LEROY "Granny" GRANNIS
Surfer and Surf Photographer
LeRoy Grannis self-portrait courtesy of Swell.com.
Aloha and welcome to this chapter in the LEGENDARY SURFERS series!
Man on deck, this time 'round, is legendary lensman LeRoy "Granny"
Grannis, one of the few California surfers to transition from active
surfing in the 1930's to continued active participation in the sport
through the 1960's and on into present day.
Enjoy LeRoy's story and spread the stoke!
Contents
NORM HALE
JOHN "DOC" BALL
JOHN "DOC" BALL
HOPPY SWARTS
EARLY SURF CLUBS
PALOS VERDES SURFING CLUB
SURFIN' THE LATE '30S
WAR & FAMILY
AFTER THE WAR
SURF PHOTOG
ISLANDS, 1ST TIME
"PHOTOS BY GRANNIS"
WINDS OF CHANGE
TODAY
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. Back then, what used
to be called El Camino Real - the Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH for
short - was a dirt road.
1920's
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."
Norm Hale
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.
John "Doc" Ball
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 has lasted
more than 60 years, to present day.
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.
Hoppy Swarts
"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. 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.
Early Surf Clubs
[The Depression]
"kept us
kinda limited in certain ways," Doc 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 affect on surfing. "Well, I don't know how it
affected us," 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 honor for
the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club, saying that it was the first, in 1934,
when "the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club was formed. 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 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."
Palos Verdes Surfing Club
John "Doc" Ball was typically modest in his
comparison of 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. It's
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 were inducted into the PVSC.
"Myself and Hop [Hoppy Swarts] 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, 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 knows 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 section entitled "Palos Verdes Surfing Club at the Long Beach
Surfing Contest" Doc Ball wrote that at this contest, the Hawaiians
even sent over a team. 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.
"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… "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
later generations of surfers remember where he or she was when President Kennedy was assasinated, when we
first landed on the moon, or when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. "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
that surfing and hanging out at the beach became less of a priority
than raising four kids.
After The War
"Immediately,"
after World
War II
was won, "my first week back [September 1945], I went to Malibu.
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 amongst 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
foreward 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 another 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 some 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 Hal 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]. So, 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 The 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.
Islands, 1st Time
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.
Granny also 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.
Also, 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 Grannis 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 his 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, 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.
It is curious to note
that the June 1965 edition of International Surfing contained a half
page article, with photographs, of a "New French Gadget." It was the
first 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, obviously, lacked the requisite vision.
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 help
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…"
Winds of Change
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.
Today
Today, Granny still shoots,
although "not aggressively." I asked LeRoy about the renewed interest
of surfers 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 and I, after enjoying a Bud Browne
showing of "Surfing The 1950s" in San Clemente, mid-1990s.
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).
Credits
- Interview with LeRoy, 26 June 1999
- "Photo: Grannis -- Surfing's Golden Age, 1960-1969," edited by Brad Barrett, (c)1998.
- Lynch, Gary. "Biographical Sketch of Dr. John Heath Ball," 2 February 1989
- Interview with Doc Ball, 10 January 1998
- Santa Ana Register, 31 July 1928
- Lynch, Gary and Gault-Williams, Malcolm. "Tom Blake: The Uncommon Journey of a Pioneer Waterman," © 2001
- Noll, Greg. "Da Bull," p. 93.
- Doyle, Mike. "Morning Glass," (c)1993, pp. 26-27.
- Photo images coutesy of LeRoy and Swell.com.
Related Resources
TOM BLAKE: The Journey of A Pioneer Waterman
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