Cult Fiction

Fast forward to late winter of 1977. I am a sophomore graphic design major at Ohio University in Athens, commissioned by the owner of a popular shirt shop known as The Underwear to design and print t-shirts for various campus groups and events as well as to produce my own concepts for retail sales. The year before, I had created a modest hit of a shirt that simply stated “DISCO SUCKS.” Were it not for the life of its own it took on, it would have had a loyal but relatively modest number of fans. But after the shirts became the focal point of a cultural conflict that shut down a campus radio station, prompted death threats to the artist (me), nearly caused a riot, and became an ongoing subject in the local editorial pages, it was a best-seller for us. But I digress…

After OU students returned from the holiday and New Year’s break of 1978, the Midwest was hit with a fierce, now legendary blizzard. Underwear store owner Jerry “Ski” Szubski wanted to know what new design I had in mind for the approaching spring. By then there had been a plethora of “I Survived the Great Blizzard of ‘78”-based shirts flooding Midwest t-shirt shops.

I mentioned perhaps zigging instead of zagging, and that a lampoon of surfing in the Midwest might provide a better theme, a diversion from the winter’s post-blizzard doldrums. My proposal was that I’d take my 1976 Olentangy Masters Surfing Classic artwork and modify it to read “1978 Hocking River Masters.” The Hocking is Athens’ own meandering, muddy and often overflowing river that flanked the campus. Where the date of Beach Boys’ 1976 concert had originally appeared, I would instead use the date of the final weekend of the upcoming spring break.

Ski liked the general idea. It certainly conjured up a happier image than the blizzard and dreary winter we had just endured. We concurred that the Masters design was great for the back, but we needed a suitable companion design for the front. I kicked around a few images, including one of a surfer in silhouette, cannibalized from a multi-color posterart project I was creating in a serigraphy class. It would look pretty good on the left chest of the shirt, but it needed a slogan or catch-phrase to appropriately tie it all together. Remembering the “Surf Olentangy” bikini girl art not used for the ’76 Beach Boys concert shirts, SURF OHIO came to me as a logical slogan to pair with the surfer dude. It was short and sweet, to the point, and offered some simple yet bold graphic options. As a graphic design major with a few marketing and communications classes under my belt, the brand value of a strong, memorable name and clean logo design was well familiar to me. Plus, it seemed funny as hell.

I grabbed a sheet of PresType, the dry transfer lettering most often used to set type fonts back in the day, laid it out on paper in Eurostile Bold Extended, and paired it with my surfer dude. That, rather simply, is how SURF OHIO was born. Other than the federal trademark in 1987 that replaced my original 1978 copyright mark, the logo remains virtually unchanged to this day, afro and all.

However, back then, though Ski liked the concept well enough, it was going to have to prove itself first before he felt comfortable fronting me any of his stock to print on. Thus, I bought the first five dozen tees after having my art converted onto acetate film positives, to be burned into silkscreens by my supplier in Columbus. I printed up the 60 tees that weekend at home, in mom and dad’s basement, which they were well accustomed to having converted into my printing shop. Uptown they went, into Ski’s shop. With just an initial trickle of sales to speak of, I made up some handbills to promote the shirt, or more accurately, to promote the Hocking River Masters Surfing Classic and took every opportunity to post them around campus and uptown Athens, mostly stapling them to telephone poles as was the college tradition.

As finals week rapidly approached, I was beginning to get nervous, so I decided to also invest in a small display ad in the Ohio University Post, the campus paper. Enlisting a friend to help me model the shirts and another to shoot it, all I could afford was to place the ad once, in the very last issue to be published before finals week, the Post’s final issue of the winter quarter. My photographer, a photojournalism major from New Jersey named Mac Wright, insisted the shoot be outdoors to make it look natural. Thus we posed some of the pics on the solidly frozen Hocking River, still snow covered from the blizzard. It was a good news/bad news concept. Good news was that Mac was brilliant – in black-and-white, the snow actually appeared to be sand in the final shots. Bad news was that my friend caught pneumonia and pretty much never spoke to me again, even with the free t-shirt.

It turns out posting all those yellow and black posters in late winter’s icy blast was not for naught. Just before I placed the ad, the posters attracted the attention of a Post reporter who tracked me down through The Underwear. Apparently, word on the street of a surfing contest in Athens had created quite a buzz. Though the headline of the resulting article at first seemed a bit harsh – “Surfin Classic a Hoax to Sell T-shirts” – it did not matter. The interview with me and Ski was actually quite favorable, and resulted in a crush of customers at The Underwear. It didn’t hurt that the article just happened to run the very same day as my ad, nor that seemingly 75% of the student population of about 12,000 was headed to a warm beach for the break.

Thus, the very weekend classes let out, students literally queued up to purchase a SURF OHIO t-shirt on their way out of town. They lined up through the small basement shop and up its steps. With just 24 hours remaining before I too headed out up Route 33 for home in Columbus, Ski commissioned me to rush another 10 dozen SURF OHIOs through. Through some creative bartering with my dorm’s Resident Advisor that evening (my currency being beverages and a free t-shirt, as I recall), he tossed me the keys to a vacated room in Gamertsfelder Hall. There, I popped a box fan into the window facing outward, ran clothesline back and forth across the ceiling, fired up my radio and, using the two desks as my worktables, hand-screened tees until about three in the morning. I didn’t need the beverages, not with the fumes I was inhaling (as in mineral spirits, by the way).

With the navy ink barely dry enough to fold the shirts, and my ride home idling in wait up on Union Street, I dropped off the newly minted SURF OHIOs to Ski, picked up my cash, and fought my way back up the steps through a line of about 30 waiting customers snaking down into the shop. I well recall the enthusiasm – theirs and mine. Though it was not quite exactly an “overnight” success, it was quite sudden. I was now that “Surf Ohio guy”, and would remain so for a long, long time, though I had no idea for just how long, at that moment.