As a journalist, I’ve always found Mike Eaton an exceptionally easy subject to track down, the research portion of any article on Eaton going something like this: Call up his website, scroll to his phone number, dial. The end.

And on the other end of the line, sounding scratchy and distant and as though he were standing near the one desk in the back of an otherwise dusty and bustling factory (which, of course, he probably was) I’ve always found Eaton to be a friendly, gregarious voice, full of anecdotes and stripped-bare answers to questions that he’d probably addressed hundreds of times before.

So when I’d heard earlier this year that Eaton was preparing to shut down his operation, pack in his fifty-year surfboard and paddleboard shaping career and head to the Big Island of Hawaii, I called, same as always.

I was surprised then when the phone rang once, then stopped, followed by the sharp, upward three-note lilt that means you’ve got a bum number. "The number you are trying to reach," the computer-generated female voice of the phone company told me, "is no longer in service."

And like that, an era had ended, I knew. In many ways, it was a fitting end for unassuming Mike Eaton, whose name has been part and parcel of the Southern California surfing and paddling community for decades, but who would never make too much fuss about his own departure.

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Eaton was easy enough to find, though, and just as accommodating as I’d remembered him. So I explained to him, just as I have every other time I’ve spoken to him, that I was a magazine guy, and that I’d heard he’s leaving, and that I wanted to talk to him about that.

"Well, yeah," he said, in his trademark drawl. "That’s pretty much it. It’s all true."

Since the early ‘70s, Eaton’s occupied the same shop in San Diego’s Mission Bay, shaping influential and highly functional surfboards, as well as some of the most sought-after paddleboards on the planet. But on April 1 of this year, Eaton unceremoniously closed doors on the shop, leaving behind the building that had housed his life’s work.

None of this is particularly surprising, of course. At 73, Eaton has fifty years of boardbuilding experience under his belt, and even more time in the ocean. He deserves to head off to the Islands and enjoy a period without labor. "I’m going to the Big Island and I’ve got the spread all set up," he said. "It’s one of the last little bits of country on the island, so I’m excited about it."

He says the waves are "good enough" for him, and he’ll still be able to paddle, and with family nearby, it’s an ideal place to hang up the planer and enjoy life for a while.

In the surf, it’s been quite a life. Testament to his span of generations, Eaton learned to surf from Tom Blake, who was his swim coach in Palos Verdes, where he grew up. Eaton began surfing at the age of 14, and began shaping boards professionally in the late ‘50s. As a Coast Guardsman, he was stationed in San Francisco where he met Jack O’Neill, and where he later shaped boards out of O’Neill’s garage.

Eaton had grown up around Dale Velzy, and would often travel down to shop as a kid, where he would, among other things, watch Velzy shape boards. When O’Neill asked him if he could shape, Eaton naturally lied.

"He asked me if I could shape, and I said that I could. I figured I’d seen Velzy do it enough," says Eaton.

And that’s how an influential Southern California shaping career was born. In O’Neill’s garage, he shaped surfboards. After he got out of the service, he says, he moved back home to Palos Verdes, training porpoises and whales, again getting the job by stretching the truth.

"They said, ‘Can you train a porpoise?’ And I said, ‘probably as good as anybody,’" Eaton says.

Soon Eaton returned to shaping, making boards for some of the most influential labels of the day. Paid by the board, he saw that he could make a good living if he was just willing to work.

"A lot of the other guys just wanted to surf," he said. "So they’d come in on Friday, shape a couple boards and live off that for a week."

While still keeping up on his time in the water, Eaton turned to shaping boards prodigiously, and professionally. "I had a lot of good years there," he remembers wistfully. Getting paid by the boards, Eaton remembers making upwards of twenty boards a day for a stretch.

When Bing got bought out by Gordon & Smith in San Diego, Eaton continued to shape for them, producing an early 3-fin bonzer board and variations on the keel fin fishes that were popular in the San Diego area at the time. He garnered a local following and a reputation for making high-quality boards. "He crafted some of the finest big-wave guns of the ‘70s," reads the Eaton entry in Matt Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, which also notes that Eaton’s shaping philosophy ran counter to the full-steam ahead shortboard revolution of the period.

In 1978, Eaton established his own surfboard label. And although he remembers making his first paddleboard, a 12-footer, in 1968 for the World Surfing Championships in Puerto Rico, it wasn’t until the late ‘80s that he began making paddleboards in earnest, a craft for which he may ultimately have become best known.

Eaton explains that this had more to do with heritage and upbringing than anything else. That growing up around Tom Blake and palling around with Dale Velzy taught him that there was more to the lifestyle than just surfing.

"Learning from Tom Blake, he was the original surfer type," Eaton says. "He was so into health food and running and living the clean lifestyle."

But when I suggest that maybe being immersed in the waterman lifestyle this way was what has kept him going all these years, Eaton scoffs slightly, saying that he thinks the opposite is true. That keeping himself immersed in a host of divergent interests might have been the best thing he could have done for his surfing career.

"I was always more of a greaser surfer," he says. "I was in to hot rods and cars. Velzy and I used to build up cars and trade them."

Eaton adds that his other great interest was sailplanes, adding that he often considered that that was the hobby that was ultimately going to take him down. "I always figured that’s how I’d adios this world," he laughs.

Ultimately, though, it’s his career in the water that has defined his life’s work. He may have made sure to diversify his lifestyle over the years, but he was always immersed in waterman culture. He’s completed the Catalina Classic multiple times, the last finish coming in 2005, at the age of 71. He hopes to compete again when he’s 75, but he says that we’ll have to see about that.

For now, he continues to paddle three days a week, several miles at a stretch, lengthening it out on long summer days. He also stays in the surf regularly, even if he’s self-deprecating about his own abilities. "I’m a little slower than I used to be," he says.

And as he prepares to leave San Diego for Hawaii, he says he’s lost count of the number of boards that he shaped. He added it up years ago, he says, and it was well over 50,000. He could figure it out, he’s quick to point, but it’s clear that he doesn’t want to.

That’s okay. His legacy will be as a great shaper, and as a fine paddleboard maker. For years, before paddleboarding’s modern resurgence, there were only two names in Southern California paddleboarding--Joe Bark and Mike Eaton.

Now that he’s leaving his full-time shaping work behind, Eaton is passing off his line of paddleboards to Brian Szymanski and the crew at North County Paddleboards, whom he trusts to continue in his legacy of well-crafted boards. Meanwhile, his surfboards will be built by Waterlines.

As for Eaton’s shaping, he says he packed up all of his tools and he’ll be bringing them to Hawaii with him, where he’ll have a workshop on his property. "I’ll shape at my leisure," he says, "And I’ll be expensive."

It’s a deserved stance for an iconic boardbuilder.

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In many ways, Eaton’s contribution to Southern California ocean culture transcends surfboards and paddleboards. Yes, if you had to hang a hat on it, you could say that his building paddleboards helped to usher in an era when California surfers once again had an appreciation for a once-forgotten sport. And, yes, you could look at his surfboard shaping career and recognize that even during the ‘70s shortboard revolution, he was making longboards, and that he’s always been an advocate for high-volume, fuller designs ("I’m not that in to pocket rockets and all that," he says today.).

But really, it was Eaton’s role as a living connection to the past, and his sustained and active involvement in the surf and waterman lifestyle that make him so invaluable. The fact that he has been able to remain an integral part of our culture through half a century’s work. The fact that he remained stoked on surfing and that he didn’t become grumpy or bitter about the changes that have taken place in the culture during that time. The fact that he’s a man who learned to surf from Tom Blake, and that he continues to surf in the lineups of his Sunset Cliffs neighborhood alongside college kids who probably couldn’t tell you who Tom Blake was.

The young men who have taken up the waterman tradition today owe a debt of gratitude to surfers like Mike Eaton, and they know it. They know that if it wasn’t for a person like Eaton--who continued to build outriggers and go freediving and cross the Catalina Channel into his seventies (not because it was particularly fun, but because it was in some way necessary), and in general to breathe life into the waterman tradition that he grew up with--it’s unlikely that Southern California surfing today would be much more than checking the waves on the Internet and alerting your friends via cell phone.

But because Eaton did those things, and because he did them for as long as he has, he has inspired a new generation to return to those roots, a generation that takes that responsibility seriously.

Of course, if you ask Eaton, he wouldn’t phrase it that way.

He’d just say, as he did last week, "We had a good run."

And then he’d ride off in the sunset toward Hawaii.

Eaton’s website, complete with its highly useful message board, will remain up even after his retirement. Check it out at www.eatonsurf.com. Also, his boards will be handled by North County paddleboards (www.ncpaddleboards.com), and his surfboards will be handled by Waterlines (http://www.waterlinesunlimited.com) . To share an Eaton appreciation of your own, go to our Eaton Appreciation Thread in our forum.