Drew Kampion's profile on Dick Brewer ran in the Spring 1999 issue of Surfer's Journal. This version has been shortened and slightly edited.

Richard Brewer lives near Hanalei, about a mile up-country from the highway on a flat, relatively barren, five-acre prairie darkly backed by the twin towers of Kaua'i’s highest mountains, Kawaikini and Waialeale. The wettest area on earth is up there (451 inches of rainfall on an average year), not far from RB’s place as the Hawaiian goose flies, but an impossible trek for a human.

His house is not what I expect—more the kind of place he and his wife, Sherry, might have come across in their business as real estate agents (too good a deal to pass up) than a welcoming place for the soul of the guy who invented Surfboards Hawaii and later sat 

 with the Roshi. It’s a square, white-stuccoed, two-story structure, well situated down a palm-lined 100-yard drive past a similar but more flamboyant home. He and Sherry live upstairs. Sherry’s brother, Robin Oswald, shares the house with them. Robin's bedroom is on the ground floor, where Dick Brewer Surfboards is also headquartered, which is convenient since Robin is the business manager. It’s all temporary, says RB, just until they get a shop built.

In the downstairs family room, exquisitely shaped blanks are stacked on a sofa, ready for boxing. A glassed Brewer longboard lies deck-up in the center of the room. The closet is big enough to hold an array of Clark Foam shipping boxes (ranging up to full-gun size), rolls of bubble pack, tape, and other shipping materials, and a stack of business cards with the familiar plumeria lei surrounding the handwritten words “Dick Brewer Surfboards”—and beneath the lei, set all caps: HAWAII.

Bundled sets of thruster fins and their little blue FCS Allen-wrench keys are spread out on the bar. Photos and articles from surf magazines crowd the wall and mirror behind the bar. Around the corner is another room; that’s where RB shapes. When you step into it and close the door, you could be anywhere—flat-black walls, glowing fluorescent tubes, piles of foam dust, more photos, surfboard order forms with their generic outlines, racks of rough-shaped blanks on one wall, Masonite templates hanging below glistening-white finished shapes on the other—and a well-used planer resting on a stool as if cooling.

Upstairs in the small living room, the balsa tow-board Brewer shaped for Laird Hamilton to ride the largest waves ever ridden is mounted on the wall above the window and sliding glass door that opens out onto the covered porch, where we sit on soft chairs, sip homemade lemonade and talk about Dick Brewer’s life and career. It’s July 31st, 1998.

Now past 60, thicker and white-haired, but with a razor-sharp recall for the telling detail, Brewer remains one of surfing’s contradictory characters, at once vague and precise, pragmatic but philosophical, self-absorbed and spiritual. He looks to have come a long, hard way from the famous David Darling shot of him in a full lotus posture, grinning euphorically between his head-standing proteges, Reno Abellira and Gerry Lopez.

That photo was taken in 1969, at a moment in time when Brewer had emerged as the magnetic center of the opposition movement to the coup d'etat of surfing being perpetrated by a band of Australian rebels. While the American surf industry rocked back on its heels and scurried back to the drawing board after the vee-bottom board changed everything, frantically retrenching and retooling to accommodate the sudden shifts in function, fashion, and philosophy, RB was almost solitary as an alternative (if not exactly a nay-sayer) to this Southern swell, assimilating it and translating it into his own evolving vision of the modern surfboard.

In fact, Brewer was an American mirror of the Australian revolution. His own inspiration had been evolving since he first set foot on the North Shore in the Summer of 1960, a greenhorn shaper and aspiring big-wave rider who knew one thing immediately—he didn’t want to go back home. From the start, he was intent on being at the leading edge; he earned a reputation as the North Shore’s consummate big-wave surfboard builder, and further expanded by becoming David Nuuhiwa’s shaper. Brewer had rejected the mainstream to pursue the future with a core group of young test pilots on Maui, so when the Aussies showed up in the Fall of ’67, Dick Brewer wasn’t about to be passed over by the iconoclastic Aussie contingent, led by reigning World Champ Robert “Nat” Young and surfboard designer Bob McTavish.

In the end, the revolution from Australia transmogrified into the evolution from Hawaii.

Brewer was living on Prison Street in Lahaina, near Honolua Bay, where he’d recently opened a new surf shop, Lahaina Surf Designs (LSD). That’s where the mini-gun was born, where revolution met evolution in the historic culture clash of late ’67. The Aussies have always claimed the shortboard revolution as their own, albeit crediting proto-genius California kneeboarder George Greenough with his flexible spoon boards and deep, twangy fins for the inspiration. This revolution was introduced to the Northern Hemisphere in the form of the fat-assed vee-bottom boards that were the spinout joke of Sunset Beach that winter. But when those same boards hit Stradivarian notes on the turquoise walls of Honolua Bay a few days later, it was the images of Nat and McTavish at Honolua, accompanied in 

 magazine by the hyper-excited prose of Aussie writer John Witzig, that birthed the shortboard era.

But Brewer claims to have made a short “mini-gun” for Gary Chapman earlier in 1967—before Nat and crew dipped so much as a big toe into the futuristic waters of Honolua Bay. His recollection is clear: “I’d made a 9'10" gun for David Nuuhiwa in the Spring of ’67, and David broke the nose off, so I redrew it at 7'8" with a 17" nose on it—a tanker nose—and Randy Rarick was a patcher and he reglassed it. I took that board out and rode it at Chun’s, at the left called Piddlies [and got some] phenomenal roller coasters with that heavy nose and the gun tail. That board became the prototype for the Bing Lotus. So, the mini-gun was happening in the Spring of ’67.”

Rarick, who went on to become a shaper, pro surfer, and pro tour contest organizer, remembers things as clearly if a little differently: “I was a ding repairman working in town behind Surfline, and Brewer was working there for Bing. Pintails were the rage, and in ’67 he made one for David Nuuhiwa, and David broke the nose off. So the board came to me at Surfline, and I took the grinder and just rounded off the nose and patched it. Brewer comes in to look at it, and goes, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So Nuuhiwa took it back out and made it ride great. And that may have developed into what we called the pocket rocket.”

Brewer had been hired by Bing Surfboards in 1966 to build the Pipeliner, the first lightweight gun. In the Summer of ’67, as a follow-up, he designed the Lotus and the Pintail models. These were full-sized boards, also made for Bing, and they were unusually light. But there was no mention of “short” in any Bing Surfboards ad prior to 1968. Then Gary Chapman bought a reject blank and brought it to Bing’s South Bay factory, where Brewer shaped it into an 8'6" mini-gun.

“Bing fired me the next day,” Brewer claims. “Before I left, I told all the shapers in California to shape underground, with the intent of wrecking the surfboard industry—which it eventually did, at least as we knew it.”

Back in the Islands, Barry Kanaiaupuni (“the most sophisticated surfer in the world at the time,” according to RB), surfed Chapman’s mini-gun at Velzyland. “Power off the bottom, roller coasters off the top; the board was brilliant,” says Brewer, “a door-opener.” After a brief stay on Oahu, looking to go deep underground, Brewer joined forces with Buddy Boy Keohe and set up shop on Maui. Soon, two young surfers came over from Oahu to get new boards.

“I think it was in late ’67,” Gerry Lopez recalls. “Brewer had just moved to Maui and was shaping in Lahaina. Reno [Abellira] and I each took a blank over there to get boards made. Reno got his shaped first, but before Brewer could shape mine, Nat and Greenough and McTavish and Ted Spencer and a couple of other Aussies showed up with those wide-tailed, vee-bottom boards. They wanted to go ride ’em at Honolua Bay, but there wasn’t any surf there. John Thurston had a shop [at the Cannery in Lahaina] where all the boards were glassed, and they came there, and we met ’em, and Brewer and McTavish kind of bullshitted for a long time. So the next day we go back to do my board—I think I wanted a 9'8", which was considered a shorter board then—and Brewer just takes the saw and cuts two feet off the blank, and it’s 8'6". He tells me, ‘That’s how big a board your getting.”

That 8'6" x 22" mini-gun was “something else,” says Gerry, and everybody wanted to try it. “It had a hot-dog nose and a gun tail with a slight vee in the back. The young guys all rode it and loved it, and the old guys all said it didn’t float worth shit. That was the beginning of the mini-gun era.’’

Meanwhile, the Aussies didn’t have to wait too long for surf—it jumped. “We surfed Honolua at 15 feet, the most beautiful day, while Waimea was closed out at 40 feet," Brewer recalls. “Nat broke his board on the first wave. Reno broke his board after about nine waves. Buddy Boy and Dick Brewer [Brewer frequently refers to himself in the third person] never lost their boards all day. Next morning [at breakfast in Lahaina], BK and Reno were there, and Nat Young left his table with Witzig, Ted Spencer, McTavish. He came over to our table and said, ‘Mr. Brewer, I’d like a board, mate.’

“And I said, ‘I’ll build you a board after I build ’em for the ten guys on my team.’ It would take a week or two. He jumped up and down ten times in front of me yelling, ‘I’m Nat Young! I’m Nat Young! I’m Nat Young! So I shook his hand and said, ‘How do you do, Nat.’ He glanced over and saw Reno and Barry smiling in their Polynesian perfection, watching a haole blow it on an ego trip. ’Nuff said. I didn’t make him a board, and he’s never mentioned my name since. And after that, I never saw Witzig’s camera pointed at Buddy Boy, Hakman, Sutherland or Leslie Potts, who were the best guys in the water. I’m just calling it the way it happened.”

Nat Young doesn’t recall the breakfast incident, saying,

“If I did ask him to shape me a board (and I can’t remember), I it would have been out of respect for him and because of the ambiance of the situation on Maui that year.”

, McTavish would call Honolua “Buddy Boy’s Bay,” and John Witzig wrote, “While we were in Maui, shaper Dick Brewer began to experiment with vee-bottoms on pintails. Perhaps there is an answer here. Yet I find the two styles of approach [Hawaiian and Australian] to surfing to practically be the antithesis of one another. To my mind, the potential is with McTavish and Nat and their equipment.”

The meeting with the Australians—and just being there on Maui at that point in time—was clearly a turning point in Richard Brewer’s life. All the young Hawaiian surfers he mentions from those days—Jock Sutherland, Jeff Hakman, Buddy Boy Keohe, Leslie Potts, Reno Abellira, Barry Kanaiaupuni, Gerry Lopez, Larry Strada, Gary and Owl Chapman—were on the Brewer team, and the Brewer team was at the vortex of just about everything that was coming down in the surfing world in those psychedelic 1960s.

The surfer-shaper relationship is a unique one. Some guy creates a vehicle and hands it to you, and you go surf it, and if you connect with the vehicle, drive it into some compelling bottom turns that reward you with answering power and positive response—man!—you love the man who built this thing for you. But if you drive into the pit and jam your back foot deep into the guts of the water and the board chugs, skips and planes sideways—well, then you think of your shaper and how very, very disappointed you are with him (I’m gonna strangle the fucker!), and why not? Go ahead, blame the shaper!

When Tom Blake came to Waikiki in the 1920s to look up his mentor Kahuna, Duke Kahanamoku, the most famous surfer in the world was riding a solid chunk of modestly shaped Mainland redwood. Blake took it upon himself to explore the storage rooms at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, where he found evidence of a previous civilization. As Blake wrote in 

 magazine in 1930, “Strange as it may seem, three old-style Hawaiian surfboards of huge dimensions and weight have hung on the walls of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu for twenty years or more without anyone doing more than wonder how in the world these great boards were used, and were they not too long and heavy to be practicable.

“I, too, wondered about these boards in the museum, wondered so much that in 1926 I built a duplicate of them as an experiment, my object being to find not a better board, but to find a faster board to use in the annual and popular surfboard paddling races held in Southern California each summer.”

Tom Blake was a Renaissance man who did anything well, who was, as Dick Brewer might say, “aware.” He certainly shook up the status quo on Waikiki Beach. Blake discovered that what the contemporary Hawaiians were building was neither fish nor fowl—neither 18-foot-long, 13-inch-wide royal 

. The ancient Bishop boards gave Blake a glimpse both of the past and of the future. The 

 suggested the long lines and drawn tails of the modern gun; the 

 suggested the short, maneuverable surfboards of 1968.

Blake found what he was looking for in the ancient 

. He took precise measurements, built an intricately-framed hollow replica, sheathed it in marine plywood, and blazed a trail to paddleboarding fame. He correctly saw the highest use of his hollow board as a life-saving vehicle, and it became the leading rescue tool on the world’s beaches.

But guys surfed ’em too. Although they were thick and boxy, and your center of gravity was high, these “cigar boxes” were lighter than redwood planks, and throughout the ’30s and ’40s, typical surf lineups saw devotees of both schools—solid and hollow—at play.

The most famous guerrilla-like shaping moment took place in 1934, at Blacks Point, (discretely located around Diamond Head from Waikiki Beach), where, out of frustration, John Kelly, Fran Heath and Wally Froiseth took a hatchet and drawknife to their “slide-ass” planks and mowed them down to a narrow 5-inch tailblock with a pronounced vee carved into the finless underside, thus creating the “Hot Curl”—the template for all big-wave guns to follow.

From there, the genealogy of modem surfboard shaping passed to the Mainland, where Bob Simmons adapted new materials to his own needs and capabilities, taking advantage of World War II technology to replace Blake’s complex wood framework with a Styrofoam core and the marine plywood hull with fiberglass and resin. As a shaper, Simmons recognized, too, the functionality of fins, concaves and hydrodynamic rail lines.

Joe Quigg, Simmons’ contemporary, who first visited the Islands in 1947, was inspired by the elegant Hot Curl surfing of Rabbit Kekai to create historic balsa pintails that introduced improved rocker characteristics. Adopting the streamlined Hawaiian shape, Quigg wrapped glass cloth around lightweight Amazon balsa and created the “Malibu chip,” urging the surfboard one more giant step toward modernity. It was Quigg’s refinement of the principles introduced by Blake, Simmons and the Hot Curl that, in turn, inspired Bob Shepherd and Pat Curren and the other pioneer big-gun builders on the North Shore in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

To the average surfer, at each stage of its evolution, the modem surfboard seemed like a relatively done deal. But for the surfboard shapers who have navigated the sport through its historical evolution, it’s always been about pushing ever closer to the ideal, and making what might be possible actually possible. Fired by these evolutionary sentiments, from the day he first picked up a planer, Dick Brewer gravitated towards the leading edge and surfing’s ultimate specialty product—the big-wave gun.

Richard Allen Brewer was born on the 13th of October 1936 in Bemidji, Minnesota—in a triangle of Indian reservations (the White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake) a few miles west and south of the nose of Lake Superior. His family were Quakers. His grandfather, Albert Charles Brewer, a blue blood graduate of MIT, was an engineer who worked for Northern Power and Light designing and building dams to power the timber mills and iron mines of the north country. His father, Charles A. Brewer, was an engineer, too. But in 1939, as a second World War grew imminent, he bought a ’36 Dodge four-door sedan, packed up his wife and two sons (Charles, Jr. is a year-and-a-half older than Dick), and headed to California, where he became a machinist and worked on landing gear for DC-3s at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach. The family lived on Golden Avenue, right on the beach, before the breakwater was built to create Long Beach Harbor.

“I recall giant waves off the Rainbow Pier,” Dick says. “I got hit in the head with one of those Tom Blake lifeguard paddleboards at Long Beach—should have knocked some sense into me, but it didn’t.” His father was a tool-and-die maker by the time the war began, and in 1941 the Brewers moved to Compton—20 miles inland—where his dad had bought a new house in a subdivision.

Sylvia Ann Brewer, Dick's mother, was the granddaughter of a Norwegian trapper, and had Indian blood in her veins. She was a good housewife and mother, who injured her head in the ’40s, was given a lobotomy to mitigate acute symptoms, and became, in RB’s words, “a vegetable.” Charles divorced her during the war and eventually remarried. Sylvia passed away, but her Indian heritage lives on in RB’s prairie-country gaze, which isn’t so different from the surfer’s gaze.

In ninth grade, the Brewer family moved to Whittier for a year, and Dick went out for water polo. He used to pedal all over and earn money mowing lawns, he says, and at one point was hired to mow Richard Nixon’s parents’ yard. Brewer was always a hard worker, diligent beyond his years, as was his brother, Charles, Jr. The two worked around their father’s machine shop, even when they were very young. During the war, Charles Sr. bought orange groves; after the war, he sold them and built a tool-and-die shop in Bell Gardens. “Dad had the perception to stay away from defense work,” RB observes. Instead, “he was one of the first to invest in electrical discharge machines, which then became the standard way to manufacture molds and difficult shapes. When plastic injection molding got big after the war, he became very good at that too.”

A California kid could get a learner’s permit at 14-and-a-half years old in those days, and RB got one so he could drive to school and work. “I could barely see over the steering wheel of my ’36 Ford Coupe with the rumble seat."

But his real passion early on was designing and building U-control model airplanes—“stunt and combat”—and he was deft with all things mechanical. “I was third in the nation at the West Coast stunt championships. I’d still be competitive today; my designs were fast and maneuverable.”

During his later school years (first at Whittier High, then Lynwood High), Brewer worked part-time for Keith Black Racing Engines, which specialized in high-performance boats and later AA fuel dragsters. Dick operated the drill press and milling machines. “I could do anything in a machine shop,” he boasts, the way white-haired guys are allowed to. “I was a cocky little guy at 16, and I could do anything a grown man could.”

In 1952, along with a couple of high school friends, Dick began surfing. His first board was an already-old Dale Velzy. “A few years later, I got my first custom board from Dick Barrymore, who now does ski movies—it was 9' long and 20” wide because that’s how long and wide the [balsa] wood was. It was a Woody Brown template, a double-ender we called ’em ’cuz the nose and tail looked the same. It’d be a semi-gun today—light balsa with a single layer of glass.” He remembers it all lovingly, “That board was lighter than my friend’s Hobie foam board. I rode it for two years, up until I left for Hawaii. I rode everything in California on that same board—Lunada Bay, big Cottons Point, Windansea, Ventura Overhead—so I knew you could ride a 15-foot wave on a 9-foot board.”

By the time he was 20, Brewer was going to Long Beach State, surfing whenever he could, and working the night shift at North American Aviation as a toolmaker. “The union was up in arms. You’re supposed to have ten years experience and seven years apprenticeship to be a tool-and-die maker. They said I was too young to be Class A—top dollar—because of work experience, but my production output was 300 percent; the union steward told me to slow down, I was making everyone else look bad, but I never had a rejection of one of my jobs. Finally, I was silver-soldering some pieces together for a drill fixture and got into a hassle with the steward over not being a certified welder, and this led to a disagreement in the parking lot. I decided there was no room for big companies and labor unions in my life.”

He loved surfing, but Dick’s machinist’s heart was still deep into the Southern California car scene. “My friends inland were all drag racers,” he recalls. “I’d show up at Huntington Pier in a supercharged car and bum I rubber for a couple of blocks. ‘That was Dick Brewer,’ they’d say”

He was a cultural anomaly at college, too—president of the Alpha Sigma Kai fraternity and the Association of Men’s Students at Compton J.C., then a Men’s Senator at Long Beach State. “I gave up my term as senator to join the Air National Guard (in 1958),” he says. “The recruiter lied and said I wouldn’t have to go to basic training till I finished the school year, but they sent me to basic right after school started. They told me the commies are gonna kill everybody who’s anybody, so I surmised, Why be anybody? I’m just goin’ surfing!”’

Fortunately, Dick had another sideline brewing. “I wanted to shape a board. I’d watched Bob Olson and Gordie and Velzy, and I figured I could do it as good, if not better. I was a pretty good surfer by then—y’know. Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, Power Plant—I liked Power Plant, cause of the warm water in the wintertime, and it was a nice little right. I slept there in my car a lot when I was going to Long Beach State. Just to wake up on the beach somewhere in California and paddle out at dawn—that’s what was happening! It was always glassy early, and you got your surfing before you went to class; otherwise you were jonesin’ all day. So, I kind of lived that lifestyle.”

He used a template traced from a friend’s Quigg balsa to shape his first board. “Harold Walker was starting to blow foam in Newport, so I bought one of the first Walker blanks and made my first gun, a 9'10", which I used at Waimea later on and it worked well. I shaped it in a garage in Surfside; that would have been about 1959, and then I took my first trip to Hawaii and it was all over.”

After a great summer in Hawaii, he returned to Long Beach, but his heart wasn’t in school anymore. On the other hand, he had Haggerty’s and the South Bay so wired that Dewey Weber put him on his surf team. And so it was that, with a new 8'6" Weber hot-dog board under his arm and 20 units remaining for his engineering degree at Long Beach State College, Richard Brewer returned to Hawaii in the Summer of ’60 and never looked back.

Brewer moved into an apartment behind Tommy Lee’s surf shop, across from Ala Moana. He roomed with Walt Phillips, who was making surfboards and surf movies. The 8'6" Weber worked great at Chun’s Reef and Ala Moana, but Brewer had Donald Takayama shape him a 9' x 20" double-ender with dropped rails in back for the North Shore—he thought the guys out there with their rhino-chasers were in the Dark Ages. “I got out there and my 9-foot DT was working perfectly in small Sunset. But my new friends Mike Diffenderfer and Buzzy Trent told me, ‘RB, ya gotta get a big one like us!”’

In those days, says Brewer, “a Pat Curren gun was ordered by how many feet of flat bottom you wanted—measured from the tail—and in front of that was a giant belly. So Diff says do seven feet of flat bottom, and we’ll shape it together—perfectly straight and flat with dropped razor rails in back with the belly in front and a Pat Curren fin with about an 11-inch base. When it was done, me and Diff and Butch [Van Artsdalen] were there, and Diff goes, 'Pat’s got nothin’ on us!'”

Brewer was quick to establish himself on the North Shore, taking off on set waves at Waimea and jacking northwest peaks at Sunset. Although he was a goofy-foot and smaller in stature than most of the surfers, he’d go shoulder to shoulder with anybody, no matter how big their reputation, from Greg Noll to Pat Curren. Credibility in the water helped build credibility on the beach, and his future came into focus. “I decided not to become an aeronautical engineer,” he recalls. “I decided it would be more fun to design surfboards and be involved in the whole thing rather than in just one phase of something.”

In the winter of ’60-’61, Brewer opened Surfboards Hawaii in Haleiwa, filling scuba tanks and selling Dewey Weber and Scholl boards—both from Venice, California, and shaped by Harold Iggy—and he began to shape a few boards himself.

“Bob Shepherd was my real teacher," Brewer recalls. "He taught me the techniques.” Like Quigg, Shepherd was all about natural curves and concaves. “Pat Curren was an influence, too, because he was a friend, but his boards were so sticky it turned me away,” RB admits. “The reputable part of Curren’s trip was the razor rails and a dead-flat bottom, but I went into concaves with soft rails and natural rocker.”

When Brewer began to shape big guns, all that genetic material, that native instinct for mechanics and precision, began to translate into boards of distinctive craftsmanship and performance, even before he had much experience. “I’d already built a few guns, and when Buffalo Keaulana won the ’61 Makaha contest on a Brewer, people started to ask for Surfboards Hawaii guns. Then I got an order for 50 Surfboards Hawaii per month from Wigwam department stores in Honolulu, and suddenly the Quonset hut I was living in became a factory at Kammieland. Pat Curren, Jose Angel and others had lived in the hut, so it had a history, but now Butch Van Artsdalen, Mike Diffenderfer, Peewee (my glasser at Surfboards Hawaii), George Lanning, Mitch the Jew from Malibu—they all lived and worked there. And I was the only one that had a real bedroom! And that’s how I really got started—that first 50-board order from Wigwam.”

Setting up shop on the North Shore put Brewer in the middle of the big-gun action and on an accelerated learning curve. “I learned from everybody that came through the Surfboards Hawaii shop, Mike Marshall, Wayne Land—Wayne Land taught me some things in the surform that I use to this day. Diff came in and shaped a few boards. Mike Hynson came in and shaped a few boards—a lotta guys.”

Mike Marshall, who was Joe Quigg’s protege, gave RB his first lesson in shaping etiquette. “Mike got real emotional because he’d heard that Quigg was upset that he was shaping some boards at Brewer’s"—Brewer generally uses the third person when referring to his name as a business entity—"and Quigg had made him promise he’d never shape anywhere but Quigg’s. So that was my first experience with that sort of thing.”

In 1963, when his business had really taken off and Surfboards Hawaii had become a prestigious label, California surfer and entrepreneur John Price visited Brewer and said he wanted to open a shop and manufacture Surfboards Hawaii boards in California. It seemed like a good idea at the time, says Brewer. "So we signed some papers which I had in a file when I went to the Mainland about six months later.” This was 1964, and the reason Brewer left the islands had to do with a strike-related shortage of materials; all of a sudden you couldn’t get blanks, resin, cloth or any other surfboard materials in Hawaii. Brewer decided to go where he could make some boards—to Price’s shop—and he asked his youngest team rider to come along.

“It seemed strange he [Price] hadn’t paid me any royalties yet; the agreement was $10 per board and 25 cents for every T-shirt. But Jeff Hakman and I went over there anyway, and I did 30 to 40 boards a week all during the summer of ’64. It was a fun time cause I was also crewin’ on the Hawaiian dragster on weekends with Don Prudhomme, and time went fast.”

Hakman, too, remembers it as a great summer, working part-time at Price’s north San Diego county shop and surfing—his first gig as a pro surfer (at age 15). Jeff stayed at Price’s house and says John was a great host. He didn’t see any conflict between Price and Brewer; but he noticed that “Brewer didn’t seem to be making much money—but then again, he was having a lot of fun.”

After Jeff returned to the Islands at the end of the summer, things came to a head between Price and Brewer. “I wanted to start collecting my royalties,” Brewer recalls, “and Price says, ‘Well, you know, I own the Surfboards Hawaii name in California, and you own it in Hawaii, so I don’t owe you anything.’ So I walked away. I thought, ‘Surfboards Hawaii can’t get by without Dick Brewer,’ and [eventually] it didn’t. But he had a couple great years, then he sold the company and went up to Park City, Utah, and became the mayor. His whole campaign, I heard, was that he was a successful retired businessman.”

Business relationships would be a recurring problem throughout Brewer’s career. Certainly he was not able to achieve the financial success of many of his contemporaries, many of them lesser-known and more minor contributors to the evolution of the surfboard and surf culture.

Sitting on the back porch, sipping lemonade and watching red-headed cardinals flutter around in his fruit trees, something reminds Brewer of another disappointment. “When I was in Hanapepe, Kauai, a few years later,” he sighs, “Charlie Galento came over from New Jersey and said, ‘You know, Greg Noll quit building boards and went out of business, can I have the Surfboards Hawaii name?’ And since I wasn’t using it, I said, ‘Sure, Charlie, but if you ever sell it, I want some money.’ And we shook on that, and I never got any money from Charlie." Brewer thinks for a moment. "I should have studied law not engineering," he says with a little smile.

Brewer walked away from Surfboards Hawaii and went to work for Hobie Alter in 1965, working alongside Terry Martin and Ralph Parker. “That was my real apprenticeship in production shaping. Me and Ralph Parker were doing about 30 a week. Terry Martin did as many as 89 in one week. But my whole gig of going there wasn’t to build Dick Brewer models. I was just gonna shape with the boy's, and I did it, y’know? I did the 30 a week. And I remember Hobie paid me $19 per board. They paid Terry Martin and Ralph Parker $9 per board. Hobie say's, ‘Brewer, you’re gettin’ double what these guys are gettin’.’”

“Cause I was a Bonus Baby, I guess. He brought me over from Hawaii for the summer—and they did show me a lot of Aloha. I went to the motorcycle races every Friday night with Grubby Clark and Flippy Hoffman and Walter Hoffman and Hobie and their whole crowd, which are a fun group. Every Friday night they religiously went and watched Sammy Tanner race motorcycles on the flat track at Ascot Park. And we rode motorcycles from Hobie’s shop in Dana Point all the way through the hills to Grubby’s shop, which is about 15 miles inland, and never crossed one road. That was fun.”

Hobie hired RB specifically to shape big-wave boards, and the Hobie-Brewer guns synthesized everything RB had so far learned about board design from other shapers, other surfers, and his own experience on the North Shore.

“Of course,” Hobie recalls, “when you got Dick, you got Bettie with it.”

Bettie, RB’s first wife, was also widely known as “Sweaty Bettie,” apparently because she worked so damn hard. “She sanded and glassed and sometimes shaped,” Hobie recalls, “and sometimes the other guys had a problem with that—with her I being around the shaping room so much. But I got along good with Dick; he was a hard worker. He made the guns. He was a good craftsman and shaper—a one-board-at-a-time shaper, whereas Terry Martin and Ralph Parker were more production guys. I imagine working with Ralph and Terry helped Brewer, but his boards were nice boards, pretty boards. We’re talking big-wave boards, of course.”

“At the end of the year with Hobie I thought I’d done really I well,” Brewer says. “Jeff Hakman had won first at the Duke on an RB Hobie model"— a 10' gun with four redwood stringers—"and I’d shaped Eddie Aikau his famous red Hobie, and then Buzzy Trent did an ad for Hobie and was unhappy that he only got one board out of the deal. But then I wanted to move ahead with R&D. I asked Hobie for $10,000 to research a new thing called ‘summer semis’ that I’d built a few of. I told him, ‘Buzzy says you rich guys gotta pay,’ and Hobie said, ‘We give out a paycheck and that’s all.’ And that was the end of my year contract with Hobie.”

RB found more work up the coast at Harbour Surfboards in Seal Beach. “I was making the Trestles Special model for Harbour, about 100 of them, to buy Webber carbs for my 427 funny car before I went back home,” says RB, watching the cardinals flit through the treetops. He also shaped a series of very Hobie-esque guns for Carbonell Surfboards during this period. “And then a friend said, ‘Hey Dick, come work for Bing.’ Since Bing was one of the top builders in the world at that time, I talked with him before heading back home.”

Nothing had been decided by the time Dick returned to Hawaii in early ’66 and moved to Kauai, now determined to stay as far away from the big manufacturers as possible. “By then,” he recalls, “Jimmy Pflueger and Fred Schwartz had opened Surfline Hawaii, along with Dave Rochlen, and I was shaping underground. I rented a building out back of the Joe Kitchens’ shop in Hanapepe and got set up. Then Schwartz hit me with a proposal to build Bing Pipeliners at Surfline, and that’s when I finally signed with Bing.”

Working out of Surfline in Honolulu and Bing's Hermosa Beach shop, RB was soon designing and shaping a series of revolutionary lightweight guns for Bing—the Pipeliner, the Big Island Semi, and then the Big Island Gun. By the Summer of ’66, in the run-up to the World Surfing Championships in San Diego, RB’s rising status was reflected in Bing magazine ads that presented David Nuuhiwa and Brewer as star-power equals in a surfer-shaper relationship. “Working with David was incredible,” Brewer recalls enthusiastically. “He had the capacity to take a new board to its limits on the first go-out. He was one of the most creative surfers I ever worked with.”

But behind the scenes, things were more complex. “Between Jock Sutherland and David and the rest of the team, there was a lot of ego at Bing’s that summer,” Brewer grins. As it turned out, Nuuhiwa was eliminated early in the World Championships, and his much-anticipated confrontation with Nat never materialized. (It was Sutherland, riding a Brewer-shaped Harbour Cheater model, who came closest to beating Nat Young, finishing runner-up.)

Over the next six months, RB shuttled between Kauai and the Mainland with a variety of team riders. “Bing absorbed the whole Dick Brewer surf team, which had been looking for a home since Surfboards Hawaii had closed,” says Brewer. “But when we got into the mini-gun thing, we just took it on our own. I went out and got a whole bunch of reject blanks, and me and Hakman and Sutherland and Gary Chapman and Owl—we’d work all night at Bing’s factory building these fantastic boards, then we’d go to Mexico, or Rincon if it was wintertime, or we’d go back to Maui with a whole bunch of boards. We’d stay up all night glassing six or eight, ten boards, putting all of these colors all over ’em. I’m surprised Bing didn’t flip out. You know, the whole bunch of us would be over there like a bunch of . . . .” Brewer searches for the word.

“Freaks! This was during the acid era, right? Anyway, Bing had this glasser—Prindle, the catamaran guy—with crooked glassing racks! I told him to use three points or go home! So me and Hakman and Chapman got back from a trip to Mexico, and 'cause of these crooked racks he’d twisted a dozen Brewer Lotuses and Pintails and a bunch of Nuuhiwa Lightweights. So I sawed down all his crooked racks and told him he should build boats. Little did I know he’d become a millionaire, and I’d be a pauper. Bing fired me for ‘putting his shop in disorder,’ so the whole bunch of us split to Maui, and that’s when Lahaina Surfing Design started.”

"THE LIFE AND WORK OF RICHARD BREWER," BY DREW KAMPION (1999)

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos

Surfboards