ABOVE: Dozens of longtime surfers gathered last month for the opening of the Surfing Florida Museum at its new home in West Palm Beach. BELOW: A hand-crafted board by Nomad Surf Shop legend Ron Heavyside is part of the collection. The museum is open noon to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
If you arrived at the grand opening celebration early, hoping to beat the crowd, you were disappointed.
The crowd had already beaten you.
The latest incarnation of the Surfing Florida Museum opened its doors at 4 p.m. on May 2, and by 4:30 the place was packed.
Filling the 9,200 square feet at 7623 S. Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, old surfers, young surfers, and friends of surfing squeezed past each other for a better look at all those awesome photographs, the surfboards, the skateboards, the history of a sport that has inspired more great popular music than baseball, basketball and pickleball combined.
And the museum doors opened that day all because of a letter carrier called Mr. Gruber, and a shipwreck.
‘The ship’ was a magnet
On Sept. 8, 1965, a Category 3 hurricane dubbed Betsy made landfall in the Florida Keys, and outer bands battered Palm Beach County with 80-mph winds and 20-foot waves.
The Amaryllis, a Greek banana freighter, was heading for cover in the Palm Beach Inlet when Betsy’s massive swells shoved it ashore onto Singer Island, about a mile north of the inlet.
Betsy passed, but the Amaryllis stayed.
This was bad news for the crew of the 450-foot, 7,200-ton freighter, but very good news for surfers.
The stuck ship was now a breaking point, turning the waves at an angle rather than horizontally as they came ashore. Angled waves, better surfing.
“A few days later, a friend and I climbed up and got on the ship,” remembers Fred Salmon. “All these Greek sailors were running around and acting crazy, and they made us get off. The captain was a great big fat guy who thought the ship was gonna tip over.”
Salmon is 75 today and the chairman of the museum board. He was 14 then. Arriving on Singer Island two years earlier from upstate New York, he had graduated from skateboards to surfing with some encouragement from Beach Boys albums.
To local surfers, the Amaryllis was simply “the ship,” and word soon spread of the perfect surfing spot it had created.
“People came from all over the country to see that ship,” Salmon recalls. “In those days, you could park anywhere. I counted 250 boards in the water one day.”
Actually, 250 boards and a letter carrier named Marion Edward Gruber, grandson of a former West Palm Beach mayor and, more important, an amateur photographer.
M.E. Gruber was 41 when the Amaryllis wrecked.
“We kids all called him Mr. Gruber,” Salmon says. “He was an amateur photographer, but he used high-class equipment for the time.”
Mr. Gruber had come to photograph the ship. He wound up photographing the surfers, first off Singer Island, and then up and down the coast from Lake Worth to Jacksonville.
When he died at 83 on July 30, 2007, Mr. Gruber left behind an archive of about 5,000 surfing slides he’d photographed between 1965 and 1972.
Fred Salmon gave the eulogy at his funeral.
“He said he’d leave the archive to me in his will, which he didn’t do, but I had a letter where he said, ‘Good luck with your local history project.’”
Salmon contacted Mr. Gruber’s sister in Fort Worth, who agreed to give him the images if he formed a nonprofit organization.
James Stecki stands next to newspaper clippings in the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post about his younger self.
Salmon brought on fellow surfers Tom Warnke, Corky Roche and Bill Keeton, and the Palm Beach County Surfing History Project Inc. was born.
The first of more than 40 surfing photo exhibits debuted at the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties in May 2009.
In 2014, the history project begat the Surfing Florida Museum, first at a gallery at 255 NE Sixth Ave. in Delray Beach.
In 2016, the museum moved to Park Avenue in Lake Park, and in 2018 to a warehouse in Grandview Heights.
The collection went into storage for two years during the pandemic, and then, at 4 p.m. on May 2, this newer, bigger Surfing Florida Museum arrived in the Palm Coast Plaza.
By 6:30, 523 people had come through the door.
Memorabilia dating to 1919
Now here we are, all these people ogling 80 panels celebrating surfing in seven Florida districts with 900 photographs donated by 100 photographers, historic panels, films, a library, a performing space, oral histories, countless memorabilia.
Here’s the large panel honoring the town of Lantana.
“Few places have produced as many champion surfers per capita as Lantana.” And that includes Caroline Marks, a 10-time national champion who spent her early years on Hypoluxo Island and, in 2024, won a gold medal in the Olympics.
Here’s a 1919 photograph of surfers by the long-gone Breakers hotel pier, the oldest known photo of surfing in Florida.
Here’s “Simmons Spoon,” a 10-foot-6-inch balsa wood board shipped from Hawaii in 1947 and believed to be the oldest board in Palm Beach County.
Here’s Jimmy Buffett’s board, autographed and donated.
Here’s the original logo for the Nomad Surf Shop from the early 1970s.
A bumper sticker campaign was critical to keeping surfer access in the town of Palm Beach in 1970.
And here’s a bumper sticker boasting “I Gave To Save Surfing,” a humble reminder of the time Palm Beach tried to ban the sport.
A surfer named Bruce Carter sued, a future mayor of West Palm Beach named Joel Daves defended the surfers, and on July 1, 1970, state Supreme Court Justice Joseph Boyd Jr. wrote:
“The Town of Palm Beach may regulate and control surfing and skimming in areas subject to its jurisdiction and may prohibit these activities at certain places along the beach. However, the complete prohibition of this sport from all the beach area is arbitrary and unreasonable.”
Surfers still catch waves off Palm Beach.
Father and son champions
The museum brought the exhibits. The visitors brought the memories. But trying to explain the joy of surfing to those who don’t is never easy.
“I always say it’s a bath for your brain,” says Warnke, 77, the museum’s executive director. “With yoga and meditation, they always say you have to be in the here and now, but when you’re surfing you have to be in the here and now. If you’re thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner, you’re going to fall off.”
Not far away, the man standing in front of a giant photograph of Surfer magazine is also the man on the cover of the magazine.
Scott McCranels and Jimmy Johnson chat in front of a photo where the teenage McCranels is visible second from the left.
Dr. Scott McCranels, a local orthodontist, is a member of the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame.
He and his late father, the orthodontist John McCranels, are the only father-and-son duo in the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame.
“Only a surfer knows the feeling,” he says. “It’s just you on that sloping wave. Gravity and your balance are doing all the work.”
Scotty “Frog” Miller, 68, surfed the Amaryllis as a boy.
“You’re on your own,” he explains. “In team sports, you’re only as good as the team, but in surfing, you can be as good as your skill allows.”
Does he still surf?
“Oh, no,” he says. “My shoulders are toast. That’s what happens when you paddle a million miles in your life, and I was also a pool plasterer. The last thing I rode was a hydrofoil, because I could get pulled by a rope.
“But I wish I still had every board I ever owned.”
Vivid memories
The Amaryllis remained aground on Singer Island until Aug. 22, 1968, when the Army Corps of Engineers towed the remains three-quarters of a mile offshore and sank them in 85 feet of water to create an artificial reef.
The boys and girls who surfed the ship are old men and women now, some with bad shoulders, but all with sweet, vivid memories.
On a wall at the Surfing Florida Museum is a large photograph of a surfing competition held at the ship in 1966. A surfboard placed on two chairs holds 10 trophies, with that day’s 10 winners standing proudly behind.
At the museum’s grand opening, an old surfer named Ed McCoy, 76, pointed at the third teenager from the left. “That’s me.”
And the girl standing beside him.
“And that’s Jerrie. I was 17, and Jerrie was also 17, and this photo was taken the day we met. She offered me a ride home to Lake Worth.”
He smiled at the memory.
“She’s in her red 1965 Mustang convertible with our boards in the back, all sunburned, and she bought me a meal at the Royal Castle on Forest Hill Boulevard.
“It was like meeting an angel.
“She passed a year ago,” he said. “We were married for 58 years and 10 months.”
Ed McCoy with a photo from a surfing competition in 1966 that includes him, third from left, as a teen. Photo by Mary Burns
If You Go
What: Surfing Florida Museum
Where: 7623 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach
Hours: Noon-4 p.m. Friday-Sunday
Admission: Free, but a $5 donation is requested
Info: 561-236-0155; surfingfloridamuseum.org
Also: An exhibit titled ’Surfing History’ will open on June 22 at the Richard & Pat Johnson Palm Beach County History Museum, 300 N. Dixie Highway, and run through Oct. 31. An opening reception at 5:30 p.m. June 24 is free to the public.
Comments