Early spring, late afternoon on the North Shore, and unseasonably solid, groomed groundswell is lurching on the boil at Pinballs inside Waimea as I round the corner, heading to Sunset Beach.
Pulling off along the side of Kam Highway, I watch big, wide blue walls march across the point out of the northwest, their faces whipped and lifted tall by stiff offshore trades. With a six-pack of Guinness tucked beneath my arm as instructed, I frogger south across traffic. It never feels good turning your back on waves, but the invitation I’ve received is rarer than the surf out front.
“They say he’s the best glasser in the world,” Owl Chapman tells me. “And they’re probably right.”
“His color work—his tints, his pigments—they’re flawless,” says Dennis Pang. “Rich, vibrant. He has such a great eye. His laps are perfect—how he flairs out the nose and tail when he tapes them off. If he’s glassing on fins—either thrusters, which no one ever does anymore, or single-fins—his fillets are impeccable. Not a bubble. His pin lines are incredible. He can do double, triple pin lines, which are so fucking hard. No one does that shit anymore. He’s number one. His glass jobs are what every laminator strives for but can’t achieve.”
His name is Jack Reeves, and for the last 50-plus years he’s been here on the North Shore, quietly building his reputation as a resin and fiberglass guru and Dick Brewer’s most trusted and consistent collaborator. When Brewer kicked out in March 2022, at the age of 85, it marked the end of one of surfboard design’s greatest underground duos. I’m here to understand how the whole Brewer-Reeves thing came about, and how in 1970 a 20-year-old moved from Florida to the North Shore and became one of the most, if not the most respected laminators in the history of the surfboard.
Slipping through a tall, heavy wooden gate half a block off the highway, I pass a rusting ’80s Volvo wagon sitting in front of a pile of sheets of kaleidoscopically swirled broken fiberglass pulled from the floor of Reeves’ shop. A sunburned Brewer gun stands against the entryway of a thoroughly patinated forest-green shack.
I knock—not so loud as to startle, just enough to be heard over the conservative talk radio droning inside. The door cracks open, and I’m met by bright-blue eyes magnified by two pairs of readers resting atop a substantially well-worn respirator mask.
Stepping across the threshold, I’m hit with stale air, heavy resin fumes, and the colorful, organized chaos Reeves has amassed over the three decades that his underground resin-and-fiberglass studio has occupied this backyard. “These racks are 40 years old,” he tells me through his respirator. “They’re termite-eaten and sagging a bit, but the wood has been around forever. It just gets moved. I’ve been in this 1-mile stretch ever since I left Haleiwa.”
Curing on his glassing racks or stacked along the wall, waiting for sanding, are gorgeous, richly tinted Owl Chapmans and Pat Rawsons. Dozens of Reeves’ personal boards rest throughout the shop, covered in weathered Dixie cups and raw chunks of resin striped with the sprawling range of his color work. I take a spot in the corner to observe him cross-stepping slowly in cargo shorts and military-spec work boots that are mummified in masking tape and resin drippings.
Reeves is cutting the laps on one of the Chapmans before the resin cures too much, his fingers holding a razor blade impossibly steadily, trimming freehand, as true as any jig. He pinches and pulls back the blue tape for the board’s big reveal, then drops his respirator to his chest, his face breaking into a broad, open smile.
•
Reeves’ father was a Navy man, stationed on Oahu from 1958 until 1962. Reeves and his older brother, Bob, got into surfing at Barbers Point and around Waikiki, learning how to work with fiberglass and resin by repairing their own boards. When the family packed up and relocated to South Florida in 1963, they thought their surfing days were over.
“I learned the basics of ding repair the last year we were in Hawaii, and then we moved,” Reeves says. “Thinking there was no surf in Florida, we sold our surfboards. When we got there, lo and behold, there were waves, and we met a bunch of the local surfers and got into it. I was patching dings for my school buddies, and I ended up getting a gig at a sporting-goods store patching dings. Within months, the owner had us gluing up blanks and building boards. This was, like, 1964.”
Reeves lucked into meeting Graham Jahelka, at the time one of the most respected board builders on the East Coast, famous for his unrivaled gloss and polish finishes and his detail work. “Graham taught me everything I know,” Reeves says. “In those days, all the color work was done in the gloss, with pigments—a lot of stripes and solid-color boards, pin lines. He taught me every technique that I still use today [in] laminating.”
Eventually, Reeves and his brother headed north, as Melbourne, Indialantic, and Brevard County quickly became performance and industry hubs for the East Coast, home to guys like Dick Catri and Larry Pope and a regular stop for traveling surfers and board builders like Jim Phillips and Johnny Rice. By 1968, Reeves’ brother had a label going with a friend named Bob Tomb. Together, they formed Tomb and Reeves. Before long, Jack was in the mix with the best of them, building a few hundred boards a year.
“They were building the most beautiful boards already back then,” fellow Floridian, master laminator, and board builder Juan Rodriguez tells me. “Just perfect laps and color work, as good as anything coming out of California.”
Shortly after the Army Corps of Engineers’ construction of the jetty and fishing pier on the north side of the Indian River, Reeves got in on some of the first surfs at Sebastian Inlet. Those early sessions gathered some of Florida’s best. “I got arrested in probably 1969, surfing Sebastian with Jack,” Rodriguez tells me. “Thrown in jail in Indialantic, soaking wet.”
“That was right when it was first discovered,” Reeves recalls. “After they built the jetty, but when it was still illegal to surf near it.”
By far the best and most consistent wave that anyone had ever seen on the East Coast, Sebastian was very much a secret, and heavily localized. But when Jeff Hakman, Bill Fury, and Gary “Chappy” Chapman (Owl’s playboy older brother, one of the era’s most underrated and influential talents) showed up, they were shown the goods. The three found themselves caught up in the whole Central Florida scene, enjoying the warm, punchy wedges, loose youth lifestyle, and tanned coeds flocking to the beaches from the dozens of nearby colleges.
“My brother made it all happen,” Owl tells me. “Him and Hakman were hanging out in Florida, surfing and partying, and they really hit it off with Jack and that crew.”
“Hakman told me, ‘Hey, if you ever make it to Hawaii, look me up and we’ll set you up,’” Reeves says. “We drove cross-country, headed to California, then Hawaii. I got off the plane in Honolulu and a guy named Bill ‘the Professor’ Taylor, who would become a really good friend, picked me up and took me to a free concert at Kapiolani Park, then dropped me at Hakman’s. I knocked on the door, just, ‘I’m here!’”
Of course, Reeves knew better than to show up empty-handed.
“I brought over two blanks I got from Diff [Mike Diffenderfer] in California,” he says, “which were like gold at the time because good blanks were hard to come by out here. Diffenderfer was the guy then. People really liked his designs. Hakman got one, and Danny Calohan shaped me a 7’6″ out of the other one. I glassed them, and that started it all.”
•
Landing on the North Shore during the winter of 1970, Reeves immediately started glassing boards for Calohan and Jim Turner’s Plastic Fantastic, with other shapers quickly arriving to tap his talent. At the time, the North Shore board-building scene was scattered all over the countryside, with shapers and glassers working out of Quonset huts that had been retired from the nearby military bases. Reeves’ first shop was on the Haleiwa strip.
“This was when Brewer was still on Kauai,” he says. “I started working for Plastic Fantastic, and that evolved into me taking over the shop. I bought the whole shop out for, like, $300. I still have a roll of cloth that came from that shop, in 1972 or 1973. When Dick came over, I was glassing in the showroom, on the main drag in Haleiwa, partitioned off from the retail shop.
“For a short period of time, we were doing Surf Line Hawaii, Downings—Reno [Abellira] was bringing me boards. Owl was starting to shape then, Lightning Bolts, which was still pretty young. I just had a glass shop. Back in those days, we’d do at least 20 a week, and this was before sanded finishes came along. They were all glass-on fins, probably 60 percent of them had color, and this was also before airbrushing came along.”
Reeves cuts the laps with a razor blade, trimming freehand, as true as any jig. Then he pinches and pulls back the tape for the board’s big reveal.
Looking around Reeves’ shop, there are relics from that era scattered everywhere, tucked in corners, buried by years of fiberglass dust. But of the dozens and dozens of world-class board builders who have leaned on Reeves to match their craftsmanship with his color work, it’s obvious who his most cherished comrade has been, evidenced in Reeves’ collection of personal Brewer guns. There are boards from every decade of their working relationship—refined single-fins comprising ’80s and ’90s Clark Foam, and a handful of jaw-droppingly beautiful solid and chambered balsa riders, all tuned through the years to Reeves’ preferred wave range: Sunset Beach, big, clean, and blue.
“When I first got here,” Reeves says, “we surfed everywhere, driving from Haleiwa to Velzyland looking for the best spot. Over the years, it whittled down to a few waves, and finally it became just Sunset.”
“Jack is a very proficient surfer,” Owl says. “Always has been. Great bottom turn.”
“Jack and Brewer had just a wonderful relationship,” Dennis Pang adds. “I remember Jack telling me, ‘I’m a Brewer guy forever. A lifer.’”
“I’ve always been a Brewer guy,” Reeves confirms. “I met him through Gary [Chapman]. Brewer made me a board, and I actually rejected it because it had a twist in it. He said it was a bad blank, but it was actually a really nice board. It ended up going to Maui. John Severson got it, and supposedly he just ripped it.
“The scene back then was still pretty primitive. All the resin barrels were out on the street. It was real Country then. I was just so excited to be getting boards from the best shapers in the world, in my little glass shop. I did boards for Diffenderfer, Rawson, Lopez, Parrish—a little of this, a little of that. I was really concentrating on lightness back then. Small laps, thin hot coats, spruce stringers, and the foam was so good that they held up. Clark Foam was the best.
“Brewer moved around, shaped all over. There were a couple shaping rooms at the shop when Dick came back here in ’72 or ’73. He shaped me that red board there in ’73—my first Brewer gun. After that, I was Brewer all the way through. I certainly didn’t do all of Brewer’s boards—other glassers came through—but I always glassed his boards when he asked me to, no matter what. There’s one back there that says ‘Brewer-Reeves #1’ that wasn’t even for me. That was Brewer. He would just write stuff like that, and he meant we were number one.”
•
Reeves tells me to hop in his Volvo for the short drive up the hill to the home he and his wife bought in the 1990s, with a panoramic view overlooking Sunset Beach. After years in Haleiwa running a proper production operation—sometimes glassing upward of a couple hundred boards a week throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s—Reeves bailed, looking for a little less pressure and more time.
“I went underground, and I’ve been that way since,” he says. “I had a killer shop at Rocky Point for a while, then I got this spot in the early ’90s, and I’ve been here ever since.”
Until recently, Reeves would walk the few hundred or so yards from his home to his workshop, but his knees aren’t what they used to be, so he saves his steps for the laminating room.
Immediately upon entering his downstairs unit, I’m confronted by a massive collection of, well, all sorts of shit. “I was a swap-meet guy forever,” he admits, looking around at it all—vintage golf clubs (10 sets within eyeshot), piles of stereo systems, other audio equipment.
On racks buried under blankets, old beach towels, and tattered posters sits perhaps the most ridiculous cache of priceless pieces of surf history in his collection: Brewer after Brewer after Brewer, handshaped replicas of Surfboards Hawaii Buzzy Trents, a Hobie-Brewer gun, a Bing-Brewer Pipeliner, et cetera. More balsa guns are stacked on top of one another, or in racks on the wall, perfect specimens of some of Brewer’s myriad original contributions to the development of the modern surfboard. A black-and-white photo of Brewer in his Kauai shaping bay sits over the doorway.
“You look at my boards and they’re all relics from the past, even though it wasn’t that long ago,” Reeves says.
Over their decades working together, Brewer had his fair share of ups and downs, periods of prolific versus arrested productivity. Through it all, Reeves never missed an opportunity to grab a shaped Brewer blank, or to swap a finished board in exchange for forgetting about some past-due invoices.
“I don’t care what anyone says—he has the most incredible surfboard collection,” Pang tells me when I ask if he’s seen Reeves’ personal stash. “Boards with real history, for real waves, for the North Shore. He glassed all of them. Buzzy Trent, Jose Angel, Buffalo Keaulana, all the hotshot big-wave surfers—his hands have touched all the legends’ boards. He did it all right: a simple life, middle class, not homeless like some guys we know. And he’s got his beautiful creations all around.”
“Jack has been doing this for north of half a century, and his work stands alone,” says Roger Hinds, one of the most respected start-to-finish old-guard members still operating at a high level. “When I first got here, in the early 1970s, his name was at the top of the list with all the best guys, and we all wanted to be able to do that level of work.
“He’s never compromised, and he’s such an artist. Each board has its own personality, and the best glassers can fix blemishes, hiding them and dealing with the intricate little things that come up in the procedure. Everyone has their recipes—this much of this, this much of that, knowing how the foam’s density is going to change the color, or the brand of blank. Any board of his from his entire career has that same quality. That’s why Owl and Dick and the best guys searched him out. Everyone should learn a lesson from that.”
“Jack Reeves is a samurai sword maker for the gnarliest samurais on the planet,” says Alex “Superwolf” Villalobos, one of today’s most sought-out laminators, known for his own rich color work and attention to detail. “You wouldn’t want to get your samurai sword from some widget maker, or a ‘Swords 4 Less’-type place. There’s no connection, knowledge, or soul poured into that, unless it’s a lifelong craftsman making it, like Jack. He knows what’s gonna happen to all the boards he’s glassing, and how the guys want and need them.”
Reeves laughs when I ask him what it’s been like being surrounded by all these larger-than-life characters all these years. “It’s been entertaining,” he says. “A lot of different personalities, a lot of different eras.”
•
Reeves invites me to come by in a few days to finish our chat. When I arrive, the door is open and he’s kicking around the back of the shop, which has been cleared out slightly since my last visit, save for two new additions laid out on the racks: nearly identical balsa guns, with matching wooden noseblock and tailblock wedges. “Nothing goes downhill like wood,” Reeves says. “Brewer used to charge me to shape a balsa the same as if it was foam. I was getting them because the getting was good.”
He points out one of his balsa riders on a rack off to the side. “That board right there is probably one of the finest surfboards ever made. They don’t break. All my foam boards are broken; all the wood ones are intact.
I’ve heard tales of them breaking. Owl broke one, but it was super hollowed out. Balsa is three times as dense as foam. Real light wood will dent—anything dents—but not like foam. You want to keep them light. Four-ounce bottom, 6/4 deck. Most people would think you’d be putting on 10-ounce volan.”
Listening to him, I’m suddenly aware of exactly what I’m looking at: the last Brewer guns Reeves will ever glass—and the end of the Brewer-Reeves line.
“I don’t know how many foam boards he shaped the last few years, but I glassed those a while ago,” Reeves says. “These are definitely the last ones. Dick roughed them out and shaped them probably two years ago, and Jim Yarborough finished them. Nobody was pressuring me to do it, but the land sold where Dick’s shaping room was on Kauai, so it was time to get them. These are for Dick’s wife. I don’t know what she’s going to do with them. They’re surprisingly good. I never really looked at them that closely. I thought they were 7’10″s or 7’8″s or something, but they’re 10-foot-plus guns, and single-fins. I made them custom wood fins. So they’re gonna be nice. They’re light.”
Reeves pulls out a stack of Brewer’s iconic lei laminates from over the years, originally hand-drawn by Jericho Poppler, deciding which these last two deserve. Then he grabs a pencil and inscribes “JR” on both blanks. He lets me hang in the corner as he applies a first filler coat, sealing the wood to keep the porous blank from soaking up all the resin when wetting out the cloth.
Reeves will spend the next week going through the dozens of steps balsas require to be laminated properly, foiling the custom book-matched wood fins, and finish-glassing the last RBs that will ever come through his Sunset shop. I ask how it feels holding these last Brewers, looking back on it all.
“I had all the work I could do, with the best shapers, and that’s how I stuck with it,” Reeves says.
“It wasn’t really a plan—it’s just how it worked out. Now, I’m close to home and still have all the work I need. I’m living the dream—that’s what they tell me.”
