of the woodworking buildings on the north side of Otis. Dormant machinery and industrial relics lurk in the shadows. High above the concrete floor, wooden beams and rafters recede into darkness. An eerie green light filters through glass skylights, illuminating dusty tool cribs that seem untouched since the boom years of the war. Ancient safety signs remind long-vanished work crews to Be Careful Today. But amidst the slumbering diorama of bygone industry are pockets of 21st-century activity and production. Workmen run machines. Forklifts stack bundles of balsa on pallets resting on the concrete floor.
The days when Simmons, Kivlin, Velzy, and Hobie selected their balsa here before heading across the street to the office to pay and get their paperwork are gone. But one feels their presence here. The atmosphere is that of another time and another era, the age of balsa.
In a vast, high-ceiling storage room, Douglas DeWitt’s grandson, Bill DeWitt Jr., disappears into the gloom behind some cluttered racks and stacks of boxes. He returns shouldering a monolithic balsa surfboard, covered in decades of dust. It is a slotted Simmons-style planing hull, laminated with early fiberglass. A haunting, mysterious relic, it bears silent witness to a time when General Veneer was a crucial participant in one of the most transformative eras in surfing history. Apparently Simmons didn’t make the board, Bill Jr. explains, at least according to DeWitt family history. It was his uncle, Dick DeWitt, the surfer of the family, who built it in the late 1940s.
Upstairs in his veneer paneled office, Bill Jr.’s father, Bill DeWitt, tells tales of the old days. When we ask about the board, he concedes Dick may have had a little help from Simmons. Framed photos of jets and rockets hang on the walls. He speaks of when the entire compound was in full production—of General Veneer employing multiple work crews, secretaries, accountants, and engineers, of dealings with NASA and Wernher von Braun, of rocket tests at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
For General Veneer, the loss of surfboard-related balsa sales in 1958 barely dented their bottom line. In the postwar years, selling balsa to board builders was more like Dick DeWitt’s public service to his fellow surfers than it was a financial necessity. By 1950, General Veneer had diversified into aluminum honeycomb and other space-age materials for jets, satellites, and rockets.
Bill describes how in the early 1960s, General Veneer worked with NASA on the Ranger series spacecraft, making protective balsa housings for its instruments and cameras. Balsa was used for shock absorbance, as Ranger would dive directly into the moon at high speed toward a hard landing while taking reconnaissance photos of the lunar surface. The balsa housings kept vibrations down and stabilized the lens. Ranger was the first American spacecraft to land on the moon, and it brought General Veneer balsa with it. General Veneer materials returned to the moon on the Saturn rockets of the Apollo missions.
These days, Bill says, General Veneer has a brisk business repurposing older Boeing commercial passenger jets into cargo planes. Balsa is still used for the flooring. They also do a lot of set work for the Hollywood studios. He says Disney has been a great customer for 40 years. “When Mickey Mouse says jump,” Bill says with a twinkle in his eye, “we say, ‘How high?’”
Then there is their custom door business, described on a promotional flyer as follows: “General Veneer Manufacturing Co. still makes doors the old-fashioned way. Sweat and sawdust and wood shavings go into every door we deliver, and we can tell you the names of the craftsmen who worked on each door—guys with names like Wade and Salvador and Eddie, not foreign machines with brand names you can’t pronounce. We have been making doors, plywood, and fine wood paneling this way since 1931…”
Bill mentions in passing that a few surfboard shapers still come in for balsa wood. He doesn’t mention any names. It is clear he takes pride in knowing that the tradition continues.
[Feature image: A 10’2″ dual keel Bob Simmons hull—sandwich built in 1949 using General Veneer plywood and balsa, a jig designed by Matt Kivlin, and employing a Dow Styrofoam core—returns to a place of its genesis in the GV workshop. Photo by Alastair Mckevitt]
