There are objects from surf culture's collective deep past that I hold near and dear. The 

 handbill. The first O'Neill logo. Mike Doyle's beard, the Duke Invitational trophy, Jackie Dunn's white-on-red Lightning Bolt pintail. Every issue of SURFER from March '69 to February '72 (also known as the High Kampion era, and yes there is your daily double entendre on a silver platter). Fifty-or-so years from now, when I at last shed these mortal boardshorts and trim into the great hereafter, angels will sing the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby" while I inhale from a just-opened bar of Waxmate.

Riding high on my not-so-dear-and-dear list, meanwhile, is the long-gone Bay Standard surf rack. Aloha, I believe, was the model name. Bay Standard wasn't the first car rack manufacturer, but in the pre-soft-rack age it was by far the biggest—if Bay Standard didn't monopolize the American market in the 1960s and '70s, it was damn close. Design-wise, the Aloha rack was two parts clumsy to one part cruel, a Chevy Monza by way of a New York SMBD club. White on green, as I recall, but there may have been other colors. Aloha racks consisted of two metal pikestaffs laid one in front of the other horizontally on the car's roof, attached to the rain gutters with clamps and bolts and wingnuts. The straps, wildly over-constructed, were made of hard plastic sleeves and an assortment of flesh-seeking springs, clips, and coils. If you stacked three boards on a side—we did this often; teenaged wave-hunters in my day often roamed in packs of five or six—the stick on top, unless rigorous precautions were taken, was in for some rail damage. Rack thieves, meanwhile, were everywhere, invisible and unrelenting, like human pollen, and if the dude knew his business the fleecing took less than two minutes—unless the nuts and bolts were rusted together, in which case the fuckers 

 ripped 'em off, God knows why, but it took an extra minute or so.

Hating too hard, maybe? Overdoing the personal stuff? Just getting started. My brand-new fully-airbrushed Jeff Ho swallowtail got stolen off a pair of Aloha racks in 1972. Four years later, the best stinger I ever owned got likewise pinched in Redondo. A year after that, my first and only magic twin-fin silently took flight off my racks somewhere on the 405 between Manhattan Beach and Huntington Pier—never heard it lift off, just pulled up to check North Side and the thing was gone. So okay, none these instances were actually Bay Standard's fault. But the simple proximity of Bay Standard's crap racks and my lost precious, not once but 

, was enough. From 1981 until last year, every car I owned, ten rides all told, new and old, foreign and domestic, had but a single mandated feature—enough cargo space for three boards. Create your peace of mind one small step at a time, is what it comes down to.

BAY STANDARD SURF RACKS WERE THE ROOT CANAL OF SURFING

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