The day Slip Check got colorful.

One Saturday in the summer of ’67 my friend Pete Robinson and I were messing around at the MP shop spraying some Slip Check on Pete’s new 8’9 Snub. Pete worked for MP in the fin department so on our day off it was OK for us to come by the shop and do stuff to our boards.

Pete had gotten a really nice knitted doily table cloth from his mom and had thought it would be nice if we draped it over his board and sprayed the Slip Check through it so the pattern would be left on the board. Instead of a solid color like all the other boards with Slip Check his would be different.

I’m not sure Pete’s mom knew that once we did this the doily was not going to decorate a table anymore but, in didn’t seem to bother Pete so we went straight ahead.

We draped the doily over the nose area of his board and got one of the colored spray cans of Slip Check… If I remember right it was the magenta one… and sprayed the decking through the doily. Let it sit for a few minutes then pulled the cloth off the board and there was the doily pattern on the nose of Pete’s board. I don’t know where Pete got the idea from but we sure hadn’t seen anything like it. I was so stocked I thought ’man, I’m going to do that to my board’.

I got my board, cleaned the wax off and laid the doily over the deck of the board. I thought I’d do the whole deck though, not just the nose. But instead of using a single color I got all the Slip Check colors and began spraying through the doily from tip to tail fading from on color to the other. Lightly layering one color over the other I could even get more colors. When I was done and lifted the doily off my board…. WOW, now that was really different. All these colors with the doily pattern imprinted on the deck was cool. Never had seen that before either.

Well, that’s where it all started… in Ventura anyway. Before you knew it guys all over were spraying multiple colors with doily patterns on their boards. MP even started marketing packets of paper doilies right along with cans of Slip Check.

Pete and I had no idea what we were doing or where it would go…

D.R.