New ‘Princes’ exhibit at MAH embraces the whole of Santa Cruz’s history of surfing

There are plenty of people who have never been within a thousand miles of Santa Cruz but who can still tell you that this place is all about surfing. It’s no secret that surf culture is Santa Cruz’s brand, much like beer in Milwaukee or cheesesteaks in Philadelphia.

What’s less well-known, even by many locals, is the degree to which Santa Cruz’s surf culture has changed — and is still changing — profoundly and irretrievably. What’s common today — lots of newbies on new Costco surfboards in the water, retail shops selling more lifestyle accessories than actual surfboards, local kids who grew up surfing having to move away because of a lack of affordable housing — marks a pronounced step away from how things used to be just a generation or two ago. 

A new much-anticipated exhibition at the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz is not about the evolution (or, as many old-timers would speak of it, the de-evolution) of surfing locally, per se. But by honoring surfing’s deep-rooted history in Santa Cruz, it paints a picture of a vanishing world.

The show is called “Princes of Surf 2025: He’e Nalu Santa Cruz,” and it’s an encore of a similar exhibit at the MAH from a decade ago. Both the 2015 show and the new one mark the anniversary of the moment when three teenage Hawaiian royals visited Santa Cruz in 1885, and introduced the noble Hawaiian tradition of surfing to the locals. It is widely viewed as the first recorded instance of surfing on the North American mainland.

The exhibit will tell the story of the three nephews of Hawaiian King Kalakaua, who surfed near the mouth of San Lorenzo River on three massive surfboards made from California redwood. The exhibition will feature replicas of those boards — longboards used by Hawaiian royalty were known as o’lo boards — created by master Santa Cruz surfboard shaper Bob Pearson of Arrow Surfboards. Pearson, along with surf historians and writers Kim Stoner, Barney Langner and Geoffrey Dunn, coordinated the first exhibit back in 2015, and they reunited to mount the new show as well.

So, what’s different between the two shows? On a practical level, space. The new show is in the MAH’s showcase second-floor Solari Gallery, which is about triple the size of the third-floor gallery that housed the 2015 exhibit. What that means is that the show has been expanded to include other artifacts of local surf culture, such that it can be read as a history of Santa Cruz surfing, from the princes to the modern day. 

At the heart of that expansion is a long-term project initiated several years ago by lifelong Santa Cruz surfers Kim Stoner and Don Iglesias of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club Preservation Society. Their mission, in collaboration with the MAH, was to identify the popular and, in most cases, long-defunct surf shops that dominated the scene in surfing’s glory days of the 1960s. Included in the new exhibit are historic photos and stories of nine surf shops where young surfboard-shapers were creating the boards that Santa Cruz’s ’60s generation were riding in the waves. Only one of them, Haut Surfboards on Swift Street on Santa Cruz’s Westside, still exists as a surf shop. That shop and eight other buildings around town all became part of the MAH’s Blue Plaque program, which designates historically significant buildings in the county. 

With a few exceptions, the Historic Surf Shops of Santa Cruz closed not too long after they opened. But taken together, they represent a crucial chapter in Santa Cruz’s surfing history and tell the story of such legendary figures in the surf scene as Johnny Rice, Gale Yount, Doug Haut and Jack O’Neill.

In 2019, Stoner and Iglesias began the meticulous research to qualify the surf shops for Blue Plaque status.

“The building had to still be there, for one thing,” said Stoner. “It could be a different use, but if the building was gone, we couldn’t do it.”

The two friends grew up in that environment of the 1960s and remember all the surf shops that they documented. But they also had to supply the historical information for the shops, researching business directories, lease agreements, deeds and other documents. 

“And then we interviewed a million people, all the old codgers,” said Iglesias.

The result is a map of the collective memory, spots all across town that formed together the beating heart of the surf world locally in the ’60s. On the Westside, Haut Surf Shop remains where it opened back in 1969. Old-timers might remember Owl Surfboards by the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf, or Hobie Surfboards on Ocean Street. Freeline Design Surfboards, the Portola Surf Shop and O’Neill’s Surf Shop anchored the scene at Pleasure Point. Meanwhile, legendary shaper Johnny Rice was doing his work out in Aptos. One of those addresses is now a pizza restaurant, another a physical therapist’s office, another a convenience store.

The bulk of the new show at the MAH is, of course, the surfboards themselves, and the vast range of materials, shapes and weights of the boards tell the story of surfing over the past century in microcosm. The show will include more than 50 surfboards, from the enormous redwood planks the Hawaiian princes surfed on, weighing in at more than 200 pounds, to fiberglass and foam short boards used to surf the legendary surf break north of Santa Cruz, Mavericks. 

The significance of the 1960s surf shops is that they largely experienced the revolution in materials used in surfboard manufacturing. As late as the 1950s, most surfboards were still made of wood, albeit lightweight balsa wood. Surf shops like the ones in Santa Cruz began to proliferate with the advent of polyurethane foam, which was much lighter, much cheaper and much easier to shape than wood. It also allowed young entrepreneurs to shape their own boards and create signature designs and styles. Many shops had to start from scratch, creating their own foam blanks that they would then shape and “glass,” i.e., coat with fiberglass.

What’s called a surf shop today will often feature mostly expensive branded apparel often in expensive retail spaces, in stores owned and managed by outside corporations. In the 1960s, a surf shop, remembered Don Iglesias, was mostly in the business of shaping surfboards with “maybe three or four T-shirts and some bar wax.” But in the back, amid foam dust and fiberglass fumes, they were making surfboards.

In those days, surfers were not really respected in mainstream culture, which made surfing into a distinct subculture. And that subculture largely sprouted from the shops.

“It was a bohemian lifestyle,” said Iglesias, “they’d sleep in the back on an old mattress. If you were a young guy and you wanted to learn how to shape boards, they’d hand you a broom and you started sweeping out the shop. If you’re lucky, you could work your way up, and if you had some skills, you’d get to learn from the masters.”

Much like bikers, surfers existed on a kind of outlaw fringe of polite society. They were often tabbed as lazy, though many of them resisted drinking and drugs in order to rise before dawn each morning to catch waves. 

“That laziness thing was really just exhaustion,” said Iglesias. “We’d surf three or four hours a day, and you’d go home and be a zombie. Some of that laid-back [reputation] was just because we were all fried.”

In the days before the surfboard leash, surfers had to be exceptionally athletic as well. Retrieving a lost surfboard required a lot of vigorous open-ocean swimming. 

Older men reminiscing about how things used to be has a limited appeal generally. But in this case, said Iglesias, young surfers enjoy hearing about the surf culture of the 1960s and ’70s. 

“A lot of kids, they’re just fascinated,” he said. “And [the MAH show] gives them a better understanding of surfing, all the way from the Hawaiians all the way through Mavericks. What’s next? I don’t know. We just feel fortunate, blessed to have experienced what we did. Other things will come that will be great, but I think we were there in the golden age.”

“Princes of Surf 2025: He’e Nalu Santa Cruz” opens Friday, July 18, at the Solari Gallery at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, with an opening reception at 7 p.m. (6 p.m. for MAH members). The show runs through Jan. 4, 2026. 

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