In the days before high-tech wetsuits, when surfing was just beginning to catch hold in Bolinas, the town’s founding wave-riders would gather around bonfires built on Agate Beach. There, they told stories and began forming friendships, blissfully unaware of a future in which visiting surfers would swamp Bolinas on busy weekends.
Back then, all they had was the fire, each other and the waves. “The fire would draw everybody for warmth,” said Dennis Cuyler, who was among the first surfers in Bolinas during the 1960s. “That’s how the whole connection started.”
That connection both helped shape the town’s identity and generated graphics, skateboards and surfboards whose makers gathered in the town’s surfing hub, the Bolinas Surf Shop. A sampling of the original boards, graphics and videos from those early days is on display through this weekend at the Bolinas Museum.
The exhibit gives a glimpse into the origins of the town’s surfing landscape and yokes that time to the present, offering what the curators say is a way for local youth to connect with previous generations and develop an appreciation for where they live.
“It gives the kids agency to talk to their parents,” said Walter Blair Tom, one of the curators. “And that deepens the community.” He and his collaborator, Marialidia Marcotulli, spent more than a year collecting interviews and items from Bolinas surfers near and far for a display that evokes nostalgia and pride.
The Bolinas Surf Shop was opened in 1963 by surfer Eric “Buzz” Besozzi. Formerly housed in the museum’s current photography gallery, it served as a space where Mr. Bessozi and a coterie of surfing aficionados designed and crafted thousands of surfboards and produced graphics that remain iconic images for surfers and skaters. The shop was also a watering hole for artists and others who, as the exhibit puts it, “all shared a common love of the sea.”
Among many innovative feats, Mr. Bessozi pioneered a method for “glassing” boards with a secret fiberglass resin formula that crinkled over the board, labeled “crinkle plaques.” Dozens of board designs poured from the shop, and Mr. Bessozi and a partner also created the “Seaflex Skateboard.”
Hunkered down in his shop off Wharf Road, Mr. Bessozi was too busy preparing huge loads of shirts for sale to give an interview with the Light. Instead, his indispensable contributions to Bolinas surfing and skating live on in a narrative compiled by Mr. Tom and Ms. Marcotulli.
Central to that narrative—and to the people who pioneered surf and skate culture in Bolinas—is a sense of wanting to maintain privacy and personal histories, to protect their heritage from the onslaught of visitors and newspaper reports seeking to broadcast the town’s singular qualities. Even the curators were hesitant to create the exhibit out of fears that it would draw more visitors to an already-flooded Bolinas.
To their relief, that has not happened. “There’s this unsaid ethos of the town, which is ‘Don’t bring more people in,’” Mr. Tom said. “I was pleasantly surprised that I haven’t seen a whole lot of people coming from out of town to see the exhibit. If anything, it’s really enriched the existing community that’s there.”
“SEAPEOPLE: The Bolinas Surf Shop, est. 1963” shows at the Bolinas Museum through Sunday, Aug. 14. The museum is open from 1 to 5 p.m. on Fridays and from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends.