blind stitching
Like the fashion world, surf wear shows to buyers months in advance of the season. For the past three days, Tim McKevlin, owner of McKevlin’s Surf Shop on Folly Beach, and two of his buyers have been at the Orlando Surf Expo exploring products such as bathing suits, shorts and t-shirts, surfboards, repair tools and materials, fins, traction, leashes and accessories. The bigger companies will have shown Tim holiday wear for next year. Smaller companies will show spring and summer. The amount of product available is immense compared to what was offered back in the 1970’s when Tim first started going with his father to buy for the shop. The vast amount of categories of product include items that appeal to tourists, and resort wear. Even Wrangler and Izod are there now. In the past shows and company displays were smaller, more humble. Today companies spend a lot to impress clients at shows, including waterfalls and splash pools.
One of the products being closely looked for are apoxy surfboards made by a company who is known to be strong in this respect. He has a few in now, Lost and Channel Islands brands, but plans to diversify this year and pick up a couple of new brands. Thirty years ago the shop carried apoxy boards but they tended to fall apart back then. The process and materials have improved and now there are good companies making apoxy boards and Tim is slowly bringing them in.
When it comes to wetsuits at McKevlin’s, fit is king. That is what they look for when buying. The shop currently carries O’Neal and Ripcurl. In the early 1970’s there were only two choices, long and short sleeved and as there were only two places in the Charleston area which sold wetsuits, McKevlin’s being one of them, they would go quickly. If a suit came in that was new and different it would sell fast. In the 1980’s bright, neon colors were big and large companies began selling to everyone so the beach was dotted with them. Companies have come to carry a broad range of suits the result being there is something for everyone, price and fit wise. Prices today range from $150.00-$500.00, the upper range of cost featuring the more stretchy lighter neoprene material with seam taping. Top of the line sealed suits are blind stitched which really keeps water out. As many people know wetsuit technology has come such a long way that in cold weather you can dump warm water down your suit before going out to keep you warmer in the water and it won’t leak out. People are surfing up in the cold waters of Washington State and Oregan now whereas years ago that wasn’t a possibility.
The years 1962-1963 were probably not too different on Folly Beach, SC than they were on Rehoboth Beach, DE where I spent summers. In both towns the news about surfing came in on Air Force planes to local bases soon to become new homes to military personnel from CA. The teenage children of these personnel, and young airmen themselves, spread the tales of this exhilarating, new-old fashion of making way through the surf. Like wildfire the sport ignited and caught on. Every kid within fifty miles was talking about it and McKevlin’s Surf Shop was born.
As a camper at a wilderness camp on the Delaware Bay, I had front row access to the new craze and later to the boards themselves. On breaks in the early 60’s the waterfront crew and counselors made up of sixteen, seventeen and eighteen-year-olds would take the two wood longboards into the ocean surf at Rehoboth and we would watch from the sand in encapsulated awe as they stood up, stood up!, and glided home until the surf no longer allowed them or they wiped out altogether. Ten years later, as counselors, we too would surf, to varying degrees of success. In 1997, my last year at the summer camp, I was offered one of the old wood longboards by the caretaker and reluctantly declined as the top of my car was already piled high with luggage before heading back to Atlanta. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think of that board, a nostalgia that I saw in the eyes of Tim McKevlin, owner of McKevlin’s Surf Shop during a recent interview on Folly Beach.
I asked Tim where the surfing and surf business all started with his family and he told me that he and his brother Ted and the other Folly kids used to look up to the California surfers who flew into N. Charleston with the Air Force. They would bring their boards down to Folly and surf and spread the word through teaching the locals. For Tim it started in the fall of 1965 when he was eight-years-old. In the back end of the bowling facility that his father and uncle owned on the beach his father ordered and stocked Con brand surfboards, known for their fine quality, out of Santa Monica. The McKevlins would buy large blocks of paraffin wax and cut it themselves, selling it locally. The era of popular bowling was waning in the early 1960’s and Tim’s dad could see that surfing was the next big thing. The back room of the bowling alley soon also found a demand for sandwiches and surf clothes, becoming basically “a room with a book catalog” as a start. For entertainment they cut a hole in the ground and stretched a taut tarp over it making a jumping venue at 10 cents per minute. Tim’s brother Ted was nine years older and started surfing, along with some of his friends. A local band calling themselves the Pendletons helped to spread the word. “When they would perform, the Pendletons would place surfboards on the stage behind them. Soon they were performing in Florida, telling the locals there that they surfed in South Carolina,” Tim told me. At 17 or 18-years-old Tim said he became more interested and involved in the surf business alongside music and playing the drums. By the late 1960’s some surfboard companies were coming out with clothing lines, simple though they were, initially not much more than a t-shirt with their logos according to Tim. Hang Ten with their bare feet logo was one of the first. By the mid-seventies the industry became more complicated with a wider selection of product and “baggies,” high-waisted trousers, were sold by most surfboard companies (see photo) and worn by surfers and then other boys as the fad spread. Tim began accompanying his father on buying trips to Surf Expos, first to Melbourne Beach, FL and two years later to Kissimmee and Daytona, always on the look-out for something individualized and different to sell in the McKevlins’ growing surf business back on Folly Beach.
Catch the following segment on Saturday, January 16th
