OCEAN CITY — The Ocean City Historical Museum is adding another important aspect of Ocean City’s history that goes back further than many people may realize — surfing.
The display, which will be in the back part of the museum, should be ready by summer.
“People think it started in the ’70s,” said John Loeper, who got hooked on surfing as a kid on the island in the 1950s. Hawaiian surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku brought surfing to Ocean City, and the East Coast, in 1912.
Loeper, who is president of the Board of Directors of the Historical Museum in the Ocean City Community Center, learned how to surf from Ocean City’s legendary lifeguard and surfer John Carey, who won the National Lifeguard Overall Championship in 1934 and the National Surfboard Rescue title in 1936, according to the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame.
Carey and Don Pileggi started the first competitive surfing program on the East Coast in the 1960s — the Ocean City Surfing Association, which was one of the first in the United States.
Loeper said surfing was so big in the resort that there were 14 surf shops on the island at one point, including the first, Surfers Supplies, which still exists at 31st Street and Asbury Avenue.
“People don’t realize that is a huge part of our culture here and we’re going to get it all set up. It’s going to be unique. We’re calling on the surfing community to come forward with what we’ll need,” he said, which should include as many as 20 boards and other surfing paraphernalia.
He talked about one board that has been donated.
“I had to take it down to Surfers Supplies that cleaned it up. It’s a beat board. It’s not some beautiful antique. It’s a board that was ridden hard and put away underneath whatever,” he said. “I had it cleaned up.”
The museum has the whole history of that board, one of 60 made and shaped locally.
“That’s what we’re doing. We’re grabbing the history on all of these boards,” he said, citing another one coming to the collection, a Gordon and Smith donated by a former Ocean City Beach Patrol lifeguard.
“I’m passionate about old surfing,” Loeper said. “John Carey taught us how to surf (around 1959) and there are only five of us left. It was John Carey, Pete Schwenk, Dr. Schwab and Bob Harbaugh. I was just a little kid and my parents knew John Carey.
“I used to go up there on my bicycle and hang out and one day John said, ‘Why don’t you take my board? Try it.’ It was a big board. It was like being on an ocean liner. And I loved it. I said, ‘I have to buy a surfboard.’”
A few years later George Gerlach opened Surfers Supplies “and that’s where it all blossomed from.”
Loeper recalled working as a teenager at the old Gillian’s Fun Deck for the summer and saving his money. Carey hooked him up with a doctor, whose name he can’t remember, but who knew Bunger surfboards in Long Island, N.Y. “They arranged to have a surfboard made and brought down for me,” he said. “I surfed the end of that summer and I’ve been surfing ever since.”
There will be more than surfboards in the museum display.
“We’re also going to do oral history on the people that are from way back, starting with Bob Harbaugh,” one of the original local surfers, he said, and then moving onto people including Mike Monroe and Wayne Blizzard. “All these guys who are still around, but they’re going quickly.”
The museum is gathering old photographs and has some old 8mm and 16mm films. They plan to set them up with QR codes so people can watch them on their phones and see what surfing back in the day looked like.
Loeper noted that at some point if someone decides to start a surfing museum on the island, what the museum collects will be transferred there. He believes Ocean City has been losing too much of its historic surfing artifacts to a small surfing museum in Tuckerton because there hasn’t been a museum here, even though the idea has been bandied about for years.
“It’s all getting moved up there and we’re losing it. You know, every year we lose more and more of our history,” Loeper said. “We want to preserve it and keep it here. That’s going to be exciting.”
Loeper is planning a meeting in a couple of weeks and wants to get as many older surfers involved as possible with a big push for surfing memorabilia. He is asking for people to contact him at (609) 602-0753 or by email at sjlkeeper@yahoo.com.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
