All original Hawaiian Beach boy shape from the kings of early surfboard manufacturing -- Velzy Jacobs! Rare outline with Hawaiian legacy. Swaggering, innovative surfboard designer, builder, and retailer from Hermosa Beach, California, best known for creating the "pig" in 1955, a wide-hipped board that became a prototype for today's longboard. "Dale could out-drink, out-shoot, out-ride, out-shape, out-sell and out-finesse all comers," Surfer's Journal wrote in 1994. "And he made it all up as he went along." Velzy was born (1927) and raised in Hermosa Beach, the son of a mechanic and the grandson of a woodworker who built cabinets for Teddy Roosevelt. He began surfing in 1936, started shaping the following year, and was soon making balsa-redwood laminate surfboards for himself and his friends beneath the Hermosa Pier. He's sometimes credited as the first surfer to hang ten. After working as a teenaged Merchant Marine during and just after World War II, Velzy began to shape boards commercially, first in Manhattan Beach (1949–50), where he opened Velzy Surfboards, regarded by some as the world's first surf shop; then Hawaii (1950–51) and Malibu (1953). Velzy teamed up with fellow boardmaker Hap Jacobs in 1954 to open Velzy-Jacobs Surfboards in Venice Beach; four years later he opened a second Velzy-Jacobs shop in San Clemente, and before the decade was out he'd opened branches in San Diego, Newport Beach, Hermosa, and Honolulu. Postwar shapers Bob Simmons, Joe Quigg, and Matt Kivlin, all from Southern California, had already made big improvements in board design while Velzy was still a teenager—Simmons with his easy-to-ride "spoon" board, Quigg and Kivlin with the lighter Malibu chip models. Velzy's balsa-constructed pig design—which dropped the board's wide point back toward the tail, further improving maneuverability—was another key step in surfboard design evolution. "It changed the sport," Quigg later said. "Suddenly you had thousands of these kids out there riding pigs. There was a time when you couldn't even sell a board in California unless it looked like a Velzy." Other Velzy designs, including the Bump, the 7-11, the Banjo, and the Wedge, tended toward the gimicky. His streamlined paddleboards, however, were highly prized in the '80s and '90s. Velzy was the undisputed king of surf retail throughout most of the '50s. He had a skilled team of shapers assisting him in production and top-name surfers rode his boards, including Mickey Dora, Donald Takayama, Mike Doyle, Dewey Weber, and Mickey Muñoz. Velzy played up the role of surf world magnate, smoking enormous Cuban cigars and driving from shop to shop in a gull-wing Mercedes. In 1958 he bought a new camera for a young filmmaker named Bruce Brown, and paid his living and travel expenses for a year while Brown made his first surf film, Slippery When Wet; five years later Brown began shooting his surf classic The Endless Summer.