August 8, 2012 Wednesday - Part 2

The Becker T-Shirts

For years I have thought that David who rides the Becker board needed a Becker T-shirt. So I bought him one and one for myself on my trip down to Southern California. Kate and I stopped at our favorite surf shop: Becker Surfboards on Pier Ave in Hermosa Beach. Within thirty minutes we quickly picked out over $150 of clothing items for our kids, friends and ourselves.

The Becker Shop and Becker Surfboards have a special significance for me. The shop opened in 1980 and at that time we lived in Manhattan Beach. It quickly gained the reputation as the best surf shop in the South Bay of Los Angeles. Due to family and career, I was not surfing at that time, but I would visit the shop to gawk at the boards and dream about taking up surfing again. We moved to Mill Valley in 1983 and would travel every summer to Manhattan Beach and Palos Verdes to visit family and friends. A highlight of the summer trip was a visit to the Becker shop for t-shirts, sandals, trunks and Becker sweat shirts. Any time we are in the South Bay, we go out of our way to visit the Becker Shop on Pier Ave.

In 1988, after his third year in the Junior Life Guards program in Hermosa Beach, my twelve-year-old son Kevin announced he was going to buy a surfboard with his own money. Wow, I was all for it – lets go. I pulled out my old 10’ 6” longboard that had been in storeroom under my mother’s house since my college days (1967). That got me back into surfing. Kevin and I have been surfing together ever since. The next summer I purchased a like-new 9’ 0” Becker used board at the shop and surfed it until it fell apart five years later. In his quiver of shortboards, Kevin has one longboard, an 8’ 0’’ Becker, a Mike Gee model.

Here’s a couple of facts about Phil Becker from Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing: Phil Becker learned his craft from surfboard pioneers Dale Velzy and Hap Jacobs and became the primary shaper for Rick Surfboards in Hermosa Beach from 1958 to 1979. In 1980 he started Becker Surfboards, cranking out ten boards a day and passed the 100,000-board mark in 2000, putting him 25,000 boards ahead of anyone else in the world. Becker continues to use the Rockwell planer he bought in 1965, a power tool that is no longer in production, thus he has to occasionally rebuild it himself. If you are ever in Hermosa Beach, swing by Becker Shop on Pier Ave, you won’t be disappointed.