This balsa and redwood board was originally made in the 1930s and was once owned by Otis Chandler, son of the founder of the Los Angeles Times and the newspaper’s publisher from 1960-’78, who was a keen surfer and shot-put champion. It had first been the property of Hollywood stockbroker, writer, actor, director and producer Bob Brant, but Chandler acquired it when he began dating and subsequently married Brant’s sister, Marilyn (known as “Missy”), in 1950.

Like all Pacific Systems boards it had a domed bottom in the nose but had very little rocker or kick. All such boards were prone to “pearling” or plowing underwater during steep takeoffs or in choppy surf conditions. Chandler took the board to Bob Simmons, an eccentric and innovative Santa Monica-based board builder who’d pioneered the use of fiberglass in the post-WW II years, and had him add a redwood extension to the board’s nose to give it a more forgiving flip. The technique, known as “scarfing” was accomplished by cutting across the board’s nose at an angle, glue-and-doweling on an additional section of wood and then reshaping the area to blend in the curves. A fiberglass patch was often used to add strength and integrity to the job.

Simmons was a real visionary in surfboard design and construction. In addition to being first to use fiberglass on wooden boards, he was also first to use polystyrene foam as a surfboard core in a quest to make significantly lighter equipment. An avid student of planing hull dynamics, Simmons made balsa and fiberglass boards with complex bottom shapes that included concave channels. He also made boards with two fins, one on each rail at the tail. All such innovations were truly futuristic in the late 1940s, although they are now common features of surfboard design. Simmons died in a surfing accident at Windansea, San Diego, in 1954, so his contributions to surfboard evolution were unfortunately cut short.