Matt Warshaw interview LeRoy Grannis in 1994 for a Los Angeles magazine article titled "When Malibu Ruled." Grannis was 77.

Do you remember the first time you surfed Malibu?

The first time we went up there was 1936.

No, it was still fenced off, there was no beach access.

Just a wire fence, right along the highway there. It came down a year or so later.

We had a friend in the Colony, so we drove past First Point, kept going, turned around, parked in the Colony, and walked down past the lagoon.

Hoppy Swarts. He was from Hermosa too, and we surfed together all the time.

Small. Three-foot. But perfect. We had a ball, just the two of us.

Pretty often. We'd always call around and get someone to surf with us. We didn't want to surf alone.

Well, that kind of put an end to it for a while. For me, anyway, not my brother.

Don was in the Coast Guard and got stationed at Malibu. They had a patrol set up right there. He and another guy would patrol the beach at night. They'd be on for two weeks, then get a 72-hour leave.


Japanese subs were supposedly dropping spies and soldiers and the like on beaches up and down the coast.

Did your brother ever find any soldiers or spies?

Did he have a board there at the station?

He did. He got to surf Malibu alone. He'd do an eight-hour shift at night, then he had the rest of the day off. The barracks were right there on the Point.

Dale Velzy and my brother were real close, and it's possible that he got Dale in, too.

When I went into the service, in '43, I did three months of basic training in Miami Beach, and I never saw such consistently miserable surf,

I got out in September of '45 and drove up to Malibu in early October. There were maybe a dozen guys in the water, which was shocking to me. I turned to a friend of mine and said, "Well, it's ruined."

We had a hurricane in 1939, in September. On Saturday we surfed Long Beach Flood Control, before the breakwater was built, sort of where the Queen Mary is now. The next day it was closed out so we drove up to Malibu, and it was so big we were pulling out at the end of the pier.

You've been surfing for 60-something years. What period was best?

Before the war. Late '30s up to, say, 1941. Here in California it was just one big happy group of surfers. There weren't more than four or five hundred of us. And there was no question of sneaking around trying to beat the crowds, or trying to find a new spot, because no matter where you went, you could get all the waves you wanted.

We were in a fool's paradise, you know? We didn't know that a shorter, lighter board would work better. Those longer boards picked up waves easier, and that was a big thing. Actually, we were in the process of changing from the heavy old solid redwood logs to balsa and redwood boards, which were lighter, so there was some progress being made.

What did it mean to be a surfer then? Was there a stigma at all?

No, this is way before all that. We were very much looked up to, in fact. You had to be in good shape just to carry the boards, for one thing. Also, in '39, that hurricane I mentioned, some surfers rescued some boaters who capsized in Newport Harbor during the big surf. That got the newspapers on our side. It wasn't until the '50s and '60s that we got all the bad publicity.

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