Bill Barnfield: Setting the Record Straight

Dicky Nelson, Danny Espinosa and others into riding for Al and I talked him into sponsoring them with boards. I discovered Davey Smith (remember him) as a very young kid surfing the afternoon windswells at "the pit" with me. We became good friends and I brought him into the Channel Islands Team. Al doesn't seem to like to remember this too clearly......but fact is.....this is exactly what happened. Much later........I finally talked Al into coming to visit me in Hawaii in the late '70s or early '80s, I can't remember for sure. This was his first trip to Hawaii. I had been making Tommy Curren's boards with Channel Islands stickers etc. Al had a photographer (John ?) take several rolls of pictures of us shaping together. He wanted to use them to establish his connection to me. (I was the cool shaper dude of the moment, ha!) I taught Al a lot and introduced him to Shaun Tomson, etc. Al never used the photos and has never given me credit for my influence or connection to his rise to fame. But like Rusty who I also helped, in the same fashion, you can easily track the stellar rise in their careers, shortly after working under my influence and instruction. Rusty has made some small comments here and their about my helping him and I thank him for it...... But Al has been totally silent. It seems to be the odd nature of this business! I still love him anyway. And I have much broader interests and bigger goals than impressing the latest crop of surfing grommets. On the other hand, it would be nice if the facts were logged in correctly somewhere in the history of surfing.

WHEN YEAR DID YOU BEGIN WORKING FOR LIGHTNING BOLT?

As mentioned before, 1971 which is when it started, if I remember right. But I began to actively shape for them in about '73. I would do everything on the boards complete, so they were like my personal pieces of gallery art. I sure wish I would have saved some of them! I think that both Jack Shipley and Gerry would confirm that I was one of the original Lightning bolt guys that helped to define and establish Lightning Bolt as the premier surfboard company of the '70s. This was a great time. Kind of like being at Apple Computer in the early days.
As time went

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