Dale Velzy plaque, marking world’s 1st retail surfboard shop, installed in Manhattan Beach

Surfboard shaper Dale Velzy, known as the founder of the first retail surf shop in the world, had that legacy honored with a plaque installation at the shop’s original location this week — just steps from the Manhattan Beach Pier.

The bronze plaque reads, “Opened one of the world’s first known surfboard shops at this site in the early 1950s,” and is in the sidewalk outside The Strand House restaurant, 117 Manhattan Beach Blvd.

The plaque was unveiled at an event at the Hermosa Beach Museum in August and the installation took place on Tuesday, Jan. 2, according to Jacquelyne May, who helped spearhead the project, which had been in the works for nearly 12 years.

Many other supporters helped along the way, including Bing Copeland, who founded Bing Surfboards in 1959.

Copeland, in a Thursday phone interview, said he was Velzy’s “shop rat” when he was a teen.

“I hung around the shop,” Copeland said from his Sun Valley, Idaho, home. “He was really my mentor.”

Copeland, now nearing his 88th birthday, said the plaque was a “long time coming.”

“I’m just really pleased that it’s finally in the concrete,” Copeland said.

Copeland paid $2,300 for the plaque, May said in a previous interview, while the South Bay Boardriders Club paid to help expedite the plaque’s creation so it could be completed for the unveiling.

Velzy’s son, Matt Velzy, who lives in Hawaii, attended the unveiling in August.

The younger Velzy said on Thursday that he was “stoked” by all the work May, Copeland and many others did, as well as the Hermosa Beach Museum for hosting the August event in memory of his father.

“It was great to see Bing and Sonny (Vardeman) and many more who remembered my dad with cherished memories of that era,” Velzy said this week about the unveiling.

In the 1940s, the elder Velzy began his surfboard-shaping career, which led to him opening the first retail shop in an empty shoe repair shop in Manhattan Beach, considered to be the first in the world, in 1950.

Velzy died in 2005 at 77 years old, but not before he was inducted into the Hermosa Beach Surfers Walk of Fame in 2003.

In August, the younger Velzy donated some of his father’s tools and a trophy his father received from the editor of International Surfing Magazine in 1966 to the Hermosa Beach Museum.

Source: Orange County Register