num_pages: 256
description: This large-format, premium-quality 256-page, hardcover book, with more than 250 photos spanning the legendary surfboard shaper's entire life and career, was written by former Surfer Magazine editor Paul Holmes after research that included hundreds of hours of interviews with Hawk himself and dozens of his friends, associates, co-workers and contemporaries. The book is more than just the story of Velzy's extraordinary and colorful life, but also that of the development of the entire surf lifestyle and industry. Dale Velzy's is a story set in a time and place where a combination of climate, geography, local aerospace industry materials and Hollywood's media machine made California and surfing virtually synonymous. Velzy didn't single-handedly invent the surf lifestyle and industry, but his pioneering work as a craftsman, his charismatic personality and his knack for sales and promotions did much to establish it. Known as "Hawk," Velzy cut a colorful figure along the Southern California coast in the late 1950s when he was "the world's largest manufacturer" of surfboards. With his diamond pinkie ring, big cigars and fast cars (including a "gullwing" Mercedes 300SL), he ran around with the Hollywood crowd and counted movie stars and moguls among his clients and friends. Velzy was the epitome of the maverick extreme boardsports entrepreneur-just 30 or 40 years ahead of his time. Velzy led multiple lives: as a great surfer and a fearless lifeguard; as a surf lifestyle pioneer and surfboard design innovator; as an avid Western horseman, occasional working cowboy and saddle maker; as a bow-hunter and marksman; as a hot-rodder and biker; as a gregarious socializer and barbecue wizard. Surfing and the surf industry as they exist today couldn't have developed without individuals as talented, determined, and downright unconventional as Dale Velzy. Through the prism of his extraordinary life, this book shows how it happened.
language: English
title: Dale Velzy is Hawk
titlecomplete: Dale Velzy is Hawk
ratings_count: 5
publisher: The Croul Family Foundation