Family Photos

We're always stoked to post family snap shots that turn up little gems of information. Here's one of those photos, taken back in the summer of 1967 at Old Man's, San Onofre. Pictured clockwise (closest) Betty VanDyke, Karen Gallagher (Surf Guide fame), Gretchen (mom), Peter VanDyke (sitting), Gene VanDyke (standing), (sitting) Fred VanDyke, and Charles Gallagher. Photo: Gallagher Family Archives. Below is the cover of the Surf Guide magazine (V2#9, Oct. 64) that featured a younger Karen Gallagher.

Missing Link

Not to take anything away from either Dave Rastovich or Mark Cunningham, but George Greenough is probably the closest link we have with dolphins. We're posting two gems this week, a snapshot circa 1978 taken by Greenough confidant, Greg Huglin and a late model Velo style spoon from 1968 (now in the collection of Spencer Croul, also by way of Mr. Huglin). The snapshot shows George and and the camera housing he built for filming water sequences on "Big Wednesday". Here's the description (in George's own words) from the 2011 Hawaiian Surf Auction catalog: 
“This camera was custom built to shoot surfing in 35mm using panavision lenses up to 200mm. The original camera is an Arriflex II C. The problem with putting this camera in a housing was weight. You couldn’t focus and hold the camera at the same time. I needed a balanced shoulder mounted camera to be able to pull focus while shooting. I had to redesign the viewfinder, take the camera apart and build a waterproof, lightweight housing for it. This took about 500 hours to do. The end result was excellent balance while shooting “Big Wednesday”. I used lenses up to 200 mm shooting off a mat. The camera is easy to focus while shooting and I’ve used it for a variety of other projects since”. 
The spoon kneeboard is one of those missing links between the long and short board eras—it was George doing radical s-turns on them—at a time when a drop-knee cutback was considered high performance surfing. His kneeboarding would be reinterpreted into stand up surfing with the advent of Bob McTavish's vee-bottom, Plastic Machines, and Dick Brewer's mini guns. BTW, the camera housing also resides in the collection of Spencer Croul.

Photo: Dan Merkel/A-Frame