By ALLEN SALKIN
The New York Times

Waterbeds: The next big wave? By Allen Salkin  8-14-03 RICHMOND - Roland Formica is a lonely soldier. His beard has whitened during his long battle. Allies have surrendered to his shrewd enemy. Negative propaganda has assaulted him. But the last real waterbed salesman in the Bay Area stands his ground, powerfully worded full-color brochures holstered at the ready. "I won't have a conventional mattress in here," Formica, 55, said, his feet in thick-sole black leather shoes planted amid 16 waterbeds at his shop, Odds 'N' Ends Waterbeds. "In the beginning, all of us waterbed guys looked at it like a war on the innerspring. We called them "dead beds." Odds 'N' Ends, which opened in 1969 and which Formica claims is the oldest waterbed store in the world, used to be one of more than 20 such shops in the Bay Area, the birthplace of the water bed. One by one, competitors have closed or added so many "dead beds" -- futons, air mattresses and regular furniture -- that they are by rights no longer waterbed shops. Formica, who decided 34 years ago he could change the world by selling waterbeds and has never wavered, stores decades' worth of catalogs and design magazines in a back room and keeps discontinued stock in a warehouse. "I had a guy come in last week looking for a Liberty heating pad," he said. "Liberty went out of business 20 years ago, and no other pad will work with it. I had one new in the box." He smiled, two decades of storage justified. It has been a long and wavy road for Formica and the waterbed. Almost immediately after the bed's invention in 1967 by a San Francisco State graduate student in design named Charles Hall, it was seized on by the counterculture as an alternative to Mom and Dad's bed. Originally consisting of a water-filled vinyl mattress held in a wood frame, the undulating blob was inarguably sexier-looking than a conventional sleeping surface. Medical experts pronounced it healthier because it conformed to the body's curves. Anyone could see that the bed, which Hall originally called "the pleasure pit," was just plain groovy. "There were always hippie chicks coming in from out of state, from back East," said Formica, who was 21 when he opened Odds 'N' Ends. "And if you had a waterbed, you were going to get lucky. You'd be on this thing with two or three people, with trippy lights and cool music and the thing going up and down." By the late 1970s, business was booming and Formica was a young father. "I started all of my kids on crib-size water beds," he said. "They came out of the womb where they were supported by water and right onto water." Waterbed sales grew nationally until the mid-'80s, reaching a peak of $1.5 billion to $2 billion in 1987 and accounting for 22 percent of the American mattress industry, according to the Specialty Sleep Association, a trade group. At Formica's peak in the mid-'80s, he had three stores, a waterbed manufacturing plant and 13 employees. Then the market crashed for a variety of reasons, including bad publicity, poor quality control and changing tastes. Sales slipped in 2001 to $456 million, 6 percent of the mattress industry. Today Formica is down to one store, and he is the only employee. "Roland is a die-hard," said Hall, 60, who now makes high-tech inflatable kayaks in Martinez. "That's how it used to be. Real waterbed shops wouldn't have an innerspring in them." Hall contends that waterbeds are best sold in specialty shops where knowledgeable salespeople can answer the inevitable waterbed questions. "You field stuff about 'Is it going to fall through my floor? Will I get seasick? Will it leak?'" he said. The answers: No; no; and not unless you stab it with a long sharp knife. When a couple in their 50s, both doctors, entered Odds 'N' Ends on a recent afternoon, Formica was ready to tell them all the good reasons to buy a waterbed. "With these beds, you have no pressure points on your body," he said. "You may just wake up in exactly the same position in which you fell asleep, never moving once all night." "When you get in," he added, "it's warm and your muscles relax immediately and you go right to sleep." Also: "This will outlast a regular bed 2 to 1 and will sleep the same tonight as it will 10 years from now." The customers, Linda and Barry Engelstad, had pretty much made up their minds before entering the shop that they wanted a water bed. Linda Engelstad, an internal medicine specialist at Highland Hospital in Oakland, said she has slept on one since she sold waterbeds at a now-defunct shop in El Sobrante while she was a pre-med student. Formica wrote up their order, $859 for a California-king-size model and foundation. "It's not like we haven't moved ahead with our lives since the '60s and '70s," Linda said. "But this is the one thing we're hanging on to. In over 30 years, I've never had a backache." In the 15 years since waterbed sales sprang a leak, a few manufacturers have quietly improved the product, industry experts say. The modern waterbed is soft-sided and looks exactly like a conventional mattress. A virtually leak-proof water-filled bladder is held in a foam case, instead of wood, and a thick pad of ticking is zipped over it. The mattress can be placed on any standard platform bed or on top of a box spring, is nearly waveless, uses standard sheets and, once emptied, is far easier to move than a coil-filled mattress. "The product born in the 1960s was not a mature product," said Dennis Boyd, president of the Specialty Sleep Association and owner of Boyd Specialty Sleep in St. Louis. "Now what I see every day in my own store is twentysomethings who are very, very interested in the product and don't have any preconceptions of the product coming from the '60s or '70s." There are signs that the waterbed, unfashionable for a decade and a half, may be on the verge of making a comeback. Sales in Europe, Germany in particular, have surged in recent years, from virtually zero in 1990 to 220,000 units last year, Boyd said. Waterbeds may be acquiring a patina of hipness, as all things '70s and '80s reappear for another lap around the pop-culture track. The rooftop bar and pool at the Downtown Standard hotel in Los Angeles features three red plastic pods, each with a vibrating water bed. The wavy beds are full nearly every night with groups of giggling bar patrons. "They have turned out to be very popular," Andre Balazs, owner of the trendy year-old hotel, said. "Waterbeds haven't been seen in a while, but suddenly there it is and it's vaguely familiar." In Formica's heyday, he sold 100 to 150 beds a month from his three stores. These days, he moves 50 to 75, half sold through a Web site, www.americasbestsleep.com. He still carries a few old-style waterbeds. The Hampton has both a fold-out champagne tray and a velvet-lined jewelry-safe box in the padded headboard. Just before closing on a recent Wednesday, Carmen Hollingquest, a 26-year-old secretary at San Quentin prison, came in to shop for a waterbed to replace one she bought in 1997 that had been damaged in a break-in. She first became interested in waterbeds because of their "freakiness," she said, but now likes them because of how well she sleeps. "People always say it's from the '70s," she said, but that does not faze her. She asked Formica about his layaway plan and promised to return to make the purchase in a few weeks when she moves into a new house. If waterbeds do become popular again, Formica is ready, and if they do not, he believes he will have no problem staying in business until retirement age. He owns the building where his store is located and still has the expensive toys he bought when business was booming: a two-carat diamond wedding ring he moved to his right hand after his divorce, a '57 Chevrolet and a BMW motorcycle he rides on weekends to his cabin near Yosemite National Park. "All the other stores have been weeded out," he said. "I guess I'm the only weed left."