Hey everyone,
It's April 11th already and I've been in California way to long. The tee shirt business just has way to much going on right now to leave. We have been in contact with Quantico and have a bunch of Marine Corp samples heading their way, everyone keep your fingers crossed, oh and be sure to view them on our web page www.coldforgedusa.com there's a bunch of new Marine Corps graphics going up in a few days.
I'm attaching a letter I got from on old friend from the past who found me through the internet, really amazing. He had one of the very first surf shops I did business with back in the early seventies. Great talking with him again, so here it is hope everone enjoys it as much as I did.
"Michael... thanks to your site, and Rick Houle from Hammer Graphics finding it, Dan Little has been found! Wow... this is better than Facebook because it comes with an ocean breeze! I went to the site Rick listed and within a coupe of days Dan was online! He's doing great in every possible way and he related a story to me that lit me up! It's the stuff of true surf lore! Now remember this was a long time ago. The revolution was on in shortboards and I needed a psychedelic logo for Surfboards America. I had just found his company. Some of the rice paper back then was like clear cardboard! (It was so stiff it would cause the glass to pull away from the foam as it straightened up. Guys back then would lay a logo under the lam, cover it with wax paper and put a brick on it til it dried.). Dan was one of the largest high production shirt screeners in the country. I came to him with a concept and an order for decals and probably four dozen shirts (he must have been amused at this little surf rat standing before him!). He wrote: "I remember the rice paper decals we printed, I finally got it down and was doing quite a few of them for a lot of surfshops, which brought me in contact with Hang Ten who introduced me to this little start up surf company called Ocean Pacific who I believed in, and signed an exclusive deal to make their shirts. Well, needless to say that was one of the smartest things I ever did. I was able to retire and move to a ranch in Oregon in 1990 and was happily playing golf every day when my oldest son wanted to be in the silkscreen business, so here I am again." Wow, again. He played a bigger part in the development of the culture than I knew! The 60's and 70's were definitely the "soul surfing" years. A lot of the professional surfers were guys who made their living building boards and surfing as much as they could. Boards were cheap. Wages were low. Team members got free boards and shirts, but the money wasn't there at all. It was the clothing guys who brought a lot of the money into the sport and who began sponsoring the world circuits. Thanks Dan... for believing in OP... and giving all the grom's today a foundation to stand on! Hey Mike... none of this would be coming to light if you hadn't sown your life into Stanley's! Thanks from a million of us! Rock on buddy! Cere!"
Cere was a crack-up back in those days, you simply had to like him. The thing I really remember most about him though was the car he drove, a little piece of crap Honda. One of the first ones I really remember ever seeing. My 34 Ford 3 window coup was bigger then that Honda. Cere and I experimented with rice paper decals to be laminated on surfboards. It became a big part of my early days as a screen printer helping to open the doors of the local surf shops like Hobie, Dewey Weber and all those early guys. My love was still motorcycles and boats but the surf business was booming back then. Lots of fun and great memories, thanks Cere.
