Surf Legend Grabs a Board on His Final Ride
By ROBIN PIERSON

Bill Holden in his Canyon Acres shop where he worked building wave-riding masterpieces up until the day he died.

On Super Bowl Sunday, legendary surfboard maker Bill Holden was loading up his latest creation, a sleek square-tailed thruster decorated with a lyrical line drawing of a surfer girl. The Canyon Acres resident planned to show off the newly finished board at his son's annual football party.

He never made it.

After placing the board into the bed of his truck, Holden, 77, collapsed, succumbing to a massive heart attack.

The founder of Holden Surfboards of Huntington Beach, Holden first started making

surfboards in the mid-50s and was instrumental in definingthe shape and look of the classic long board.

Holden was so instrumental in the world of surfboard making that on his 70th birthday, May 20, 2000, he became the first inductee of the International Surfboard Builders Hall of Fame, created to honor icons of the surfingindustry.

Each of his boards is considered a work of art.

"I've seen hundreds of his surfboards and no two are alike," said Vito Cachia, a foot and ankle surgeon from San Juan Capistrano who owns seven Holdens. "Each board is the embodiment of his personal attention to that board and the person he was making it for. He put his heart and soul into every board he made."

Holden and his wife, Melanie, at Old Man's at San Onofre State SurfingBeach, where Holden's admirers erected a shrine of boards he had made for them, surprising him on his 75th birthday.

Besides being beautiful to look at, "fun" is the word that best describes how a Holden board surfs, Cachia said. "They're wave magnets."

Born in 1930 in Covington, Ky., Holden and his family moved to California in 1947. He started surfingat San Onofre in the 1950s right after he got out of the Marine Corp after having served in the Korean War. In 1955, while working for Glasspar Boats, he shaped his first board out of Styrofoam, using a foam flotation bun. While it surfed, the foam board broke easily and swelled in the sun. Looking around for a better wave tool, Holden found Dale Velzy who was selling his balsa wood boards for $87. Not wanting to spend that much money, Holden, a lifelong do-it-yourselfer, traded two tires that his father had recapped, for a blank. He shaped it on the beach of his favorite break, Old Man's, taking suggestions from old timers standing around.

Each surfboard was embossed with the fun-loving Holden logo.

After that first encounter, Holden and Velzy, who by the 1960s became one of the world's most prolific surfboard manufacturers, became life-long friends. Velzy died in 2005, also at the age of 77.

While attending Orange Coast College, Holden set up a board building operation in his dad's garage in Garden Grove. During the 1960s, he was shaping as many as eight long boards a day at his shop on Beach Boulevard.

According to his longtime friend, Steve Hammon of Mission Viejo, Holden wasn't motivated by money, but by quality and whether or not his creations pleased the recipients. While his contemporaries charged $600 to $800 for a board, Holden's price tags would read $300, though he'd put more than 20 hours into a project. In recent years, he often simply gave the boards away.

On his 50th birthday, Hammon received a black board "shiny like a Corvette" inscribed with RIP across the top. "He was a giver," Hammon said.

Cachia, too, received a gift from Holden on his 50th. Made of foam, palm, agave and redwood, Cachia said the board, which hangs in his office,is "absolutely beautiful. It is a token of friendship that I never have quite gotten over. I am so honored to have had him as a friend."

Embossed on each board is Holden's logo: four grinning gremlins racing towards the surf, boards in hand. His motto: "Everywhere…There's a Holden board" led to ads in Surfer magazine in which his boards would be pictured in a pit of crocodiles, in bed with a woman and atop a skyscraper, anywhere except in the ocean.

In the '70s when long boards gave way to shorter boards, business declined. For a time Holden manufactured boards and bras in Puerto Rico and developed a plastic wax package that could be closed tight after use, preventing surfboard wax from melting in the car glove box. Until he retried in 1992, Holden worked as a machinist for a print shop in Santa Ana.

A clever craftsman, Holden could make something out of what others considered junk. Before the Laguna fireof 1993 destroyed it, Holden's shop was an inverted skateboarding bowl that he lined with fiberglass,

In the '50s Holden and friends built the ultimate Baja vehicle, The Duck, an amphibious marine vehicle that they topped with a San Clemente school bus. The remains of the vehicle, which made countless surf safaris to remote Baja beaches, are currently rusting in the sands of Bahia de los Angeles on Baja's Sea of Cortez.

According to his son, Brad, of Mission Viejo, Holden was a "die hard Marine" who always wore his dog tags and a Marine Corp ring which he made out of gold he had panned near Sacramento.

Holden enjoyed a resurgence of appreciation in his work when in the late 80s long boards again became popular. He continued making boards for family and friends up until his passing.

"It's like sculpting," Holden said at last year's gathering of the legendary shapers at Sunset Beach. "It just gets into your blood."

Inside his shop on Canyon Acres where he lived with his wife, Melanie, for the past 30 years, Holden left his glasses on a partially shaped foam blank he planned to work on the following day. "He was just going away for a minute to eat chili and be with his son," Melanie said. "He worked everyday in his shop."

His wife, Melanie Ott Holden; his son, Brad, and daughter-inlaw, Shelly, of Mission Viejo; and two grandsons, Tyler and Cole, survive Holden.

Dates for a memorial service and paddle out have not yet been announced.