Bruce "Snake" Gabrielson's Surf Art Gallery and Museum

07/13/2026

The other side of the piece of resin flooring from my first Wave Trek Surfboard shop taken in Huntington Beach when I moved in 1980. A new addition in the museum. 14 different boards are represented.

07/13/2026

A piece of resin flooring from my first Wave Trek Surfboard shop taken in Huntington Beach when I moved in 1980.

06/03/2026

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122160804884404946&set=a.122103083834404946

The most famous hand in Hawaii was missing three fingers. Hamana Kalili was feeding cane into the rollers at the Kahuku Sugar Mill when the machine caught his right hand. It took the middle three fingers clean off. He was left with a thumb and a little finger.

He was born in Laie in 1882 and grew up a fisherman - small boats, set nets, the same shoreline his whole life. The mill paid the bills the fishing didn't.

Until the rollers.

A man with half a hand can't feed cane anymore. So the plantation moved him. They put him on the sugar train as a guard, with one job.

Keep the local kids OFF the train.

The kids loved to jump the cars as the train slowed near Kahuku and ride it down toward town. Hamana would spot them and wave them off with the only hand he had left - thumb and pinky, three fingers gone.

And the kids, being kids, started throwing it back.

They turned his wave into a signal of their own. His wave meant trouble - I see you, get off. The kids flipped it into the exact opposite. Thumb and pinky, flicked low: all clear. Hamana's not looking. Go for it.

That was the whole beginning. A maimed man waving kids off a train, and the kids flinging his broken hand back at each other across the schoolyard.

By the 1930s it was EVERYWHERE in Laie. By the 1940s it had crossed the whole island.

Nobody planned it. Nobody put his name on it. The word "shaka" didn't even come from him - where that word came from, nobody is sure to this day.

But the hand was his. And every kid in Laie knew exactly whose hand they were copying.

Because Hamana was no small man in that town. He was a bishop. He led the church choir. He played King Kamehameha in the hukilau - the community fishing festival that raised money for the church and grew, decades later, into the Polynesian Cultural Center.

A big, broad man standing in the surf, welcoming every stranger who came. And he welcomed all of them with that hand. Three fingers gone. Thumb and pinky out.

The man gave the world its sign for aloha with the hand the sugar mill took from him.

The whole planet throws his wave now. Almost none of them know his name.

In 1958 the cancer came. That December, sick and fading, Hamana went to watch Laie dedicate its brand-new college - the school his whole community had worked and prayed years for. He saw the doors open.

He went home that night, laid down to rest, and was gone before morning. He was a fisherman to the end. He never made a dollar off the shaka, and never knew it would leave the island, let alone the planet.

Then in 2015, his town built him back. A bronze statue, seven and a half feet tall, throwing his wave, rose at the Hukilau Marketplace in Laie. A young Maori sculptor carved it - one Polynesian honoring another, 57 years after Hamana was gone.

People stop there now. They stand beside the giant bronze fisherman. And they throw the shaka back at him.

Every time you see it - on a highway, in a photo, on the far side of the world - it traces back to Laie. To one man's hand beside a train track.

He spent his life keeping kids off a train. They turned his broken hand into hello.

Hamana Kalili. Now you know his name.

05/16/2026

The Munoz statue dedication in Dana Point. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1655892075637680

05/08/2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC440YEgWQE

Before Go-Pro technolgy, I strapped my Minolta Super 8 movie camera to my bike and went for a ride through Huntington Beach. It was the summer of 1970. -Ga...

05/02/2026

They called him a liar.
August 11, 1911. Honolulu Harbor. A 20-year-old Hawaiian named Duke Paoa Kahanamoku had just beaten the world record for the 100-yard freestyle by 4.6 seconds. Not tied it. SHATTERED it.

The Amateur Athletic Union on the mainland refused to certify the record. Their explanation? The judges in Hawaii must have been using ALARM CLOCKS instead of stopwatches. When that didn't stick, they claimed the ocean currents helped him. When that didn't stick either, they just went quiet.

Because they couldn't imagine a dark-skinned Pacific Islander was faster than every white man in America.

So Duke's friends raised the money themselves. Passed the hat. Got him on a boat to the mainland. He went to the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and won GOLD in the 100-meter freestyle. Before Jesse Owens. Before Jackie Robinson. Before Joe Louis.

The first Hawaiian Olympic champion in history.

He came home a hero. And the same white power brokers who had OVERTHROWN his queen two decades earlier offered him a "job" at City Hall. The official title was superintendent. The actual job was sweeping the floors and mowing the lawns.

Then came 1920. Two more golds in Antwerp. 1924 Paris. Silver, losing to Johnny Weissmuller - who would be handed the lead in Tarzan while Hollywood refused to let Duke play anything but "Indian chiefs."

And then the ocean called him back.

June 14, 1925. Corona del Mar, California. A sudden violent squall. 20-foot waves smashing the harbor entrance. A 40-foot fishing boat called the Thelma capsized with 17 men aboard. Most were drowning in their own clothes.

Duke grabbed his 16-foot koa wood board. 114 pounds of solid tree. He paddled INTO the chaos. Again. And again. And again. Three trips. Eight men pulled from a sea that was killing them.

The Newport Beach police chief called it "the most superhuman rescue act and the finest display of surfboard riding that has ever been seen in the world."

Every lifeguard tower in the world still uses a rescue surfboard today BECAUSE of what Duke did that morning.

Then he went back to Hawaii. And pumped gas.

Because Olympic amateur rules FORBADE him from earning a dime off his fame. Three gold medals on the shelf. A world record that had stood for years. A superhuman rescue on the national news. And his job was filling tanks at the corner of Kalakaua and Seaside.

"I'm not too proud to pump gas," he told a reporter in 1965. "I did it because it was something to do."

Then, quieter: "Out of the water I am nothing."

He never once complained publicly. Not about the AAU. Not about Hollywood. Not about the haoles who used his face to sell Hawaii to the world while he struggled to pay rent in his own hometown.

He just smiled. And handed out business cards with the word ALOHA printed on them.

His widow Nadine later explained what that silence cost him. "He suppressed everything," she said. "He kept everything inside. It gave him a stomach ulcer and, unfortunately, it was a bleeding ulcer."

The man who taught the world aloha was bleeding from the inside.

In 1957, three of the men he saved from the Thelma came onto national television and thanked him in front of millions. Duke just nodded. Two words.

"That's okay."

January 22, 1968. The parking lot of the Waikiki Yacht Club. He was 77. He reached into his pocket for his keys. His heart stopped.

Five days later, Waikiki Beach shut down.

Thousands of people stood in the January rain. All four Honolulu radio stations aired the service LIVE. A 30-motorcycle police es**rt led the motorcade. An armada of outrigger canoes and surfers paddled out past the first break. Nadine scattered his ashes into the sea.

And then the mourners threw flowers. Hundreds of outrigger canoes. Thousands of leis. Soon the ocean was a blanket of flowers.

The beach boys sang Aloha Oe. Reverend Abraham Akaka spoke through his tears. "Paoa was a man of aloha. God gave him to us as a gift from the sea, and now we give him back."

Today there's a 9-foot bronze statue on Kuhio Beach, arms wide open, facing the street so he can welcome every visitor who comes. Tourists pile leis on his outstretched hands until you can barely see the metal.

They think they're honoring a surfer.

They're honoring a man who gave away a sport, gave away a kingdom's grief, gave away his own body to ulcers - and never asked for one thing back.

Some people become legends because of what they took.

Duke became a legend because of what he gave. And what he swallowed in silence so the rest of us could say the word aloha and mean it.

04/04/2026

Lots of visitors lately. Make sure you reserve ahead of time.

04/04/2026

RIP Don Hansen 1936-2026 Don was an authentic local legend, surfer/shaper, entrepreneur, philanthropist and a true gentleman. Condolences to all family and friends. We have a Hansen board in our museum.

04/02/2026

Long Beach Surf Club..circa 1966.. So many excellent surfers were in this club from all outlying areas. From left to right: Steve Bigler, Mike Doyle, Robert August, Rich Harbour, Candy Calhoun, Danny Lehahan, David Nuuhiwa, President of the club Dick Graham, Rich Chew. Girls in the middle: Nancy Nelson and Linda Merrill.. front row Left to right down low: Chuck Linnen, Mark Martinson, Bill Fury and Tim Dorsey!
The combination of all these legends together could fill the storybooks of a thousand surf novels .. The Long Beach connection was a strong tie and spring well of talent. Thanks for the help identifying some of the legends Terry Eselun. This is a photo courtesy of the Harbour Chronicles and Chris Sardelis

03/30/2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn81wIeKfHY

credit to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnAQmJSJ7DPvMTbxx0UyJYg for the footage