The founders of Surf Research: big nosed, big ego, big ambition, big talent, champions, college educated, they were ready to take over the world. Instead they took the next wave for parts unknown.
Still ‘searching, Rusty, Garth, Mike. |
Surf Research was the 1966 brainchild of Rusty Miller, Garth Murphy, Mike Doyle and Don Hansen, who set up shop across the street from Hansen’s Surfboards in Encinitas, CA. The company was conceived as a clearing house for every surfing invention they could perfect, Doyle being the primary inventor, Rusty the salesman and Garth running the office with Hansen putting up money and stability. Doyle invented surf wax called Waxmate, a nonskid deck Spray called Spraymate, surfboard racks with locks, stretch surf shorts called Baggies, bikinis for surfing, a healthy cereal called New Food, wetsuits and patch kits. Bill Engler and then John Dahl, current Wax Research-Sticky Bumps owner, joined the party and ran the waxworks. Local surfers Cindy and Kathy Lienhardt kept things together.
Hansen soon got fed up with the marginal work ethic and mescaline trance factory hours of his partners and traded his share to Fred Ryan for the Ocean Pacific Surfboard brand, then took that company to economic dominance with Jim Jenks, his surfshop manager at the helm. Surf Research was an industry leader for four years, until the founders got bored with manufacturing and dispersed to the beckoning remote points of the globe, leaving Surf Research to wither in Fred ‘The Chief’ Ryan’s guitar caloused hands.
John Dahl’s Sticky Bumps surfwax business survived SR’s slow death and still thrives, using science and high quality manufacturing techniques to deliver advanced surfing accessories to surf shops, the original goal. Rusty and Garth are jack o’ trades and musician/writers. Mike became an artist and invented the single ski, the soft surfboard and the flexi lifeguard rescue tube. Bill Engler is the most successful aquaculturist in the western US, delivering his live tilapia, grown clean in hi-tech science-lab swirling circular ponds, to happy fish eaters up and down the coast…and taking pressure off the fished-out California waters. Everyone surfs better than they did in the sixties. Fred is dead, RIP. |
