When he trademarked the Santa Cruz Surfing Club name, Ryan Rittenhouse didn’t know he was unleashing a battle royale between old friends and generations of surfers.
Robert Rittenhouse Sr., a tall and dignified 84-year-old with a neat part in his white hair, sits in the drafty warehouse offices of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club Inc., reminiscing about the business’s namesake, the original 27-member club he started with his friends as teenagers in the 1930s.
“We were all kids,” he says. “[At one point], the club thought, we should buy Cowell’s Beach up there where the hotel was. We never knew anything about real estate, but we thought, gee, maybe Cowell would sell it.”
He chuckles gravely.
“We went up to San Francisco and actually had enough nerve to …Â More info