Nostalgia can be an uplifting and sentimental feeling. You feel that tug of desire for something meaningful from your past. What was once old becomes fresh and new for you again. Nostalgia can be comforting, exciting and, heck, just plain fun.
That could sum up the emotions felt at the Pacific Coast Vintage Surf Auction, held Jan. 26 at the San Diego Convention Center. The event, now in its 11th year, is a production of one Allan Seymour, a lifelong lover of all things relating to the quintessential beach lifestyle. Be it surfing, beach cars, Hawaiian music, clothing or coastal folk art, Seymour appreciates all of it and knows that many others, young and old, do as well.
As such, he spends much of the year acquiring the auction rights to represent owners of many classic surfboards, paintings and books, along with a variety of beach-related pop culture items, all for a growing market of nostalgic surf collectors eager for a chance to bid on vintage items at the annual event.
Although many of the buyers at the Pacific Coast Vintage Surf Auction tended to be of the baby-boom generation, a number of curious younger kids who were attending the adjacent Action Sports Retail show at the Convention Center showed up to check out some of the historical surfing items.
“Wow, this stuff is ancient,” said one mop-topped skate rat named Darryl, as he struggled to lift up a heavy, solid redwood and balsa wood surfboard from the mid-1940s.
“It’s cool to see, though ” it makes you respect the old guys that rode these logs and how in shape you had to be back then,” he added.
Seymour had more than 70 items on the docket, including a few highly-sought after wooden, finless surfboards built back in the 1930s, before the introduction of lightweight polyurethane foam in the 1950s, which revolutionized the building of surfboards for the mass market.
In his travels searching out desirable objects, Seymour discovered a cache of vintage boards in Pacific Beach that had been owned by Phil Castagnola, who owned the Select Surf Shop on Mission Boulevard from the late 1960s until 1988, when he suddenly died. Castagnola’s widow, Kelly, held onto the stash of boards but after almost 20 years was ready to sell them, including a number of solid balsa and redwood models.
As expected, those boards brought the highest prices, with a 9-foot 8-inch Pacific Systems Homes model built in 1937 fetching a high of $6,200. (Pacific Systems Homes, out of Los Angeles, built surfboards as a sideline business and was the first company to mass-manufacture boards for the embryonic wave-riding market.) A thin, 6-foot Pacific Systems bellyboard, made of redwood and pine, also did well, with a high bid of $5,200. A 9-foot-1 balsa board built in 1957 in La Jolla by Archie Fox sold for $2,600. According to Bill Thrailkill, who has built surfboards locally for over 40 years, “Fox only built about 70-odd boards total before he quit, so these are very rare to see anywhere.”
Old wood wasn’t the only interesting surf-related items to move. Surfers who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s laid down a pretty penny on some of the more modern, polyurethane foam-built surfboards. A Greg Noll-Mickey Dora “Da Cat” longboard model, built in the mid-1960s, fetched $3,000. An 8-foot Gerry Lopez Lightning Bolt pintail sold for $3,800, and a Dale Velzy-designed 11-foot, three-stringer gun-model brought in $6,300. Dora, Lopez and Velzy are recognized as legendary figures and innovators in the surfing world. Paintings of waves by artist Wade Koniakowsky sold for $1,600 and surfboard design-inspired furniture by Peter Schroff hit the gavel at $1,250.
Probably the most surprising item was a small, rare, original book on body surfing by Ron Drummond, which was published in the 1940s and sold for $2,000, after a spirited back-and-forth bidding between two determined buyers. Sometimes, even if you are a surfer, the cost of nostalgia doesn’t come cheap!