Excerpt from Surf Is Where You Find It:

The surf was up. Even though he wanted to get some work done at the blank warehouse, we conned "Grubby" into going surfing with us. Rory and I squeezed him in between us in the cab of my pickup, and we cruised down to the parking lot at Ala Moana.

It was full-on "Pole Sets" and we could hardly wait to get out there. Grubby was pretty game and followed us out between the parked boats, over the outside breakwall and out into the lineup at the Bowl. Actually he had done quite a bit of surfing at Ala Moana long before Rory was even a gleam in his father's eye and while I was probably going through my terrible twos.

Back in the early 1950s, Grubby had come over to Hawaii and had gotten a job from Tom Blake reglassing and repairing a bunch of old paddleboards and surfboards. It was to be his first job in the surfboard industry. In a way, I guess we owe Tom Blake a debt of gratitude for not only his own contributions, but more so for the tremendous contributions Clark Foam has made to the modern surfboard. Grubby might not have gotten interested in surfboards without that first job from Blake.

I remember a snapshot that Bud Browne had pinned up on the wall of the little room above the garage where he lived in Costa Mesa. It was of a skinny guy on a surfboard with a small gaff-rigged sail that was operated from a prone position. The photo's caption read, "Gordon Clark sailing at Ala Moana." It was taken during that first trip to Hawaii. Grubby was definitely ahead of the windsurfing craze that would hit 30 years later, which he would also play a hand in developing.

But today it was a solid south swell, the waves were pumping and Rory and I had only one thing on our minds. So we sat up in the lineup and waited for the first set to come our way.