BLANK MONDAY.(Gordon Clark's decision to shut down surfboard manufacturer Clark Foam in wake of foreign competition)

Gordon (Grubby) Clark did not invent the modern surfboard. It just began to seem that way, as the decades passed and his company, Clark Foam, of Laguna Niguel, California, founded in 1961, came to dominate the production of the polyurethane-foam "blank"--the lightweight alabaster core without which there would be no modern surfboard. For many people, Clark Foam and surfboards became conceptually inseparable. Clark's monopoly was estimated, as of last year, to cover ninety per cent of the American market and sixty per cent of the world market. The surfing press routinely described him as its industry's Bill Gates--or, because he was eccentric, reclusive, and rich, as surfing's Howard Hughes. In 2002, Surfer, the leading American surf magazine, published a list of the "25 Most Powerful People in Surfing." It put Clark at No. 2, behind Bob McKnight, the head of Quik-silver, a surfwear company. Clark hasn't granted an interview in more than thirty years, but the piece was accompanied by his photograph. It showed an older man in a Hawaiian-print shirt, with his face hidden by sunglasses, and two burly forearms, two big fists, and, directly in front of his eyes, two thick middle fingers raised at the camera.

When Clark, who is now seventy-three, started surfing, in the early nineteen-fifties, there were perhaps two hundred surfers in California. "We slept on the beach, drank wine, chased girls, ate abalone and lobster that we caught ourselves, worked some odd jobs, but mostly, if there were waves, we surfed," recalled Dick Metz, one of Clark's oldest friends and the first employee of Clark Foam. Today, the world's surf population is said to exceed twenty million. Although most surfers have never had much money, Clark single-mindedly built a company that's estimated to be worth as much as forty million dollars.

Then, on December 5, 2005, Clark, with no warning, faxed a seven-page letter to his customers announcing, "Effective immediately Clark Foam is ceasing production and sales of surfboard blanks." He alluded to run-ins with government regulators, primarily over the chemicals and equipment he used, and to claims filed against him by ex-employees or their survivors: "I may be looking at very large fines, civil lawsuits, and even time in prison." His equipment, most of which he had invented, could never, by definition, meet the government's standards, he wrote. Indeed, "for the majority of my equipment and process I am the 'standard.'" To Clark, this implied a limitless liability. In any case, he was done trying to satisfy the government. "When Clark Foam was started, it was a far different California," he wrote, and went on:

The only apology I will make to customers and employees is that I should have seen this coming many years sooner and closed years ago in a slower, more predictable manner. . . . My full-time efforts will be to extract myself from the mess that I have created for myself.

It was not entirely clear what he was talking about, even to industry experts. None of the relevant regulatory agencies were taking any known action against him. But Clark began dismantling his plant immediately and, soon afterward, destroying much of his irreplaceable equipment. He ordered his workers to smash his eighty-odd concrete master blank molds--all of them based on designs provided by the world's best shapers. (Shapers are the craftsmen who turn blanks into surfboards, ready for glassing.) Luis Barajas, who worked for Clark for thirty-two years and was his wood-mill foreman, told me, "Mr. Clark told us to cut up the glue presses, with torches." Clark seemed unable to watch, Barajas said, and he walked away. "It was hard for us, too." Surfers made pilgrimages to the concrete recycling plant where the broken molds were dumped--piled askew, like huge robbed caskets. A local shaper could still identify, for his companions, which molds had produced the blanks for boards that were ridden to world championships.

Rage and disbelief roiled the American surfboard business. Many shapers didn't know where their next blanks would come from. Glassers, sanders, and salespeople would all be unemployed; the price of boards would double. The age of the handmade board was over. Clark alone had been keeping the Chinese, and multinational corporations, out of surfing. Many surfers were convinced that they would now be riding clunky mass-produced plastic boards, waiting for somebody to rediscover how to blow foam as well as Clark had. How could an entire industry have relied on a single supplier? The cover of Surfer carried, instead of the usual colorful surf shot, a stark image of two white blanks, one unshaped and one shaped, against a black background, with the caption "This Changes Everything." December 5th became known as Blank Monday.

Clark got his start working as a laminator for Hobie Alter, who had been making balsa-wood-and-fibreglass boards in his parents' garage in Laguna Beach since he was a teen-ager. In 1954, Alter opened Hobie Surfboards, one of the first surf shops, along a quiet stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway a few miles south of Laguna. He hired Clark about three years later. Clark and Alter were devoted surfers, but they also shared a certain intensity on land. "Most of us seemed to take a long time to grow up," ...