There were not too many options for anyone wanting to get a surfboard during the 1920s in Hawaii or California. You could make it yourself, or you could ask a woodworking friend to make one for you. That began to change in the 1930s, when a few commercial surfboard makers entered the small but growing market. Some of them were licensees of Tom Blake’s hollow board designs. But Pacific System Homes in Los Angeles, a maker of pre-fabricated housing, took a different approach starting in 1929. Prompted by Myers Butte, the son of one of its founders, the company produced a line of plank-style boards that were well-made, aesthetically beautiful and functional too, since they employed highly regarded surfers and board makers, Pete Peterson and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison, to be their principal designer-shapers and also, no doubt, to give the boards credibility on the beach.

The boards weren’t cheap. Starting at $40, today’s equivalent of $500, they were a big ticket item during the Great Depression. But they didn’t leak like Blake’s hollow boards, which some surfers derided as “kook boxes.” This board weighs around 60 pounds. It is made of redwood and balsa, with redwood and pine nose blocks and a redwood tail block. It is also extremely rare since it features redwood or mahogany slats on the deck used to protect the balsa from knee dents while paddling.

Like all the boards of the era, it is varnished and bears the “swastika” logo that the company used until 1937, when the age-old symbol became indelibly identified with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the company changed the name to “Waikiki.” By that time, it had forged a retail alliance with the Outrigger Canoe Club and Waikiki boards were featured in promotional posters for the Matson shipping line and its flagship Waikiki hotel, the Royal Hawaiian.