Dale Velzy started shaping surfboards in the 1940s and eventually opened what is considered the first retail surf shop in the world in Manhattan Beach in 1950.

His legend as a surfboard shaper grew over the decades until his death in 2005 at 77 years old.

A plaque honoring Velzy’s legacy was unveiled recently at the Hermosa Beach Museum, with friends and family in attendance, including his son, Matt Velzy, who flew out from Hawaii for the event.

The bronze plaque, created by Green Hills, reads, “Opened one of the world’s first known surfboard shops at this site in the early 1950s.”

The marker will eventually find its home in the sidewalk at the site of that first surf shop, which is now by The Strand House restaurant, a few steps from the Manhattan Beach Pier.

“I’m so proud, after all this time they’re honoring my Dad,” the younger Velzy said at the Aug. 27 unveiling.

Jacquelyne May helped spearhead the plaque project, which has taken around 11 years, with the help of Bing Copeland, who founded Bing Surfboards in 1959, and many other supporters.

May said Copeland paid for the plaque, which cost more than $2,300. The South Bay Boardriders Club paid the additional cost to expedite the process so it could be completed for the Aug. 27 event.

“Bing encouraged me from day one,” May said.

In his family’s Hermosa Beach garage and later the Manhattan Beach Surf Club, which was located at the Manhattan Beach Pier, the elder Velzy developed an expertise at preparing and reshaping existing boards.

An empty shoe repair shop became Velzy’s surf shop in 1950.

Matt Velzy was born about two years after his father’s shop opened.

“He didn’t have any other talents and he was kind of a drop out from school,” the younger Velzy said of his father. “He started making surfboards and it became the only thing that he wanted to do and the only thing that he was good at. And so he excelled at it and kept on going and he became the inspiration for Greg Noll and Bing (Copeland) and Hap (Jacobs) and Dewey Weber.”

The elder Velzy was inducted into the Hermosa Beach Surfers Walk of Fame in 2003. Matt Velzy did not follow in his father’s footsteps, moving to Maui nearly 50 years ago.

The younger Velzy was a server at Sheraton Luau for 18 years before moving back to California in 1990, where he owned Stuft Pizza in El Segundo.

But he missed Maui.

“So I sold the pizzeria,” he said, “and moved back to Maui.”

He went to work as a banquet server at the Ritz-Carlton, in Maui Kapalua, for 17 years before his retirement.

Matt Velzy said some of his father’s tools were donated to the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center in San Clemente, but the remainder of his tools he donated to the Hermosa Beach Museum, including a balsa wood sanding block. The younger Velzy also donated a trophy his father received from the magazine editor of International Surfing Magazine in 1966.

Museum curator Jamie Erickson said the SBBC is planning to coordinate an installation time for the Velzy plaque with Manhattan Beach Public Works. No date has been set.