Thursday, July 3, 2025

Gard Chapin (1918-1957)

Aloha and Welcome to this short chapter on 1930s standout surfer Gard Chapin (1918-1957).

Miki Dora, Ramona & Gard, late 1940s

Photographer unknown

In his book California Surfriders, originally published in 1946, Doc Ball featured a half-dozen photos of Gard Chapin. Despite the fact he was not well liked, Chapin was out in the lineup often at places like San Onofre and Palos Verdes Cove, and was acknowledged by his peers as one of the outstanding surfers of the 1930s and ‘40s. “He was kind of a wild guy; lived in Hollywood,” Doc told me. “He had a sister, Martha. He’d bring her down and we got her to surfin’. Oh, God, he’d go down San Onofre [a lot]… He was quite a guy, alright.”[11]

“Innovative but prickly surfer from Hollywood,” is how writer Matt Warshaw characterized him. Chapin was the “stepfather to surfing icon Mickey [sp.] Dora. Little is known about Chapin other than he was one of the most talented and least-liked surfers of the prewar era. He was born in Hollywood… and began surfing in the early ‘30s.”

Thanks to David Rensin’s All For A Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora, we know a lot more about Gard Chapin than we used to. In fact, for further reading about Chapin and especially Miki Dora, Rensin’s work is the go-to source.

“The heavy solid-wood boards in use during the ‘30s and ‘40s allowed for very little maneuvering,” wrote Matt Warshaw, “but Chapin, after developing a drop-knee stance in order to lower his center of gravity, had greater command over his board than virtually anyone on the coast. He preferred to ride ‘deep’ (close to the breaking part of the wave), and when others rode in front of him he shouted or pushed them out of the way or simply ran them over.”[12]

“Gard was a member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, and the best surfer then,” declared a much younger Joe Quigg. “He ran circles around most guys up and down the California coast because most surfers in his generation were laid-back. To them, surfing was like going fishing. Then there’s this wild, radical guy tearing up the ocean. No wonder some guys didn’t like him that much. I think they were jealous. All those tricks that Miki [Dora, his step son] did later, Gard did first: going over people, under them, around them, behind them, pushing them off waves – and they had the same audacious, wry humor doing it.”[13]

“The rest of us believed nobody had any claim to the wave they were on,” maintained E.J. Oshier. “We’d have five or six guys on one wave and the more we had, the more fun it was. We’d holler back and forth, talk and ride in together. It was pretty square and orchestrated but it worked for us. But guys like Gard would go under you and shove your board out. It’s not that he was trying to perform and needed room; he just wanted to do what he wanted to do, and if you were in the way, he wanted you out of the way.”[14]

“Sometimes Gard would use guys paddling out to get over his wave as a slalom course,” remembered San Diego surfer Woody Ekstrom. “He’d go around one, then around the other, and yell, ‘We’ll all be killed!’”[15]

“I first saw Gard surf at the Palos Verdes Cove,” Jim ‘Burrhead’ Drever remembered. “He would howl while he rode, and his voice would echo off the Cove walls.”[16]

“The yelling was exuberance and wanting to have people watch him,” clarified LeRoy Grannis. “Most of us then felt it wasn’t necessary to draw attention to yourself surfing. If you were good enough, we’d watch anyway.”[17]

“Gard was an unbelievable surfer,” remembers Kit Horn who was a kid at the time. “I remember him at Malibu, coming across a seven- or eight-foot wave. He did this fabulous cutback on a ninety-pound redwood surfboard. He drop-kneed this thing and came back into it so hard, I just thought, ‘Who was that?!’”[18]

“The Chapin place was run-down and didn’t look like anybody lived there,” remembered Bill Van Dorn. “Chunks of cars rusted in the yard, and surfboards leaned up against the eaves. Inside the front door, immediately to the right, was a piano in an alcove, but it had been completely covered over with skis. Books, mostly [Gard’s unattractive sister] Martha’s, were piled everywhere. The kids’ mother, Louise, had pretty advanced cerebral palsy. [Gard’s attractive sister] Nancy and I didn’t socialize much with Gard. He came to visit a few times, once with [his wife] Ramona, twice without. While I was in the service, she left him a couple times. I saw him at the beach when I got back. I remember once he got in a big fight with Martha.

“Nancy supported the whole family working for an advertising agency in Hollywood. Martha did bit parts, wrote scripts, and contributed to a few books now and then. Gard did nothing much.”[19]

“Gard went to Douglas Aircraft right out of high school and worked in a tool crib making twenty dollars a week,” Burrhead Drever recalled. “He wasn’t an engineer, but in the late ‘30s that was still a lot of money.”[20]

“He just couldn’t go into the service,” Woody Ekstrom explained. “Because of his ulcers he was 4-F and had to rest a lot. But as soon as he’d get them healed up, he’d go on a drunk binge and be right back to crackers and milk again.”[21]

“Gard and Ramona [Miki Dora’s mother] were a god and goddess,” recalled Douglas Stancliff, “stunning to look at. Gard was 6’1” or so. Extremely muscular. Kind of an Aryan blond. He was also a chauvinist, intolerant, maybe racist, and loud. He drank too much. Ramona did, too.”[22]

“Gard also used to pick on a Jewish family of surfers down at the Flood Control in Long Beach,” remembered Jim “Burrhead” Drever. “He called them kikes all the time. I don’t know why he did that, because any one of those guys could have beat him up.”[23]

“On the other hand,” Gardner Chapin, Jr. pointed out, “my father had a good friend who was Jewish, a guy named Perry, who used to come over and drink with Gard on the weekends. Gard said that if anything happened to my mother and him, Perry and his wife, Alice, were going to adopt me. So, was Gard anti-Semitic? Hard to say.”[24]

“Chapin married Mickey [sp.] Dora’s mother [Ramona] in the early ‘40s,” wrote Matt Warshaw, “he brought his stepson to the beach fairly regularly when the boy was in his preteens, introduced him to surfing, and had a great influence on Dora’s personality.”[25]

“Gard Chapin influenced Miki a great deal in petty ways,” Miki Dora’s father observed. “Gard felt that the laws were made for his protection but that he didn’t have to respect them himself. One day I saw him at the beach stealing ice cream from a Good Humor man. One guy did something in front to create a distraction while Gard went in from behind.”[26]

“Miki once told me,” recalled Mike McNeill, “that when he was a kid, he and Gard would come back from San Onofre and pull up in front of Miklos’ restaurant in shorts and T-shirts. They’d walk through the door and into the kitchen, grab whatever food they wanted to eat, then walk out, get into the car, and drive away.”[27]

“Many times Gard got out of hand at the restaurant because he was drinking,” remembered Miklos Dora, Sr., “and the more he drank, the meaner he got. One night I left the restaurant early and went to a movie. When I came back, my manager said, ‘Gard came. He walked in and said, “This place is owned by my wife!” He went into the kitchen. I had some roast ducks left over from dinner, and he picked up a whole roast duck. He said, “I’m taking it. It belongs to me!”‘

“I called Ramona and said, ‘You tell Gardner that if he comes in again and behaves like he did last night, the police will be here and he will be put in jail.’ He never came again.”[28]

“Miki admired Gard – in a way,” attested Gardner Chapin, Jr. “Gard took him surfing. Gard was one of the guys. Gard spent a fuck of a lot more time with Miki than Mr. Dora ever did. Lots of Miki’s personality came from Gard because he was probably the only consistent role model…

“But I’m also sure Miki thought my father was a complete madman, and he’d have been correct. There are lots of examples. My father liked to shoot buckshot down on the neighbors below us on July Fourth, then wait until the police came. Then he’d show them a shotgun that hadn’t been fired. Of course, the trick was that he had two identical guns.

“Another time, I guess it was around 1950, as both Miki and my mother told it to me, Gard got the newspaper, read about new parking meters in the city, and completely blew his top. He said, ‘This is it. Communism is taking over.’ That would have been it with anyone else, but not with him. He started drinking and he kept ranting and raving. As the day wore on, he got madder and madder, and madder and madder. He finally cracked around midnight. He said, ‘Miki, let’s go.’

“‘Where?’

“‘To take out the parking meters.’

“Gard grabbed a baseball bat and they got into the car.

“When my dad got to the parking meters, he looked around. There was a little traffic but no cops. He started swinging the bat, and in about two minutes had smashed every meter. He threw the bat on the ground; it was shattered anyway. Then he jumped in the car and took off. Miki said he’d never seen anything like it, that Dad was like a man possessed.”[29]

Miki added: “When we were finished, Gard suddenly became very calm, and he climbed up the sign pole on the corner. ‘Here’s a souvenir.’ He handed me the street sign from Hollywood and Vine. I kept it for years.”[30]

Gard’s temper was not just “reserved for parking meters, surfers in his way, and bothersome neighbors.”[31]

“We had a peach tree in the backyard,” remembers Gard’s son Gardner, “and when I deserved it my dad used to make me pick my switch from the tree. Then he’d get out his pocket knife and cut the little branch, pull down my pants, and whip the hell out of me.”[32]

“Miki told my wife and me than Gard used to come home drunk,” Leroy Grannis said, “and drag him out of bed and beat the hell out of him.”[33]

In the later 1940s, Gard Chapin started a cabinet and overhead door building business, “when he and Ramona lived at Elwood Stancliff’s Studio City home, in the garage apartment.”

Chapin started building surfboards at this time, also, and when he got his own shop, he hired a helper named Bob Simmons. He had met Simmons when they were both recovering from accidents in a hospital.[34]

Supposedly, it was Chapin who turned Simmons on to surfing as a way to exercise and strengthen Simmons’ shattered elbow and arm that he had sustained in a bicycle accident. He was probably the guy who also told Simmons about “the green room.”

Simmons went on to become the recognized “Father of the Modern Surfboard.” Surfing historian Matt Warshaw noted that “Surfboard design genius Bob Simmons is said to have bought his first board from Chapin; the two surfers later built boards together.”[35]

Around 1955-1956, “Gard was in a car accident,” related his son Gardner. “Someone rear-ended him while he waited at a stop sign. It broke his neck. He wore a huge cast for a year. He started in on painkillers and drank more. After the cast came off, he was still in a lot of pain, so he drank even more. His real downfall was the absinthe he smuggled in from Mexico. The stuff made him insane. Everything came unglued. He lost the cabinet shop, he and Ramona split. I was sent to live with my relatives… My mother became a secretary someplace near downtown L.A. She took the streetcar to work but said a lot of times she walked so she could save the fifteen cents. She’d come [out near San Bernardino]… about every two weeks and take me back to L.A. to spend the weekend. She lived in hotels. It was different in those days: everybody seemed to know everybody in the hotel and they’d all play cards, plus they had a swimming pool. She had different boyfriends in these places… Miki always thought they took advantage of her, and that after Miklos Sr., it had all gone downhill.”

“My dad had come to see me only twice when I lived [with relatives near San Bernardino]… The first time was really great. We went out to eat, then to see Rad’s orange grove. Rad gave him a bunch of oranges. He said he’d be back in two weeks to see me again. I didn’t see him for two months. When he came, the oranges were still in the backseat of his car, rotting, and he was drunk as hell, so Frances – Uncle Rad’s wife – had him arrested. He’d brought a bunch of Christmas presents for me, so Frances let him give me the presents before she called the cops. That was the last I saw him.

“Not long after… I got the news that Gard had died.”[36]

“Gard was thirty-nine,” by 1957, explained Bill Van Dorn. “He was in the dumps over Ramona. He drank. He’d get dried out in the Bay of La Paz with a fisherman who had befriended him, a guy who tried not to let him drink. This time he’d been gone for a month, just before Christmas. One day the guy who owned the boat called me and said he had some bad news. They’d had dinner in La Paz. They’d been drinking a bit; Gard said he had a headache and would take the dinghy back to the boat and go to sleep. When the captain got out to the boat, he found no dinghy, no Gard, no nothing. He thought Gard had gone somewhere else, so he went to bed. In the morning, still no Gard, so they started looking. They found the dinghy way down in the bay, beached. Then they found Gard’s body five days later, floating. There was no evidence of injury or foul play. Nothing missing from the boat. We figured he could have just slipped getting out of the dinghy, or getting in. The dinghy was upside down when they found it… They buried him in La Paz.”[37]

“Chapin died under mysterious circumstances in Baja, Mexico,” Warshaw put it. “… Dora later told Surfer magazine that his stepfather had been murdered.”[38]

“My mother and Gard’s sister Martha finally talked to the fishing boat captain,” Gardner Chapin Jr. related. “He said that one of the two Mexicans in the dinghy hit Gard in the head with an oar and took his money. He didn’t say why, or if there had been an argument, but they found his body and his wallet was empty. I don’t think the fish took the cash. The captain also told my mother – and of course my mother and Martha knew this very well – that my father was in excellent shape, a great swimmer, and there was no turbulence. The weather had been fine, the harbor very calm. He didn’t simply drown.”[39]

ENDIT

___________________________

Footnotes

[11] Gault-Williams, Malcolm. Interview with John “Doc” Ball, January 10, 1998.

Monday, June 30, 2025

Leroy "Granny" Grannis (1917-2011)

Aloha and Welcome to this chapter in the LEGENDARY SURFERS collection, covering Leroy “Granny” Grannis.

In the 1930s, Granny was a key Palos Verdes Surfing Club (PVSC) member. In later life, he took up surf photography and this is what he's most noted for.

Granny. Photographed by unknown.

Chapter Contents

EARLY INFLUENCERS

SURF CLUBS & PVSC

SURFIN’ THE LATE ‘30s

WAR & FAMILY

AFTER THE WAR

SURF PHOTOG

“PHOTOS BY GRANNIS”

SHORTBOARDS, HAND GLIDERS & WIND SURFING

END DAYS

TECHNICAL NOTES

Leroy Frank Grannis was born on August 12, 1917, at home in Hermosa Beach, less than a block from the beach. Hermosa was a small town back then, with a population of approximately 3,500 residents. Since the big hospital was a good deal away, many people just had their babies at home. At that time, what used to be called El Camino Real – the Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH for short – was just a dirt road.

Early Influencers

By the time Leroy was five, he was going with his dad on early morning swims. “I’ve been around the ocean ever since I was born,” he told me. “When I was born, we lived a half block from the Strand in Hermosa Beach, on 10th Street.

“My earliest recollection of the ocean is when I was 5 or 6 years old. My dad used to get up early and go down and jump in the ocean in the summertime. I went along with him. I learned to bodysurf. Eventually, I got into belly boards.”

At age 14, Leroy began his long sojourn in the world of stand-up surfing. “When I was 14, I became acquainted with the surfers in Hermosa through Norman Hale, my next door neighbor. He was also a good friend of Doc Ball’s.”

“Norman’s mother had a restaurant on the beachfront called Ma Brown’s, which was where the surfers hung out. Doc hung out at the restaurant, too, and met her son and they became good friends. Doc’s son Norman is named after Norman Hale. Norm got brain cancer and died at an early age.”

“My dad bought me this slab of pine which was about 24-inches wide and 6-feet long and 2-inches deep,” Granny continued, pegging the year as 1931, “and I shaped it with a drawknife. I rode some waves on my knees before I decided I needed something bigger. Since Norm was riding paddleboards and solid boards at the time, he loaned me some to ride.”

The teenage Grannis had shaped at least one body board (3-4 feet long, 16-inches wide) and made a stab at shaping his first surfboard. It became readily apparent that this was not to be one of his strong points. So, he ditched his own shapes to borrow Norm Hale’s boards.

It was through Norman Hale that Leroy met John Ball, then a dental student at the University of Southern California. A Grannis/Ball match-up soon took hold and their friendship lasted for the rest of their long lives.

After graduating from USC Dental College in 1933, John “Doc” Ball set-up his dental practice in Los Angeles in early 1934, continued to surf with his buddies in the South Bay, and began to photograph the emerging California surfing lifestyle.

“In late ’32,” Leroy recounted, “I had to move from Redondo to University High School. In 1933, I came back to Redondo and that’s when I met Hop [Hoppy Swarts]. I moved in with my mother. My folks were divorced… My sister knew Hop’s sister and we eventually met through them. He wasn’t surfing at the time, but found out the rest of us were and jumped into it and eventually became a real fine surfer.”

Granny and Hoppy began surfing at Palos Verdes Cove, driving in borrowed cars to get there.

Surf Clubs & PVSC

[The Depression] “kept us kinda limited in certain ways,” Doc Ball told me once, in an interview with him, “but we had surfin’ to take care of everything. Long as there’s waves, why, you didn’t have to pay for those. All we had to do was buy the gas to get there.”

I asked Granny what his take was on the Great Depression and its effect on surfing. “Well, I don’t know how it effected us [then],” he replied. “It made us appreciate money when we were older, cuz we never had any during the Depression. I would go for weeks without a penny in my pocket. I went to high school stone broke most of the time. You’d take a lunch with you, of course, so you could eat. There just wasn’t any money available. Those that had steady jobs were the kings.”

A year after he got going in his dental practice, Doc got together with Adie Bayer to found the Palos Verdes Surfing Club.

The PVSC was second only to the Corona del Mar Surf Board Club. Because it organized the first annual Pacific Coast Surfing Championship in 1928, and boasted the Father of Modern Surfing Duke Kahanamoku as a member at one point, the Corona del Mar Surf Board Club is generally considered to be the first surf club to organize on the Mainland; “the largest club of this kind in America," according to The Santa Ana Daily Register, July 31, 1928.

Chuck “A Luck" Ehlers claimed the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club was the second oldest club, when "the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club was formed [1934]. They had about 18 members. The old ones plus Leroy’s [younger, by 7 years] brother Don Grannis, Ted Davies, and others."

I tried to pin Doc Ball down on this one. How he remembers it is that Johnny Kerwin got the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club going “a little after we formed. Palos Verdes was one of the first ones that organized. After that was Hermosa and then Manhattan and then Santa Monica. From there on it went up the coast and kept going after that.”

“Well, he was a member of the Hermosa Club,” Granny told me, particularly addressing the dates Chuck-A-Luck put on things in a Surfer’s Journal article. “Chuck’s all wet on his dates and things. Strictly a figment of his imagination. He was on the scene, there’s no doubt about it, and a lot of things happened [as he described], but not at the times he stated.

“He started at the same time [as I did]. It was quite a group of them in Manhattan, who surfed Manhattan Pier.”

Other surfers Granny especially remembers from back that time were not only Doc and Norm Hale, but also a “Japanese fella, whose name I forget.”

“In 1935, a whole bunch of us from Redondo High started surfing together,” Leroy recalled, adding: “One of the things that got the surfing groups going in the late ‘30s: we started playing paddle polo at the Plunge, out there by USC. The competition was pretty keen.”

John “Doc” Ball was typically modest in comparing his Palos Verdes Surfing Club to other surf clubs of the era. The fact was that the Palos Verdes Surfing Club was more sophisticated and organized than any of the other clubs early on. Its organization would be impressive even compared to today’s standards. Importantly, Doc’s photography played a large part in establishing the PVSC as the dominant surf club of the 1930s.

In 1936, a year after the club formed, both Leroy and Hoppy Swarts were inducted into the PVSC. “Myself and Hop were the only two that joined the club [PVSC] [from the Redondo High group]. The rest of ‘em scattered out between Hermosa and Manhattan (our school took in all of Hermosa and Manhattan).”

“We were really a friendly group,” Grannis said of the Palos Verdes crew. “We met every Wednesday night… Doc had a dental office on the corner of Santa Barbara and Vermont [streets]; over the theatre, there… That was an all-white neighborhood at the time… He had a spare room and we converted that to a clubhouse. We had pictures – each one of us with our boards – hanging on the wall… Every weekend, if there was surf, we were out surfing either Hermosa Pier or Palos Verdes Cove.

“See, the Cove wasn’t any good in the summertime, cuz it only takes a north swell. Then, of course, in the late ‘30s, we all started going down to San Onofre in the summertime.”

Surfin’ The Late ‘30s

One of the standout surfs Granny remembers of the 1930s was his first trip to Malibu ten years after Tom Blake and Sam Reid first surfed the place in 1926. “In May 1936,” Granny surfed Malibu with Hoppy and Bud Morrissey, who had an “in” at the Malibu Colony. “Pete [Peterson] was riding Malibu in those days, then Gard Chapin and more and more Palos Verdes [Surfing Club] people.”

“Flood Control – right where the Queen Mary is, now – that was a great south swell spot. That was before the breakwater was built across San Pedro Harbor.”

Surfing continued to gain in popularity, as demonstrated by not only surfing photographs making it into newspapers (mostly Doc Ball's), but articles about surfing, as well.

"This is Big Surf," wrote and photographically documented Doc of March 13, 1937. Pete Peterson "of Santa Monica" is identified riding the "wave of the day." Also featured: Leroy Grannis and Jean Depue.

“Pete Peterson – he was one of the big ones who could really paddle,” Doc recalled. “He was expert at taking gals up on his shoulders and everything, and riding. He was one of the big surfers in those days… He was a big wave rider. He used to be able to cut across a wave almost like they do now; get in the tunnel and get out; just an extraordinary surf hound. That’s what we thought.”

No less stoked was Leroy “Granny” Grannis, aka “Scrobble Noggin” “That was one of Doc’s sayings,” declared Grannis. “I don’t know how he came up with it. I was ‘Granny’ all along. But that was Doc’s special name [for me]. I became ‘Granny’ in the second grade.”

“He’d get shook up every once in a while,” explained Doc about Leroy’s nickname of Scrobble Noggin, “and he’d get an ornery look on his face [at those times].”

That winter swell of 1937-38 cranked out good sized surf. January 7, 1938 was "The day when the newsreel boys came down to shoot the damage done by the big seas packed up and left when we came out with our surfboards," wrote Doc Ball. Surfers he identified with photographic proof to back it up: "Tulie" Clark, Hal Pearson, Al Holland, Adie Bayer and Leroy Grannis.

In a write-up with pictures entitled "Palos Verdes Surfing Club at the Long Beach Surfing Contest," Doc Ball wrote that at this contest, an Hawaiian team even competed. PVSC members, left to right were: [Gene] Hornbeck, Reynolds, Humphreys, [Fenton] Scholes, Huber, [Al] Pearson, [Johnny] Gates, Alsten, [E.J.] Oshier, [Adie] Bayer, [Jean] Depue, Allen, [Hoppy] Swarts, Grannis, Pierce, [Al] Landes, [Tulie] Clark.

Tulie Clark was “Hot and cold,” Granny remembered. “He’d work and get out of shape, periodically. Most of the time, he was right up there and is in great shape, even today.”

I asked Granny about Peanuts Larsen, who didn't seem to be part of any one group. “Larsen was a good surfer,” Granny granted, “but a scammer. He wasn’t too well liked.”

Granny’s brother Don might have been in with them, but he was seven years younger than his brother and was a lot like many younger brothers toward their older brother. “He hung out with the Hermosa bunch,” Leroy explained. “He and [Dale] Velzy were real close friends. He was a lifeguard…”

Ocean relay races provided the impetus for surf club contests and these were “very popular” in the later half of the 1930s, Granny recalls. “[During and] after the war, that kind of died out.”

Tandem events provided a way for men to bond with women. “Well,” Granny explained, “everybody had a board that you could tandem with, cuz they were so long and buoyant.”

In 1938, LeRoy met his wife-to-be, Katie Tracy. She was an inland girl, but they met at Hermosa Pier, then went on to courtship with a strong tandem emphasis. A year and a half later, they were married.

In late September 1939, 15 to 20-foot Chubasco waves rolled in at Malibu. A number of guys went out that day, Fenton Scholes and Granny being the last ones to get out. Fenton lost his board and both came in on Granny’s… [other big days included] “New Year’s ’40 and ’41 – there was huge surf,” Granny recalled, “20 to 25-foot rollers.”

War & Family

At age 23, Granny got a job as a laborer at Standard Oil in El Segundo and worked his way up to boilermaker. In his free time, he continued to surf until World War II blew the entire California surfing scene apart.

“We were down at the beach on December 7 of 1941,” Granny vividly remembers much in the same way a later generation surfer might remember where he or she was when we first landed on the moon or terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “A whole bunch of us down there, right next to Hermosa Pier. I don’t what we were doing; playing volleyball or something. All of a sudden – somebody had a radio – and we heard over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and we all looked at each other and we knew that nothing would ever be the same. Eventually, just about all of us ended up in one branch [of the armed forces] or another.”

In 1943, while his brother Don patrolled Malibu as a Marine, Granny joined the Army Air Force and trained to be a pilot. Toward the end of the war, he became a flight instructor. After the war, he toyed with becoming a commercial pilot, but opted to go back to Standard Oil. He then went to work for Pacific Bell Telephone, where he worked in management for 31 years before retiring in 1977.

Meanwhile, Granny and Katie had a family on their hands, which meant less time for surfing and hanging out at the beach, as they raised four kids.

After The War

“Immediately,” after World War II was won, “my first week back [September 1945], I went to Malibu,” LeRoy recalled. “We were walking along the beach and looked out and saw probably around 12 guys out. I turned to the guy [I was with and said], ‘Jeez, the place is ruined.’

“Before the war, you’d call somebody before you went to Malibu because you didn’t want to surf alone… What we considered to be a crowd, back then, would be a beautiful day today.”

“Our old club members got together,” after the war, Granny said. “We all got together again. We all got married and we all had to have jobs. About once a month, we’d get together and have a poker party or something like that. A lot of the guys joined the San Onofre Surf Club [in the 1950s] and that became our common meeting point after that, for most of us – in the summertime, anyway.”

Even though he now surfed the South Bay and San Onofre only on occasion and was, in essence, on sabbatical from surfing, Leroy remained well known among SoCal surfers. As late as 1948, most all Southern California surfers still knew or knew of each other and surfboards were still pretty much of the redwood & balsa variety.

A case in point of how Granny was remembered by others even after the war was Greg Noll. In his autobiography Da Bull, Noll recalled, "When I first started surfing… there was Matt Kivlin and Joe Quigg riding redwoods at Malibu. Doc Ball and the guys at the Palos Verdes Surfboard Club. Velzy, Leroy Grannis, Ted Kerwin, the Edgar brothers at Hermosa and Manhattan. Lorrin Harrison, Burrhead and the guys at San Onofre. A few guys down in La Jolla. The entire surfing population consisted of maybe a couple hundred guys, most of them riding redwood boards, paddleboards and balsa/redwoods."

Another example of LeRoy’s status and regard is how he was looked at by waterman Mike Doyle in the mid-1950s. Doyle wrote in his autobiography, Morning Glass:

"One of the older surfers down at Manhattan Pier told me about a book called California Surfriders by Doc Ball. It focused on surfing in the 1930s and '40s… I took Doc Ball's book home and studied each picture for an hour at a time, scrutinizing each grain in the black-and-white photos, the way the water flowed over the board, the way the wave was breaking -- every detail -- until I could feel what it was like trimming across a wall of water. I studied each of the surfers' styles, their hand movements, the way their feet were placed on the boards, and I came to understand that each surfer in that era – Hoppy Swarts, Leroy Grannis, Pete Peterson – had his own individual style.

"I saw that the surfers in the book had a wonderful camaraderie that I didn't have in my own life. They were healthy and joyful, and they enjoyed being with each other. I could see a community spirit there that I wanted to be a part of.”

Surf Photog

“Once I got the kids’ teeth straightened,” Granny declared, “and got that burden off my back, I was able to quit working weekends as a carpenter and start putting in more time in the water, again.”

Granny’s return from his surfing “sabbatical” took place at the beginning of the foam board era. His foray into surf photography developed soon afterward, beginning in 1960. Doc Ball tells the story of the continuity between what he was doing in the 1930s and ‘40s and what Granny later did in the 1960s:

“My surf photography began in 1935,” Doc Ball told Brad Barrett for the foreword to Granny’s modern pictorial coffee table classic Photo: Grannis, “when I beheld the Los Angeles Times Sunday paper. Their Rotogravure Section was filled with enlargements of photos by Tom Blake called ‘Riders of the Sunset Seas,’ surf pix taken at Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Territory of Hawai‘i. It got me started photographing surfing in California. Some time after, my surfing buddy, Leroy Grannis got stoked on surf pix, and began taking surf photos. He took over when I slowed down, and went big time! He is now international and increasing in surf photo production, like a TNT blast. We are still in contact and, I gotta say, he’s a blessing to me, like no other surf photog.”

At age 42, Leroy took up surf photography as a hobby in 1960, at the suggestion of his doctor. He’d developed an ulcer due to stress at his day job. His doctor figured a hobby would get Granny’s mind off the tension at work.

“I thought,” Granny told me, “well, Doc’s gone [up north and retired] and I don’t know too many guys taking pictures of surfers, so I decided to jump into it. I built a third garage and made half of it into a darkroom and started shooting the kids at 22nd Street and Hermosa; sold ‘em 8 by 10’s for a buck a piece to get a little money back.”

So, Granny took his doctor up on his suggestion, also buying a 35mm camera and a 400mm lens to get the job done.

“I actually started in late ’59,” Leroy clarified, “but I didn’t have any decent equipment. In the spring of 1960 I decided to build a darkroom and get some better equipment. I bought an East German 35mm camera and a 400mm Meyer lens (I had been using a 50mm lens). The lens was all right, it did the job, but it had a flaw that left dark spots at the bottom of the images. I was primarily shooting black-and-white and selling 8x10s to the kids at 22nd Street for a buck a piece to pay for supplies, and then I just went on from there.”

It was in June of 1960 that Granny added the other garage to his Hermosa Beach home and built the darkroom inside it. His first shots were taken at 22nd Street, in Hermosa Beach, but it wasn’t until July that he had anything really notable. That second month of his shooting, he caught a decent day at Sequit (aka Arroyo Secos -- Secos, for short -- or Leo Carrillo) and again on July 12th. That day, he got a good shot of Dewey Weber on the nose and one of skier Ed Schuyler powering through some whitewater. These two photographs, along with a half dozen others from both Sequit and 22nd Street were published in the September 1960 issue of Reef Magazine.

“They bought six or eight of them,” Leroy remembered, “and paid me five bucks a piece. I was in hog heaven.” Stated another way, Granny told me, “About that time, this little Reef magazine started. I sold them some pictures for five bucks a piece and thought I was in hog heaven. Then, a little later, Surfer got started.”

Although short-lived as a publication, Reef Magazine was the second surf magazine to come on line, after The Surfer.

His first year shooting, Granny pumped out 2,500 frames of black-and-white.

Of the surf photographers at that time, Granny listed: “Don James, John Severson, Ron Church, Ron Stoner, the Brown’s [Bud Browne and Bruce Brown]. There weren’t too many of us and there weren’t too many places to peddle our wares, either... The ‘60s were fun cuz there weren’t that many of us in it [surf photography]… We were sort of a fraternity.”

In 1961, John Severson’s The Surfer went from an annual to a quarterly and then, a year and a half later, to a bi-monthly. Granny’s photographs started showing up in Hap Jacobs ads, then in the “Photos from the Readers” and “Toes on the Nose” sections. By 1962, there were South Bay articles and other spots complete with photographs from Leroy Grannis.

“Walt Phillips came up to me in ’62 and wanted to start a magazine,” Granny said, “which we did, called Surfing Illustrated. We got out a couple of issues, but we weren’t too well organized and I was working full time [with the telephone company]... money got to be a problem… So, Walt sold it or did something with it and then went to work for the people who bought it.”

Working with Panatomic-X, a very slow, fine grain, low contrast film that he pushed up to the speed of Plus-X (which most surf photographers used for surfing photography), Granny’s pictures were not only published in SURFER and Reef, but also Surfing Illustrated, Surf Guide and other early-to-middle 1960s surf mags.

In developing his film, Leroy developed Panatomic-X pushed with Acufine developer and double weight Agfa paper.

At about this time, Granny and Hoppy were also working with kids in the Boy Scouts program. One of their favorite things to do was lead Explorer Scout troops on surfari to Malibu and Sequit.

In 1961, Granny went to the Islands for the first time.

“In ’61, I started going to Hawaii every winter cuz my wife’s sister lives over there. So, I combined the visits with surf photography. I went to Hawaii every December from ’61 to ’66.”

In attempting to shoot Sunset, he first shot from a surfboard, hand-holding a Pentax with a 200mm Takumar lens wrapped in a plastic bag. “When a sneaker set broke in the channel,” wrote Brad Barrett, “he almost lost the rig and decided maybe the plastic bag idea wasn’t such a good one.”

In 1964, LeRoy built a 9”x9”x12” wooden box with suction cups on the corners and a waterproof cover. Mounting this on his surfboard, Granny shot from the water and was able to change rolls of film without having to return to the beach. He shot Sunset, Waimea Bay and Makaha this way.

Also that year, Granny came back home to Hermosa Beach, California winter surf and the first United States Invitational at Oceanside Pier. The Oceanside contest was a rarity: good surf with offshore winds. Standouts included Mark Martinson and Corky Carroll battling for first slot in the junior men’s division.

“Photos By Grannis”

During this time, Granny was jumping around between surf mags. At the beginning of 1964, he was still on the roster at Surfer, but by summer he’d joined Petersen’s Surfing Magazine. The July issue of that mag declared that “‘Photos by Grannis’ has become a household phrase all over the surfing world.” Even so, Petersen’s Surfing Magazine bit the dust a couple of issues later. Leroy was not left high and dry. By late that year, he’d teamed up with Dick Graham, who he’d worked with at Petersen’s Surfing Magazine. They created its successor in International Surfing.

Before the year was out, Surfing Illustrated printed some Granny photos from its inaugural issue of 1962. Surf Guide also ran some Grannis photos of Mickey Dora.

By 1965, Leroy was holding down three jobs: Pacific Bell executive, magazine editor, and surf photographer. International Surfing had quickly become the second most popular surfing magazine, behind Surfer. Surf Guide was in decline and Surfing Illustrated was barely making it.

Most of Granny’s photos from this period were shots taken at surfing contests:

February – Oceanside Invitational
September – Malibu Invitational
December – 1st Annual Duke Kahanamoku Invitational
December – 13th Annual Makaha International Surfing Championships

LeRoy would follow this pattern of shooting primarily contest shots for the remainder of the decade.

Even with all he was doing, Granny continued to manage his 4th “job,” as organizer of the WSA. “I was a cofounder of the Western Surfing Association in the late ‘50s. Hoppy Swarts had seen the Makaha contest and wanted to start something on the mainland, so we did…”

Granny’s only rival photographer, at this point, was Ron Stoner, the sole staff photographer at Surfer. The two of them were seen at all the surf contests and were publishing similar photographs in competing surf magazines. Stoner shot color. Granny usually shot black and white.

Of note was the June 1965 edition of International Surfing. It contained a half page article, with photographs, of a “New French Gadget.” It was the first commercial surf leash, invented by a Frenchman named Durcudoy. Editor Dick Graham wrote, “Personally I’d rather take a swim than have my leg snapped off. If anyone feels like testing this trick, be sure and stay in small surf (under one foot), and never try more than one spinner.” His dismissal of the leash – or legrope – did not prevent it from revolutionizing surfing.

During 1966, Granny’s production numbers dropped, probably because of the many hats he was wearing at the time.

International Surfing held its own version of the Surfer Poll. At the First Annual International Surfing Hall of Fame, Leroy was voted number one surf photographer, with Dr. Don James coming in second, and Ron Stoner third.

At the beginning of 1967, Granny went back to the Islands to shoot. December 1966’s Duke had been cancelled due to poor surf at Makaha. It was rescheduled for February 1967. Granny was there, as well as the end of the year Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, held at Sunset Beach.

Granny shot less film in 1968 than in previous years. International Surfing was sold and his duties as editor increased. “Between traveling from Hermosa Beach to the IS offices in Reseda,” wrote Brad Barrett in Photo: Grannis, published in 1998, “and continuing his evening shift at the phone company on Vermont Avenue there wasn’t much coastal time left in the day.”

In the June 1968 issue of International Surfing, the first issue under new ownership, Leroy wrote his most controversial editorial. It was a reaction to the anti-competition feelings that were growing at that time. Granny condemned the “rash of sick articles knocking competition by surfing has-beens… and frustrated would-be editors.” He argued that “without competition, the desire to excel would not be evident.”

“Well,” he responded when I asked him about the editorial approximately 30 years after it was printed, “being involved in competition – not only as a competitor, but helping Swarts putting on contests – I thought it was helping the sport. That was before it became professional. This was strictly amateur. I enjoyed getting together with my fellow surfers of my age group to compete because they came from up and down the coast and that was the only chance I had to get together and surf with them. So, I got a little upset with some of the attitudes that just thought that competition was NOT the way to go.

“Now that they’ve got professional competition, I’m with ‘em,” Leroy adds, laughing. “Oh, I guess professional competition is OK. It certainly made the magazines go that direction 100%. You very seldom see anything other than about competitive surfers anymore; at least in Surfer and Surfing magazines…”

Shortboards, Hand Gliders & Wind Surfing

Granny’s time was freed-up a little, at International Surfing, in 1969 when he switched over as Director of Photography and left the editorship to Toby Annenberg.

The end of that year marked one of the greatest swells in recorded history and Granny was on-site, shooting.

“What we went through in December ’69,” Skip Frye recalled, “was ‘The Big Swell.’ This swell was defined as one of the biggest in more than a generation (it was the biggest swell since I’ve been surfing). It was a double era swell and in a way marked the transition from the whole Sixties longboard thing to the shortboard era. It was kind of a wash through, and we were playing a whole different ball game afterwards. December ’69, the end of the Sixties, was a total change in eras, a changing of the sport, a changing of the guard, and it was marked by the biggest swell maybe in recorded history.”

“I tried to get involved” with shortboards, Granny told me. “I went down to a 7’2”; went into the Huntington Beach contest and couldn’t catch a wave and decided, well, 7-2 isn’t for me, so I went back to 8-4.

“I saw it [the shortboard revolution] wipe out several businesses… It was a rough period to go thru for a lot of the manufacturers and, of course, a lot of us that didn’t have the ability to handle short boards had to make up our minds it wasn’t for us…

“The one nice thing about what the shortboard has done is let younger kids get into it. They don’t have to worry about handling a 30 or 40-pound board. They can get out there when they’re 6 or 7 years-old and start surfing. That’s a big advantage. The younger you are getting into surfing, the easier it is to pick it up.”

As time went on, further changes took place. In 1974, inspired by friend Jim Mahoney, Granny got into photographing hang gliding and this took much of his time during the 1970s. In 1981, his photographic attention was drawn to wind surfing. 1984 marks the year Leroy ended his active surf photographic period, highlighted by what Granny considers his most well-known surf photo, his 1960s bottom turn of Johnny Fain’s at Malibu.

End Days

In 1999, fifteen years after he retired from surf photography, Granny was still shooting, although “not aggressively.” I asked him about the renewed interest surfers had toward his photography and his contributions. Granny was typically modest, sprinkling his response with his own sense of dry humor:

“I’m buying some new hat sizes,” he answered. “It’s wonderful. It’s something I never expected. I just think the fact that I’ve grown to be 80 years old and I’m still around and kicking… that’s helped get the ‘legends’ stuff started.”

“Think that did it?” I asked.

“It sure helps.”

What about a summation on the good and the bad of surfing today?

“What bothers me is that the two top magazines are pushing professionalism. These young kids get the idea they want to be professionals and let everything else go – including their education. That’s the wrong way to go… I’ve seen a lot of kids go down the drain trying to become professionals.”

LeRoy Frank “Granny” Grannis passed on, on February 3, 2011, at the age of 93.

Technical Notes

Granny’s early cameras and lenses included:

Land Camera #1 – 1960 – East German 35mm single lens reflex with stock 50mm lens and 400mm Meyer Gorlitz telephoto.
Land Camera #2 – 1961 – Pentax S with stock 50mm and 28mm lenses; also a 650mm Century telephoto lens.
Additional Lens – 1963 – 1000mm Century telephoto.
Water Camera #1 – 1963 – Calypso, a Jacques Cousteau-invented 35mm underwater camera equipped with a wide angle 35mm lends.
Land Camera #3 – 1963 – Praktisix, German 2 ¼.
Lens Adaptations – 1963 – His two telephoto lens were adapted for use with both his Pentax and Praktisix.

Over the course of the 1960s, Granny bought 45, 80 and 180mm lenses for the Praktisix. The 180mm Zeiss Jena was used with his wooden box camera. Later, when Praktisix upgraded, he replaced it with a new Pentaconsix.

In 1965, Leroy’s Calypso was stolen from his son Frank. He replaced it with a new Nikonos, which was essentially the same camera as the Calypso, only manufactured by Nikon.

At the outset, Granny bought black and white film in 100-foot bulk rolls and loaded his own cassettes. He primarily used Kodak Panatomic-X (32 ASA) and pushed it to 125 ASA in Acufine developer. He experimented with other fine-grain films such as Adox and Ilford but always came back to the Panatomic. Sometimes he shot Plus-X and Tri-X film, rated at their normal speeds of 125 ASA and 400 ASA. He processed his black and white film himself, in his homemade darkroom, and also made his own prints, first using various Kodak products and later switching to Agfa.

For his color shots, he used 35mm Kodachrome II (25 ASA) until Kodak came out with Kodachrome 64 in 1974. All his 2 ¼ transparencies were shot on Ektachrome (64 ASA).

ENDIT

Granny (r) with his lifelong friend Doc Ball. In their later decades, Leroy would annually come up to visit Doc in Northern California and they would surf together. Photo courtesy of Gary Lynch.