She can see clearly now

Torus Tammer

How to make an International Surfing Museum in Huntington Beach -- by

Natalie Kotsch: Begin with a sliver of business acumen, blend in a vision

bordering on obsession, prepare to serve an 18-year sentence of hard

labor and love, and voila!

Kotsch, 63, was born in Canada and didn’t know anything about surfing

until she came to California in 1976.

But what a difference a few decades can make.

As the founder of the Huntington Beach International Surf Museum,

Kotsch is dedicated to archiving the culture that she has loved since

1982.

“What got me so passionate about surf was not the beautiful young men

or the old ones,” she said. “What got my heart was the little ones with

their little blue lips taking their surf lessons. They got to me.”

Kotsch made her foray into the surf world back in the early 1980s by

experimenting with holding fairs and festivals on Huntington Beach

streets. This endeavor, though intrepid and unusual for the time, proved

not to be lucrative.

She would spend hours on end collecting and digging up surf artifacts.

Unfortunately, though, it was draining her life and family.

Realizing this, Kotsch marched in the direction of something permanent

-- a museum that would celebrate surfing and document its history. For

the next several years, armed with a flurry of volunteers and lots of

chutzpah, Kotsch rallied for assistance, pushing big organizations, surf

companies and even the city -- but to no avail.

It was her own single-minded focus that eventually paid off in 1988,

when the International Surf Museum of Huntington Beach finally opened its

doors.

An obvious success in a community known as Surf City, the museum moved

to bigger and better digs three years later and has been there ever

since.

“This museum began as a concept and eventually was built by

volunteers, donations and hard work,” Kotsch said. “Now, all kinds of

people come here to see our collection.”

This was true for Jim Beloff, who came all the way from Studio City to

visit the museum.

“I’m writing a book on the ukulele and the 1960s surf scene and came

here to get some authentic inspiration,” Beloff said. “This is an amazing

place.”

As successful as Kotsch the pioneer has been, Kotsch the artist has

remained unfulfilled. She remains devoid of complete satisfaction because

the evolution of her vision has not yet occurred.

Her plans are still elaborate, and her ideas are still outlandish. For

the future, Kotsch said that she sees “an ultimate museum where you’d be

able to watch footage in a 360-degree theater or just pull whatever you

want from the archives with a touch screen, put it on a CD-ROM and take

it home.”

Kotsch lives at machine-gun pace; still having to work full time and

deal with a family. But she said her vision will fall short unless she

finds a way to spearhead this endeavor full time.

“We need the creative talent to come forward,” Kotsch said. “We need

the people who have pictures in their albums too. But we also need the

big corporations, like Quiksilver to help.”

Bob Fredrickson, a Huntington Beach resident, has been a member of the

museum since 1993. In 1995, he joined the board of directors, now serving

as chairman.

Fredrickson reckons that it is hard to pull together the expertise and

the knowledge to really go after the big bucks and the big grants because

a lot of the members of the board are grass-roots people who function

best as hands-on managers of the museum’s everyday operations.

“It takes a lot of us to do the work,” he said. “But it’s very hard

for us to pull together the expertise. We need some help in order to do

that because we just don’t have the know-how or the connections.”

The ever-vibrant Kotsch stays confident though, fearlessly braving the

boundaries of time.

“Some people really thought I was nuts when I originally came up with

the idea of a surfing museum,” she said. “But obviously not everyone

did.”