The Hobie Memorial Foundation is raising funds to construct a memorial honoring Hobie Alter’s life and his many contributions to the surfing, boating, and skateboarding industries. The Hobie Memorial Foundation Newsletter publishes fascinating historical accounts such as this one in every issue. In this excerpt, newsletter editor Donna Jost interviews Hobie Surf Shop owner Mark Christy about Hobie Alter, the self-taught engineer.
Hobie Alter was a truly once-in-a-generation self-taught engineer. Arguably one of the top 20 that America’s ever known. I can say that with a straight face. He just saw things in his head, like a golfer seeing the shot in his mind before he steps up and hits the ball. Hobie knew where the ball was going to go. He knew how that boat was going to sit in the water. He knew how it would balance. How do you do that?
He never did anything that wasn’t fun. He literally brought fun to the masses, and basically his stuff just worked better than the other guy’s. The Hobie Cat was superior to the Prindle or anything else he was kind of competing with at the time. You could beach it and you didn’t have to know anything about a Hobie surfboard or a Hobie Cat. They were as intuitive as Apple.
To this day, his surfboards are probably still the Cadillac. I mean, they’re still built in the same damn building they were originally built in. He was ahead of his time. He opened the first legit surf shop, and thank God Dick Metz came around to make it viable, because if you want to lose money, you should manufacture or sell surfboards. Dick figured out you could make more money selling four t-shirts than a $600 board.
Initially, they couldn’t keep up with the demand, though, but as they got better, they opened the factory on Domingo and were able to really start churning out boards 16-hours a day.
If he didn’t see the future, he’d figure out a way to create the future and make it fun.
Like the Hobie Hawk. They only made the Hawk for a few years, right? But it was kind of state of the art. When you see a Hobie Hawk for sale on eBay, they’re six/seven hundred dollars to buy one, and the people that advertise them say, “Nothing before or since has flown as well as this thing.”
When you watch someone who is really good at something, it’s just fun to watch, even if you don’t know exactly what they’re doing. They’re exceptional. The vast majority of people will go through life and never achieve or witness absolute greatness. I think Hobie was absolutely great. I think he was up there with a Steve Jobs, in a different way. Jobs was a business guy, although he had a design sense for pure form following function. I mean, there was Alexander Graham Bell, there was Henry Ford, and there was Hobie. The future has always belonged to the people who think outside the box.
Hobie never owned a box.
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