Bill Barnfield: Setting the Record Straight

I began working on boards in the early '60s but shaped my first board in about 1967/68 when I was living in Newport Beach. It was a re-shape of an old South Shore longboard. I shaped it into a 7' Pintail.
I moved from Newport to Santa Barbara and was living in Santa Barbara in '68 with the Donovan Brothers (Bill & Stan). We lived in the Hammonds Mansion at Hammonds Reef before they tore it down. I made boards there in one of the unused rooms of the 56 room Mansion. We played football every Sunday on the huge lawn and waited for the surf to come up. Surfed the Ranch, got to know Yater, Bev Morgan, Greenough, Margo, etc and had a ball! Sometime around this, I think Bernie Baker rolled into town.
Being a Goofy Foot, I got pretty sick of rights by the end of the winter. I met a guy named, Kent Wienker (he became an alcoholic later) from Seattle WA, that was going to SBCC. He was a Goofy Foot also, so we began exploring for Lefts. Once summer came, and the surf stopped he said he knew of a place in Oregon that was an insane left.......we packed up and headed for Seaside,Oregon in the spring of '69. We met some guys there that were making surfboards. Dan Mathews, (now a school teacher in Coos Bay, OR), Art Spence (now in Prison), Jerry Harrington (later committed suicide). I worked with them making boards. I was mostly the Sander. We were called Tillamook Head Surfboards, because of the headland that created the Left point break in Seaside, Oregon.
Frankly, we were extremely progressive in our designs back than due to the access to great uncrowded waves and the fact that we were able to design totally around function, as we weren't restricted by any dominant "scene" or prejudice. The boards we were making back then were, thin, dome deck, slender railed, with a slight flip in the nose. The boards were actually very similar in principle to what is being commonly ridden today. This was a great time of creative growth and experience! In those early days, we were visited by many old friends, Corky Carrol, Micky Munoz, Mike Doyle, Roger Adams, Mike Croteau etc. When Mike Purpus came with Dan Merkle and a ton of guys with cameras,

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