Lightweight surfboards and catamarans helped launch California beach culture
LOS ANGELES — Two words — surfboards and Hobie — were all but synonymous in the early 1960s, when teenagers who saw movies such as Gidget and Beach Party rushed to the shores of Southern California to try a mesmerizing new water sport.
The lightweight, manoeuvrable boards built by a surfer dude known as Hobie carried people into the pastime that for decades had remained all but invisible outside California and Hawaii.
Hobart Laidlaw Alter (it’s unlikely many users of his gear knew his last name or even if he had one) toiled in a small beachfront shop in Dana Point, Calif., cranking out those boards by the thousands.
Hobie surfboards eventually became the linchpin of a multimillion-dollar worldwide empire that, by the time its unassuming namesake died last week, had grown to include catamarans, skateboards, beach wear and more.
Hobie died last Saturday at his Palm Desert home after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 80.
“The basic surfboard structure for 90 per cent of the surfboards around the world remains the foam core that he developed, and that was 50 years ago,” said Steve Pezman, publisher of Surfer’s Journal and a longtime friend of Hobie’s.
When Hobie built his first surfboard, about the time he graduated from high school in 1950, the oldfashioned, heavy wooden ones that had limited the sport to the strongest and most determined athletes were beginning to give way to light- er balsa-wood boards. But balsa wood was hard to come by.
A few years after Hobie moved his board-building operation out of his parents’ Laguna Beach garage in 1954, he and his friend Gordon “Grubby” Clark decided they could build a better board using a polyurethane foam core.
It took a year of trial and error, but they prevailed: The result was a board that was easy to shape, so light a child could carry it to the ocean, and so manoeuvrable a good surfer could do all sorts of stunts on it.
Soon Hobie was working with a small staff, producing 250 boards a week and struggling to keep up with demand.
As surfing spread around the world, Hobie moved on to sailing. He invented the lightweight Hobie Cat, a craft small enough to be strapped onto the roof of a car and light enough to be carried down to the beach and launched from the sand.
“Some people have described it as the great democratizing of yachting,” Pezman said. “This was something you could wheel down to the beach and set out on it. It was affordable to blue-collar workers.”
The son of a second-generation orange grower, Hobie decided soon after high school that he did not want a job that required hard-soled shoes, a coat and tie.
“I’m making money producing things that give me pleasure, doing exactly what I want to do,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1977. “I guess I’m really lucky that way.”
He is survived by his wife, Susan; daughter, Paula; sons Hobie Jr. and Jeff; eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.