A landlocked lot on the inbound side of South Padre Island Drive is an unlikely setting, but Dockside Surf Shop has been supplying the local saltwater scene “since before you were born.”
Patrick and Tippy Kelley, who celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this past December, have owned Dockside Surf Shop since 1994. They both learned to surf in junior high: Tippy attended Cullen but already knew Patrick, who went to Sundeen, by reputation. “He was in a little motorcycle gang; they rode Honda 150s and they thought they were bad,” Tippy recalled. “That was a long time ago,” Patrick explained. “There wasn’t a whole lot to do if you didn’t surf.”
At 12, he started catching rides to the waves with a friend’s brother-in-law. “He would take us to the beach if we would clean his car when we got through. We had one surfboard we shared with each other, but it took two of us to carry it anyway.”
“You learned to be tough. Either be tough, or you’re not gonna surf,” added Tippy, who taught herself when she was 13, riding the bus from Seaside Memorial Cemetery out to Bob Hall Pier. “I sat there and watched people, and I started in the whitewater and learned to stand up. I was well taken care of; everybody acted like they were my big brother.”
In that same wave of 1960s surf culture sweeping the Coastal Bend, Jerry and Cora Chisolm opened Dockside General Store and Emporium up the coast. “Dockside started in Port Aransas in ’68,” Tippy said of her shop’s lineage. A fire at the Port A store left Dockside dry-docked at a second location in downtown Corpus Christi.
Meanwhile, in Flour Bluff, a 1950s grocery store became the 1970s Surf Shack, with an old black hearse parked along the newly established SPID. “We’d camp out in the hearse, then we’d hitchhike to the beach in the morning,” Tippy reminisced about the commercial lot that would one day sponsor carloads of surf ambassadors. “So, ironically, I grew up here.”
The Chisolms bought the property in 1974, after “Hurricane Celia came along and flattened this place except for the cinder block,” explained Tippy, who was by then a champion surfer. She spent some time working at the iconic Island Surf & Sunwear in Sunrise Mall, often chasing endless summer south of the border. “She had a car that I wouldn’t drive across the bridge, and she drove it all the way down into Mexico,” Patrick mused.
Tippy would sometimes return to massive changes in the local seascape, like the opening of Fish Pass or chants of “Fair is fair” amid a beach scene that rivaled Spring Break. “We just got into town, we drove straight out to the beach and went to Bob Hall, and there were like 200 surfers on the beach and all this camera equipment,” she recalled. “Somebody came out and said, ‘Tippy, they’re filming this movie! You want to be in it?’”
She declined to appear in 1985’s cult classic The Legend of Billie Jean, as did her husband.
“I wouldn’t get my hair cut,” Patrick explained. “You had to get your hair cut in this funky style, and I wasn’t going to do it.” The new wave Billie Jean styling left local surfers scratching their shaggy heads. “It was an ’80s haircut for that movie,” Patrick emphasized. “I knew the kids from the ’80s; nobody I knew hung out with that haircut.”
The shop, however, had just the look the filmmakers wanted. The Chisolms’ Dockside Sail, Surf & Dive played itself in Billie Jean, though with a bit of movie magic, the building was transported back to its original location. “You’d open up the back door and you were in Port Aransas,” Patrick shrugged. “That’s movies.”
“I’m surprised they’ve never done a remake or a follow-up,” he said, adding that he would welcome Hollywood crews to set up souvenir tents and burn effigies of teen idols in the parking lot. “Now I do get people come in and ask me if I’m the old man that stole the mini bike,” Patrick jokes, his days in a pre-teen Honda gang coming back to haunt him in the form of movie location tourists.
Today, a soundtrack of KPUS 104.5 Classic Rock plays over the store stereo. The Kelleys removed the spiral staircase Billie Jean ascended in her pursuit of $608 worth of justice, but a “treasure hunt” of the shop’s historical artifacts includes a tiki carving, two giant clamshells and a pipe-smoking sentry at the front door. “He’s from the original Dockside,” Tippy said, “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Patrick, a vintage surfboard guru, points out a 1967 Weber Professional suspended from the ceiling. “This one, to my knowledge, has never been out of the shop. When we bought the store, these two boards were up in the attic,” he said, moving on to an adjacent Surfboard Hawaii Model A with distinct flowerchild vibes.
A respected judge on the competitive surfing circuit, Patrick spends less time on the waves these days. “My friend John Olvey, the artist who passed away recently, we did the math one time, and we figured that in 50-something years of surfing, we probably actually only surfed about two hours. The rest of the time you’re paddling.”
As for the future of the shop, “I leave it all up to her,” said Patrick, who also has a job on dry land. “It’s been her deal since the go. I come in here for a couple of hours on Sunday, so she can basically go to H-E-B.”
The shop is closed on Mondays, leaving Tippy time to hit the beach.
“It’s a challenge when you get older, but when you’re a surfer, it’s something that never leaves you,” she says. “I have surfed good waves all my life. I competed, I got a surf shop, I’ve been in business 31 years. Everything was connected to surfing, and surfing is my life. It’s still my life.”
