I was thinking how it’s been 14 years since Clark Foam closed down on December 5, 2005. I know it was a date all shapers and glassers remember. Here’s my recollection of the day, if anyone’s interested:
I was wearing my 3M N95 mask covered in foam while shaping a board at my shop in the hills of Cayucos, Ca. I had been officially trying to make it as a surfboard shaper for 5 years at this point and was really enjoying the work, the customers, and the time I spent in my shaping bay. There’s no internet and no cell service out there so I was always able to unplug, put on some good tunes, and just focus on creating the board in front of me. I did have a couple of neighbors out there that sometimes popped in to say hi and/or have a beer occasionally. I remember that one of them, named Clark of all names, came and knocked on the door loudly that day around 1:30 p.m. He said that my glasser friend, Aaron, had called his house on the land line and needed to talk to me right away. This was not something that ever happened, so immediately I thought, “Well, that’s fuckin’ odd!”
I walked across the dirt road to Clark’s trailer and grabbed the phone off his desk. Aaron goes on to tell me that Clark foam has shut down and that it’s not a joke and that I have to get out of there ASAP and find some blanks to buy from retail stores. I reacted with a shocked silence. Aaron was yelling at me “get in the car and go buy blanks!” I think Clark Foam had faxed out the news of their closure that morning at about 9:30, so the news trickled very slowly up the coast. Since we clearly didn’t have fax technology, it was John Wegener who had called Aaron and alerted him. I immediately jumped into my Volvo 240D wagon (I miss that car) and headed south to Pismo where there was one store who had a stock of blanks. I walked up to the place and saw that Gabriel Lloyd, another local shaper like me, was eyeing blanks with a cool aplomb.
I had a bit more nervous energy and started stacking a pile of ten blanks against the wall trying to gauge how many I could fit into the car. I quickly gave the lady running the store my credit card as though I was worried that she wouldn’t sell me any blanks at all if she knew what had just happened to the industry.
“What’s going on? Why the rush?” she asked me.
I looked at Gabriel and then back to the lady, “Oh nothing. Just got a urgent order to fill right now.”
She said something like, “Well, I don’t know about that. PJ Wahl was just in here too buying a bunch of these foam things. Something’s weird…I need to call the boss real quick.”
I was like, “I’m sorry but I have to run. Could you please just run the card so I can get back to work?” Luckily, she relented and I got the blanks before the price doubled.
I then raced home and called Fiberglass Hawaii in Santa Cruz. The employee seemed casual—did they not know yet? I didn’t say anything until I had bought ten more blanks by phone saying I’d be there in the morning to grab them.
I remember on Dec 5, I owed Clark Foam 232 dollars on my account. I figured what the hell…they were always good to me I better do the right thing and pay it. Luckily, Patty, the secretary, called me after the check arrived and said that Grubby had allotted me 20 blanks if I could pay for them. He had stored a bunch of blanks for the closing and doled out the last of the last to folks in good standing.
Not sure how they made the determination on how many to each customer but it was a nice gesture in a Willy Wonka kind of way (it was rumored that Gerry Lopez received a thousand because the two were old friends and Grubby was going to be his Oregonian neighbor...and he’s Gerry).
The period that followed was really, really tough for me. I was such a small player in the surfboard world and it was nearly impossible to get good quality blanks for a year or two. International foam companies quickly ramped up production and shipped to California. The blanks I was getting contained many hidden holes, twisted, horrible smelling wood stringers (treated with some chemicals?), and unfamiliar rocker outlines. It was a period of hard work as I had to access the blank, fix any deformities, and then shape my design…filling any blemish holes with drywall mud or making little foam plugs.
It was during this time that the Asian pop-out market really seized on the opportunity and flooded retailers with super cheap surfboard replicas. In Grubby’s analysis of the industry from 2004, he opined that it would be the sophisticated surfer who kept custom orders alive for the board building industry and, for the most part, he was right — we’re still here!
What Grubby didn’t foresee back then is that the greatest surfer in the world — the most “sophisticated” — would loan his name and titles to one of these Asian-made brands. And those shipping containers still keep coming, burning bunker fuel across 8,000 miles of Pacific Ocean, toward U.S. retailers who love the higher profits that these homogenized boards generate for them.
Okay, I got off topic as I do. Thankfully, U.S. Blanks stepped in a few years after the Willy Wonka shutdown and their quality has always been stellar…and they are always finding ways of improving.
Support your local shapers out there!