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 News from Around the Americas | June 2005 
Museum Rides the Surfing Wave
 Brian Chasnoff - Express-News
Corpus Christi — Boasting the largest display of vintage surfboards in the Lone Star State, spanning more than 70 years of wave mania along the Texas coast, the Texas Surf Museum opens its doors today just a few blocks from the calm green waters of the Coastal Bend.
Calm, that is, unless a hurricane somewhere out in the Gulf of Mexico exalts the nearly 20,000 devotees who regularly surf Texas, a region dependent on the wind for its waves.
"We don't surf during the things," said Dan Parker, 44, a lifelong Texas surfer and archivist for the museum. "But when (hurricanes) are a few hundred miles offshore and they're sending swells our way, we're very happy."
The bliss blown in by offshore storms helped shape this 2,500-square-foot museum, a labor of love for co-founders Brad Lomax, 50, local businessman and surfer, and Pat Magee, 54, Texas surfing legend and avid collector of classic surfboards.
And when the winds are low, as they often are in this region of 2- to 3-foot waves, the vintage boards on display here will still excite aficionados. A plaque at the museum's entrance informs visitors that the best boards possess two attributes of equal importance: utility to those who ride them and beauty to those who behold them.
"There's a lot of real pretty ways to go," Magee said, admiring one of his favorites: a 1960s-era Greg Noll "Da Cat" surfboard with a colorful floral print.
Sporting blue swim trunks, flip-flops and a handlebar moustache, Magee strolled Thursday among the museum's memorabilia and 35 vintage boards, most of them culled from his personal collection.
Surfers across the country donated the rest, and hundreds more sit in a warehouse awaiting their turn in the museum.
Magee considers each a unique work of art, cut from blocks of polyurethane with saws and electric planers by artists known as "shapers" and then painted with colored resin. One stands out for its ornately detailed drawing of a tropical bird, another for its depiction of Mickey Mouse making a rude gesture.
But Magee's favorite is a plain, battered board with a simple brown stripe down its center that he used to ride 40 years ago.
"You could turn the board as hard as you could and it wouldn't slip out of the wave," said Magee, a two-time state champion who has broken "numerous" bones on the water.
Love for surfing, however, is not limited to weathered sportsmen like Magee — a fact Lomax said helped inspire the museum's creation.
Lomax said he was amazed at the unprecedented number of people who flocked to a surfing exhibit he and Magee helped assemble at Corpus Christi's South Texas Institute for the Arts in 1999.
"There were little old ladies, families from Amarillo, guys with trucker hats on," Lomax said. "It's really so much broader than the few hundred surfers we run into."
The 1999 exhibit remains the most attended event in the institute's history, which Lomax attributes to the influence surfing has had on American popular culture. The museum is filled with traces of that influence, from vintage surfing comic books to framed posters of 1960s surf movies such as "It's a Bikini World" and "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini."
Perhaps its most striking illustration of the devotion surfing can inspire is the nearly 12-foot board displayed at the entrance, the oldest Texas-made one in the collection. It was handcrafted in 1946 from magnolia, pine and sheets of muslin, now battered and torn.
Walter Ellisor, then a Galveston teenager, built it after meeting two men from California carrying boards and looking for a place to surf along the Texas coast. He tried it out on what the display calls the waveless waters of Baycliff.
Magee said travel to places like Hawaii, where the waves can reach 15 feet, remains a must for Texas surfers. He spends a lot of time on his seafront property in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
"That's good surf," he said. |
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