With roots in Pacific Beach, Gordon and Smith Surfboards Inc. celebrated half a century of creating crafted surfboards and skateboards earlier this month. The 50-year celebration at the Wave House Athletic Club, 3115 Ocean Front Walk in Mission Beach, brought together generations of surfers and skaters to reminisce about endless summers, show off wild displays of classic surfboards and, of course, take to the water and surf. Co-founded in the Pacific Beach garage of Lloyd Smith in 1959, G&S surfboards and skateboards have left their historical marks on a local and national level. Smith, with friend Larry Gordon and a handful of talented locals, helped shape the course of coastal and suburban cultural phenomena since the 1960s. “Both Lloyd and I were 19,” Gordon said. “I didn’t dream of being as big as we were. A friend, Bobby Thomas … kept telling me this is a retiring business. A business where you could retire. I didn’t believe him until about 10 years later.” With Smith’s knowledge of chemistry and help from the Gordon family’s plastics business, the two went on to design and mold foam surfboards and eventually created flexible skateboards made from Fibreflex composite material. In 1965, Smith left for Australia to start making surfboards, according to an online biography. Smith returned to the U.S. In 1969 and sold his portion of the business two years later. Gordon went on to spearhead the business, launching it into the history books over the next 30 years. With their first official store along Turquoise Street in North Pacific Beach, Gordon and Smith went on to open stores along Mission Boulevard, eventually running four retail outlets “pretty much covering” San Diego, Gordon said. While surfers and skaters, past and present, honored co-founders Larry Gordon and Lloyd Smith along with company representatives during the Oct. 3 celebration, much of the day belonged to the stream of local legendary G&S teamriders. One by one they took to the top of the Wave House broadcast tower to give their thanks and share their memories. The detailed display collection of classic G&S surfboards belonging to Bay Park resident and surfboard repair shop owner Joe Roper showed how board shapes and functions have changed over 50 years. Roper owns Roper’s Surfboard Repair shop, 1460 Morena Blvd. His classic longboards and special edition G&S surfboards stood stoic in the sand of the Wave House as an entire community of surfers and skaters remembered the times. Roper said that a lot more people surf now than in the past, including many more women surfers and competitors across the spectrum of professions over the last few decades. He said he recalls growing up alongside local legends like Harry “Skip” Frye and Hank Warner during a time when Pacific Beach had fewer crowds and more families. “The family of surfers old and young has been pretty tight-knit in the local San Diego community for basically all my life,” Roper said. “When you grow up in an area and you surf in the same spots, you have the same group of surfers from decades before you and after … you get that respect level between us. And that’s just part of surfing the breaks and enjoying every swell that comes in.” Though many of the older surfers and skaters have grown out of the profession, it’s folks like Roper and others who’ve helped lay the foundations for much of the current local surfing and skating culture. Skaters like self-proclaimed seven-time world champion slalom skater Henry Hester of La Jolla came to the event to share stories and nostalgia. He said he skated for G&S through the 1970s in downhill skating events like the Signal Hill Speed Run in La Costa. “It (Signal Hill) was the only real recognized speed event back in the ’70s,” Hester said. Hester said he reached speeds of 59 mph on the downhill race but that he “upped” that number to 80 mph for the crowds. Dennis Schufeldt, a former skater who also raced Signal Hill in the late 1960s, remembers how he learned about slalom skateboarding. “Unbeknownst to my mom and dad I would hitchhike down to the beach on my skateboard. I ended up seeing Skip Frye and Willie Phillips skateboarding one day and they were racing through beer cans, and that was my first introduction to slalom racing,” he said. “We all wanted to act like we were surfing, but now this was another element … we were excited because we were racing.”