Welcome to the Frog House

Today dear readers we have another gem of post by Ken McKnight. Enjoy 

 Welcome to the Frog House

By Ken McKnight

     One of the most famous surf shops in the world is located at the north end of Newport Beach, CA right on Pacific

Coast Highway. The Frog House is a surf shop in the purest sense of the word and has been operating at this location since 1963.  A short walk across the street is the

Beach and the 56^th Street and River Jetties surf spots. When you enter into these hallowed halls of surfdom your venturing into a place where all caution is thrown to the wind, the sales staff is hard core surf, surf history drips from the walls and the toilet is right next to the front counter.

Known to all as a “Real Surf Shop” the Frog House caters to all class of surfers, old, young, beginner and expert.  They carry only the best lines and move almost more rubber then the wetsuit companies combined. Here is a shop that smells like wax, has real beach sand on the floors and enjoys three generations of customers that return time and again.

     This is a surf shop with a history steeped in surf lore and stories. The characters that have frequented the place over the years seem to be straight out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. If you’re a sales rep and you come in here trying to push your product the wrong way, you are liable to be lambasted with a caustic verbal barrage that can be heard and felt a few miles up the coast in Huntington Beach and beyond.

The keeper of the keys to this retail surfing calliope is an energetic fellow with a quick wit and a gentle soul, one, T K Brimer and has presided over the place for years. He is a combination of Judge Judy, David Letterman, and Chris Rock all rolled into one. 

     “We still have some of the old surf shop edge going on.” Said Brimer from behind the big wood and glass counters.  “The carpeting on the floor is 28 years old. We vacuum it once a year whether it needs it or not. And we will replace it as soon as it wears out.”

The stories from inside the Frog House are legend and known the surf world over.

There are funny anecdotes about bets on eating whole bars of surf wax, discussions on pounding swells on the sand bars out front, and the constant chatter about the strange cacophony of humanity that waffles in and out of the imaginary turnstile at the front door. It is a spot that has a worldly history complete with groundbreaking events (the famous races around the building) or the kegs on the floor of the front room with the never-ending spigot. And lets not forget the old fashioned cash register that is years older than most of us (tell us about the photos in the drawer TK).

From the outrageous backgammon sessions to the marathon poker games, there has been no shortage of subject matter. From 40 years of surf stories and surf heroes, epic hurricane swells, boats run aground, the legendary surf shop wars, and TK’s hilarious shoplifting tales. Not a day goes by when one of these famous yarns doesn’t pop up in a conversation.

What you will find at the Frog House is real surfers selling real surf products in a way that you won’t find at many other surf shops the world over. They know their surf, treat their customers with love, respect and fun, and offer up real value on the best products on the surf market today. If you can’t get it at the Frog House you can’t get it anywhere.

This is a surf shop with soul. Come on in and join TK as he explains the Frog House’s history and why the shop has lasted so long!

Frog takes a Name

“Frank Jensen was the original owner of the Frog House.” Said Brimer.  “I worked for him for ten years. Frank never surfed, hardly knows how to swim, but took a liking to surf styled people, those in the sport and enjoyed interacting with those types of free thinking and easy going folk. He started his business out of that old Milk Wagon. He had seven or eight used longboards he kept in there and he would sit here in Newport Beach, down by Blackie’s and rent those boards out during the week. He would make his money in cash, pack the boards up each night and drive home to the trailer he lived in up in Huntington Beach.”

    “But Newport Beach came to him ultimately and said no business license, get out of here. So then he drove up to Huntington Cliffs and rented surfboards there. Then the city fathers would do the same thing. They would come looking for a business license he didn’t have and tell him to leave. Then he went to Seal Beach. By the time he got thrown out of Seal Beach the guys in Newport had forgotten about him and so he would go back down there and do it again. He did that the best part of a year.”

    “ Two blocks down from where the Frog House is now was an old gas station that still stands today. Frank rented that building and started the Frog House Surf shop and Buick and Motor Store.” 

     “Within a year he moved to the current location, which was then Hause Speed Shop. Hause rented Frog the front half of the shop while keeping the back part for his own automobile projects. That was around 1963. The old garage door is still part of the building to this day.”

     “Frank Jensen had a friend named Frog. And no one would go to his house because Frog was the filthiest guy you would know in the world. He was so bad he would eat chicken in his own living room, throw the bones on the floor and never pick them up. There would be science projects of mold in his kitchen from pizza that had been there for six months. The place stunk, was disgustingly dirty, and no one would visit Frog. But he was a fun guy to hang out with and you didn’t mind if he came to visit you.”

     “Well, when Frank Jensen got the front door key to his new building (the current location), he opened up the door and looked inside, the place was so filthy and scummy, someone said, “This look’s like Frog’s house.” And it got named right then and there.”

    “ By the time I bought the place some years later there was no reason to change the name. A little after I bought it, a guy came in that was an artist. He wanted a sixty-dollar kneeboard and I ended up trading him that board for a logo that employed a Frog and surfing. That was 1976.”

TK’s Formative Moments

     “Early on,” said TK proudly,  “ when Frank Jensen was the owner, I was just a peon working behind the counter. I did the lowest grade work. I started working there in 1967.

     “I grew up in Titusville, Florida and started surfing in 1961. That was an experience in itself surfing the East coast then. It was an embryonic stage for surfing and it harkens back to maybe starting in the mid fifties in California. It was a brotherhood of surfers then. If you were driving down the road and saw a car with surf racks parked at the beach you would stop and park next to that car, paddle out to the guys in the water that you had never met before. They would be generally thrilled to have you show up as opposed to today where they might flatten your tires or throw something at you.”

   “ In 1967 my father who worked for McDonnell Douglas at the Space Center, got transferred to Huntington Beach much to my thrill. I was halfway thru my senior year in high school and came out here and enrolled at Huntington High School. This was a school that had 4000 students and I’m coming from a town that only had 6000 people total. But I was going to Surf City and I was absolutely thrilled.”

   “ I met this guy Charley Ray at school who was a “Team Rider” for the Frog House in Newport Beach. He brought me down to the shop and I immediately loved the place.”

    “In junior high school it was stated that when I grew up I was going to own and operate a surf shop. I got a job at the Frog House and I was thrilled to be here. I worked hard and did whatever me menial task I was asked to do. This was a foot in the door to the surf world.”

TK takes the Reins

    “ I had been managing the shop for 4-5 years exclusively, spoke T K,  “and Frank Jensen had been spending less and less time in the store. His love had gone into sailing. He had a 106-foot wooden sailboat called the “Ranger.” That took up all his time and since he didn’t surf, all his love had gone to the sailing circles. I was running the shop and had gotten married to my lovely wife, Linda. I was considering having children and I needed to make more money than I could earn working behind the counter at the Frog House. So I approached Frog and gave him a warning,

     “Frank, I’m going to open up my own surf shop. You’ve taught a few things about business thru the years and one of the things you said was that if I could open up next door, and take the clientele with me, I should do that.”

     “I told him I would look for a place close by if that was a possibility and I would open up next door if I can. I didn’t feel any responsibility to protect him.”

     “So Frank comes to me and says, TK let me sell you half of this business and we will be partners. I said, “Frank, I’ve been running around here long enough to know that being a business partner with you means, I do all the work and we split all the money. I’m not interested. I have been doing that for a long time.”

     “He agreed to sell me the business. So I gave him thousands of dollars in cash from a real estate sale. I put in an application for a loan at the bank for the rest of the money. Then I sat here and answered every phone call for days waiting for the bank to verify my employment. I gave myself a glowing employment report. I scraped and worked and even borrowed $400 from my wife Linda (who I wasn’t married to a the time). To this day, after 31 years of marriage, when she gets mad at me she’s liable to bring up the fact that I still owe her $400 that I never fully paid back.”

     “I gave Frank Jensen the money to roughly cover the inventory that was on hand in the building at the time. He had purposely run it down to a low amount. He then financed the purchase for ten years. I promised to pay $100,000.00 for the good will, nothing else, just the name. He financed it at a low and fair rate for the time. Then we played a series of 3 poker hands. I won all three hands. He was bummed about that but happy to be out of the shop.

     “A few years later when I wanted to buy the property he said he was not interested in selling. I asked him if it was for sale for five hundred million dollars and he said of course and I said, “okay then it is for sale. Let’s just talk about a price.” That was 1987 and we negotiated it down.”

     “Frank Jensen, after I bought the Frog House, packed up his money and moved to Friday Harbor, Washington, a small island off of Seattle’s coastal area.”

Surfboards and the Frog House

     “When I first started working here around 1967, I was sitting on the floor playing poker with Frank.” TK explained.  “He had been nicknamed Frog by that time. A guy walked in the door this particular day with two boards under his arms. They had no logos on them. One was a red one and the other blue and he wanted to sell them. Frog asked him where he had gotten the boards and he said I made them myself in my garage. They were really good boards and Frog like them. Up to that point, The Frog House had only sold used boards and a few wetsuits (which were still relatively new at the time).”

     “The guy who brought the boards in was Frank Petrillo. So Frank “Frog” Jensen and Frank Petrillo entered into a contractual agreement where Petrillo made boards with his name on them and we sold them exclusively on the West Coast and out of the Frog House. That was our first venture into selling new surfboards.”

    “ That went along great for 2-3 years and we sold a lot of boards. Petrillo was a big name then, but then the two Frank’s had a falling out. Frog thought too many boards were being sold out the back door of Petrillo’s glass shop. Petrillo moved to Texas to build boards there and we started manufacturing SMALL FACES Surfboards. The concept was that instead of one person’s name on a board there were a lot of small faces that worked to make these surfboards, interchangeable faces, plus Rod Stewart’s band, Faces, was popular at the time.”

     “Our shaper back then was Steve McGregor, who shaped for us maybe 4-5 years, then a guy name Bobby Kazanis. He shaped for years. He was one of the best shapers on the West Coast to this day. Never had the political acclaim in the industry and didn’t play well in that circle. But he has the abilities of any of the top shapers from that era. He still shapes today in Huntington.”

     “By the 70’s we were making thousands of boards using other peoples glass shops.”

More Surfboards

    “ The funny story I tell nowadays and I have told before was that in the old days, the 60’s, each shop manufactured their own surfboards and that was their personality and recognition. It was your authenticity that you were a surf shop. We had Petrillo and Small Faces Surfboards. Somewhere back in that mid 70’s time frame a guy named Al Merrick showed up at the front door with a surfboard called Channel Islands. It was a very beautiful looking surfboard of high quality and he wanted to sell it to the Frog House and let us sell them to our customers.”

     “Well I told him along the lines of something like he ought to take the surfboards back to Santa Barbara where he came from and sell them there! I would keep my Small Faces boards right here and I wouldn’t bother trying to bring them up to Santa Barbara to sell them there.”

    “ I think he left the store that day vowing never to sell us a surfboard no matter how successful he ever got, or how desirable his line was and I have suffered for 15 agonizing years trying to get Channel Island Surfboards to come back to the Frog House.”

     “Somehow they never had room to sell us any surfboards. Now, that all changed about a year ago when that same story showed up in a surf magazine. When I originally talked to Merrick it wasn’t meant to be a put down on him or his surfboards. It was just me, trying to hold on to the established tradition that surf shops make their own surfboards.

In the interim I realized that my clientele wanted to buy these nationwide and worldwide brands. I sell Channel Islands, I sell Lost, I sell Rusty out of here. All three are real popular brands.”

     “At the same time I try to keep a selection of local manufacturers here. You can find Dano and Baltierra Surfboards as well as Ron Romanovsky Kneeboards. And by the way we are seeing a re-infestation of knee riders coming to a surf break near you. We use to sell 4-5 kneeboards a week in the 60’s and 70’s. By the 80’s and 90’s we only sold 4-5 a year and now we are selling 4-5 a month. You know they are around because the handicap parking is so full at the beaches around here. Only kidding knee riders, we love you.”

The People

Why do you think the Frog House always has such unique people that come in, we asked Brimer?

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” said TK.

     “It’s like moths to the flame around here. As the years have passed by and we’ve changed very little and the quote “surf industry” unquote has changed so much we have become more and more unique in our style of business and our business establishment and all that. That uniqueness calls out to the people that don’t fit in other places and they seem to come in here all the time.”

     “Sure we have strange people that visit us. We have the guy that has his entire car covered with Frog House stickers. Must be two or three thousand stickers on it. That adds up to hundreds of dollars of my stickers on his car. His big claim to fame was his car actually got used in the doomsday movie were the big wave hits New York City , a tidal wave. If you play the movie slowly enough you can see his car get tumbled by the wave.

On the bad side I have had people come in and show me business cards he has had made with my name on them, TK Brimer, in Ontario, California. Then people come in and say, “Hey, I know the owner here!”

The Frog House has always had that Aura about it where you were either going to come in and buy something or you were going to be insulted.

      “No doubt,” T K said with a wry smile, 

     “We try to keep things on a really personal level. Sometimes it seems that when you go in to the plastic, corporate surf store and someone greets you with their very well manicured and coached, “Good morning sir, May I be of assistance” speech, well we kind of feel that many need to go the other way with,

“Hey dumbshit, what do you need?” (Laughs)

     “Of course anytime you work with the public you get one out of 2500 people that are just @#$%^&* and sometimes we do tell people they need to find another surf shop.”

     “But really we wouldn’t use that kind of greeting unless we had some past history with that person. If you have been coming here for a long time, you’re liable to have a nickname and we are liable to treat you the way your brother or sister would treat you. Like someone that was real familiar and friendly. It’s all with good love. We enjoy the people that come in here very much. And that’s one of the reasons I still run this place, because I have so much fun interacting with the people that come in.”

Touch and Feel versus smash and grab

There have been many outrageous shoplifting stories over the years. TK calls it the 12 best shoplifting stories. From the German girls to petty theft and everything in between here are just a couple classics. And for those that got away over the years, the Frog is always watching and waiting.

  “One of the early shop lifting experiences we had was this,” said TK,

     “The checkout counter at the Frog House use to be in the back third of the building. We had the surfboards in the front with no presence of sales people. What had happened

already a couple of times was a kid would grab a surfboard and run out the front door with it.”

     “This one particular time we ran out after a guy who had gone down the sidewalk and then around and down a side street, but when we went after him he flat disappeared. A block behind the shop we have a salt-water channel that runs back there. We found the surfboard stashed underneath the dock at the end of Grant Street. A surfboard and no kid. He stashed it there and escaped. So Frog decides that we are gong to set a trap for him cause he knows the guys is coming back later for the board. So during the work hours one of us has to stand back there keeping an eye out that the guy didn’t get the board in the daytime. We suspected he would come back at night.”

    “ Frog use to drive an old converted Milk Truck Wagon and he volunteered to buy all the pizza and beer we could handle if we would sit with him and wait for the shoplifter to come back. So Bobby Caltabiano, Frank (Frog) Jensen, and myself sat in the Milk Truck parked at the end of the street, incognito, watching out the windows to see if anybody shows up. We drank beer, ate pizza and planned our attack.”

    “I had a brick as my weapon of choice, Frank had a full-blown machete and Bobby had a baseball bat. We ate, drank and around one am both Bobby and I were asleep. It was a drunken sleep out. Suddenly Frog wakes us up. Here comes a four door Buick cruising down the street with its lights off, real slow.”

     “They pull down to the end of the street. We can see a driver and another guy. The passenger jumps out, runs down and grabs the board, comes back and tries to stick it thru the window into the back seat of the car. We jump out of the Milk Wagon and Fran Jensen runs over and breaks the front windshield with the machete. Bobby is beating on the side of the car. The passenger drops the surfboard and is trying to crawl into the car as the driver is spinning the tires. Frog smashes the drivers side window, and I throw the brick at the side of the car once and then twice leaving big dents. The car leaves as we are laughing. We spent the next half hour wondering what story these guys are going to tell their mom and dad about this smashed up car. It was obviously a mom’s type car.”

     “That was my first shoplifting intro. Over the years we have had many, many others.”

    “ Bobby Caltabiano was the manager of the Frog House for the first six years I worked there. He was the manager and I was the grunt. Once again with the counter in the back some kids had parked in the front, run in, grabbed a bodyboard, and ran back to their car stuffing the board in. We ran out as they were driving away up Coast Highway. I ran to my car to give chase and realized I didn’t have the keys. I ran back in the shop, back to the car and started after them. They were long gone and I didn’t know which way they went as I headed north to Huntington. I came to the BrookHurst Street intersection and had to make a choice. Go right, inland, or keep heading along the coast. I headed into Huntington Beach hauling as fast as I can on a pure guess all the way to Main Street at the Pier. Lo and behold, there is the station wagon stuck in traffic five cars back from the light and I’m another 25 to 30 cars back from them. I shut the car off, run up the middle of the street, reach in the open window of the drivers side, grab the kids keys out of the ignition and start yelling, “Your under arrest for shoplifting!”

    “ It is Saturday and crowded and I go back to my car, park it, and then call the cops from the lifeguard headquarters across the street. By the time the cops show up, the car’s still there with the driver, but all the other kids have run away. He is crying and screaming and professing his innocence.”

     “Another story was our Bobby Tang, shop employee. He caught some guys doing the same thing. As he chased them down the street the driver hits the gas as the other guy grabs the car door. He gets dragged barefoot for about 25 yards down the street with his toes down. The driver stops the car to collect him and Bobby Tang is right on his ass and I’m ten yards back. The driver takes off again, hitting the gas and drags the guy again for 25 yards. The guy stops again and the injured one climbs in. Just then a Newport Beach ambulance comes by and asks me what’s going on. We tell them the story and they tell us not to worry and head off with lights and sirens blaring. I get a phone call from the Police to come identify them. When I got there the paramedics were bandaging up the guys feet and were taking him to the hospital for his injuries. It was the first day of summer after school had let out and it turns out these guys had borrowed mom and dad’s car to go to the beach.”

     “One thread of continuity about the shoplifters,” smiled Brimer,  “is that after they are caught is how these big, bad brave boys turn into crying babies once you catch them.”

Body Boarders and the Demise of the Mat

    “ I have lived thru so many phases of the surf quote industry and sport and when Morey came out with the first body boards that came in a kit you put together, they worked great and looked like crap. Then the BE172 showed and it was the only body board in the whole world and it put the blow up raft business out of business immediately. That was a big part of the Frog House’s business. We always ran rafts. One of my first jobs was to blow the 18 rafts up. I had to drag the rafts down to the gas station, half a block away, inflate them and carry them back to the Frog House. You couldn’t drag them back. I wasn’t’ allowed to drag them.”

     “Immediately Bodyboards were better items then the rafts. We’d buy 600 to 800 at a time. One brand, almost all the same color. It was easy to sell cause they all were the same. There were no 14 brands to choose from then. It was a simple time, we’d get a big shipment and they would be stuffed everywhere in the building. The competition came and new lines sprang up. Some great new manufacturers showed up in the marketplace.

 Then Morey sold out to Kransco, they mass merchandised and ruined the profit structure for us small shops by selling to the giant big box retailers in the world. It is still a good industry and I always have at least one quality bodyboarder working for us to talk to our bodyboarding customers.”

Vendor Relations

Tk, you have had a huge history with your vendors!

     “Oh yeah, and not always positive. It’s very lucky for me that the Frog House is located here in the middle of the surf world and if you don’t think Newport and Huntington Beach isn’t the middle of the industry, then you have another thing coming. It isn’t South Africa or Australia, it is here. Luckily I’ve been on a first name basis with some big time surf industry owners and also my biggest stroke of luck is that these manufacturers by and large consider the Frog House to be a very important image store. They teat us very, very well and handle our account very specially, meaning slow Pay (laughs) and taking into consideration no pay sometimes. They give us big breaks that are reserved for the large accounts and I’m not a large account with any of those guys. I don’t do mega dollars of this small little store. But I’ll tell you right now, nobody in the surf world sells as much rubber as we sell at the Frog House. If your buying a wetsuit and your not buying it at the Frog House, you're probably making a mistake. WE sell a ton of rubber out of here.”

     “We sell hard goods and our reputation is that we sell stuff that surfers use to surf with. You can buy a t-shirt here or a pair of trunks and we love you buying these things. But primarily we sell surfboards and wetsuits. There is not a store in our area that is as authentic surf as our shop is. You can also come in here and find the boys drinking a beer behind the counter. But nowadays (laughs) we try to keep it till at least 5 o’clock. And yes, young women still come in here and find young men working behind the counter. Thank goodness I’m not a young man anymore.”

Employees -  Why do they Stay

       “You have to realize that the Frog House pays all or our employees weekly,” smiled the owner,  “I mean extremely weakly. It’s a good concept.”

     “The first employee I hired when I bought the Frog House in 1977 was Mikey Beho. His real name is Mikey Flores but he lived in Montebello and we started calling him Mikey Montebello, but it was too much and so thru the years it turned into Mikey Beho.”

    “He had a brother, Glennie, who I offered a job to years ago. He was a real good guy but he had a better job then coming to work at the Frog House but said he had a brother named Mikey who would be perfect for me. I had never met Mikey but when he showed up to interview he had this hair that went half way down his back. That meant it was three foot of hair cause Mikey was only 4’6” tall. I took one look at him and said this is not the guy I want. He doesn’t look like a surfer. What do I want him for?”

     “Bless that Mikey. He has been with the Frog House for 26 years now. Just along time standard in the shop. He has been a great asset for us. The most trustworthy, personable and wonderful guy. We love him here. But we did have one period where he left for a few years to go out on his own to pen a shop at Canyon Lakes. But he discovered how disagreeable it is to operate a business and I realized how much I missed him being around here.”

     “We have been accused of being a comedy act and it is nothing that is planned or rehearsed. WE enjoy each other and what we are doing. WE try to make a person’s day when they come to shop here. When we are having a good time and people walk in and see us, we tell a few jokes and have a few laughs with them. When a person walks out with or without a purchase in their hands, they feel like they have been loved and cared for and have been part of a unique experience. And that unique experience is part of what keeps us going. With our longevity, we are seeing third generation customers coming in here, Grand kids of original customers.”

     “I feel sorry for those people who haven’t been in a shop like ours and have missed out on a bit of the flavor of the 60’s surf thing. The reality we give them is about being “real.”

     “If they ask my opinion about a product, I’ll tell them I think the product sucks if it does.”

     “When I was a kid and I went into a surf shop it seems there was some jerk head behind the counter who thought he was cooler than I was and that he had to prove it by de-meaning me somehow. So when I have a new employee here one of the first things I go thru is that the customers are way more important to me then my employees. I can get an employee any day I want, but getting a new customer isn’t as easy. I always try to impress upon the employees that the reason they are getting that free wetsuit is not cause they are such a hot surfer, but it is because they work at the Frog House and we sell a lot of wetsuits.”

     “As soon as you not working here you won’t get anything. I never want someone to walk out of the Frog House thinking that they were not as important as the guy standing behind the counter.”

The Frog Lifestyle- Tongue in Cheek or Hardcore to the Bone

  “ It’s all about lifestyle, more so then any of the shops around that I know of. But my hats off to Russell down at Russell Surfboards in Newport. He still operates a “Lifestyle Surf Shop.” Other than that there is not many of them around. It’s all about high-octane retailing and jamming product down the throat of the next young surfer gremmie idiot that comes along.”

    “ It saddens me to see what the industry itself has turned into and that people go in and purchase and feel akin to the surf and sport stores with all the fancy stuff and 14 sales people on the floor that half of them don’t even surf and work for owners and ownership that I don’t feel really shares the love for the sport of surfing that I do. But I guess that is progress. I’m glad we are not part of that.”

     “Do I consider myself a dinosaur?”

     “I was called a dinosaur a few years back by a guy who was trying to sell Billabong down the street. He presented them with a representation letter and pointed out that the Frog House was a dinosaur that couldn’t relate to the young people and the surfing industry as it is today. I take great pride in the fact that his business lasted about a year and a half. That was about 10 years ago and this old dinosaur is still kicking around and proud of it.”

    “ I’m not ready to retire just yet. I love my wife very much but I don not want to retire and go spend twenty-four hours a day at her side. I would think Linda feels the same way!”

   Luck or Genius

I asked T K Brimer, Is that how you survived in the Newport/Huntington retailing Surf Wars?

     “I’ve always thought we survived the retail wars because I’m so much smarter and better then the other guys.” He said with smile.  “But every once in a while it comes down to realizing it is LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION, baby and we are sitting on one great location. I think maybe it is a stroke of luck more than a stroke of genius.”