This entire shaping process was pioneered by Gordon “Grubby” Clark and Hobie Alter. Notable builders Dave Sweet and Reynolds Yater were also on the scene where the surfboard building industry as we know it today was born. As the story goes, the slow steady growth of demand for polyester surfboards created more orders than the group could handle. The original company split in two, with an almost arbitrary decision made for Grubby to take over the foam blowing process full time and Hobie to do the board building. What was born was a template for surfboard manufacturing that for the past ten years, until now, had remained largely unchanged.

The news broke via one of Grubby’s famed, long newsy dissertations in the form of a fax. Why did it generate such shock? I mean it was like 911 for surfers. No one died. But many feared, on first glance, that an industry had died and a sport which was more a lifestyle than casual athletic pursuit, had been dealt a mortal blow. The modern surfboard had been born with the advent of Clark Foam. Now all of a sudden, no more Clark. It meant no more surfboards for many builders. Why? It began in the late fifties, starting when Grubby began supplying foam blanks exclusively to Hobie and then eventually to other shapers after a sort of breach in the original agreement. Grubby had cultivated a near monopoly over the years by supplying a relatively low cost, highly refined product in an efficient timely manner. He built a contrived monopoly and managed to maintain it through peerless efficiency and responsibility to the industry which relied on him. So without Clark Foam, the supply of blanks to a large percentage of board builders was suddenly and without much official warning, shut off completely.

Over a period of twenty years I had been a member of the surfboard manufacturing community, shaping and glassing close to 40,000 surfboards in my career. As a craftsman with a company modeled after the template Hobie and Grubby had lain out, I was one of a cadre of experienced surfers/builders. In the nineties, this cadre seemed to diminish as margins shrunk with the advent of greater environmental regulatory control and the growth of many other issues peculiar to manufacturing in California. All of this began to choke profitability and raise blood pressure. It was in that time frame that I learned a lot about the direction of manufacturing’s future in California and not long after, I opted out. My close relationship with Clark Foam was summed up in a conversation with the plant manager one day as we worked on sorting through some new process development issues and some serious local regulatory problems which were threatening to close my little surfboard building company.

Paraphrased, the conversation detailed how Grubby really wanted out of the business which he had created. But the irony was that the very same reliance on his product which he had ardently cultivated now kept him tethered to his grandfathered location in Orange County. Gordon Clark, at that time, supplied roughly ninety five percent of all the surfboard foam the US used. If he quit, he would be liable by proxy for the lost livelihoods of an entire industry. Couple that with a fifties born sense of responsibility to workers whose loyalty spanned close to three generations of Clark employees, and one understands some of the pressures. All that and a reputation for being mule stubborn pretty much sums up Clark Foam’s credo.

In the weeks past, many stories and rumors have continued to fly, but concrete answers for the abrupt cessation of operations at the foam factory seem difficult to find. A new employee, Josh Collins, age 31, told me that his two year tenure at Clark Foam was a dream job for a Central Coast surfer. He was both shocked and hurt to find the doors closed when he reported to work, after his long drive up coast, with a truckload of blanks for surfboard builders who were in the middle of filling Christmas orders. He looked forward to his job and knew that at days end he would be rewarded with a surf somewhere along his route. That is another of the unique, special things about the foam company; it was built by surfers to supply other surfers. The cachet of the job was what apparently keeps many folks enmeshed in the surfboard industry in spite of the obvious downs of low pay and longish hours. Josh, whose uncle runs Shoreline Glassing, a large builder in South Bay, comes from an apparently long family line of board industry. He summed up his feelings with, “I had hoped that I would be afforded the same courtesy I would have given Clark. Some notice or warning would have been nice. I mean it is Christmas!”

Having read Gordon Clark’s swan song fax to the industry, I admit I empathize with what he has endured to keep his company based here in California. The pressures he faces would cripple many other less bull headed folks. He cites the EPA, down through State and County agencies, for providing untenable pressure plus many of the other attendant issues which are rapidly gutting US manufacturing competitiveness. I think that any other industry but a surfer run one would have folded ten years ago.

In the last ten or fifteen years, new technologies and methods of manufacturing have become accepted by the surfing community. They are viable. They are overseas based, the lone exception being a solitary polyurethane core foam company run by Harold Walker. It is So Cal based. However, Walker’s company does as many blanks in a year as Clark would do in a week. Rumor has it that a veteran industry shaper named Gary Linden has taken the helm from an ailing Walker and plans on ramping up production or possibly moving operations to China. The short of it is that today in 2005, Clark foam is no longer solely responsible for the survival of an industry and the maintenance of the status quo for equipment in surfing. For the first time since the business started over fifty years ago, it seems the door is open for him to leave. And as is apparently true in entrepreneurial fashion, he is making a strong statement regarding environmental regulatory controls in the process.

When Clark foam started, board builders were using wood. No, surfers are not back in that era again with the closure of the foam factory. There are alternative methods of manufacture that will keep boards under surfer’s feet with or without Clark blanks. What the closure will do however, is send polyurethane blank fabrication overseas to China. It will also radically increase import of existing overseas manufactured surf industry products, everything from finished molded surfboards to polyurethane blanks.

It is pretty much common knowledge that building almost anything utilizing regulated raw material is impossible in the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and it has been for quite some time. What we are seeing is a change of course for an industry that has a history of being resistant to globalization in surfboard manufacture for a long time. It is sad in that
regard. It marks the end of an era and resulting release of naiveté. The Golden State–the term now has become an oxymoron for those who would attempt to compete as manufacturers within its borders.