Gary Lynch interviewed Tom Blake in 1989, when Blake was 87. Quotes were used in a SURFER profile titled "Tom Blake: Beyond the Horizon." The quotes here have been shortened and edited from Lynch's original transcript.


When I was a child, nine or 10 ten years old, I saw a newsreel from Hawaii of surfing in Waikiki. Just a short clip, but it left a very strong impression. Later on, after school years, I left home, got out to California, and saw my first surfboard in Santa Monica Bay. I was 20 or 21 years old. I took a surfboard out, tried to ride it, caught a wave, and took a big, mean, nasty pearl dive on a three-foot wave. Got shook up. I put the board away and forgot about it for a while. Later on, my swimming took me into lifeguard work [in front of] Santa Monica Canyon. I took an old board out and tried to ride it, and I didn't have any luck. Days later, I took it out again and finally caught a little two-footer, stood up, and found that I was actually riding a wave. One of the biggest things you remember about surfing is your first ride. A little ride, but the board kept going and going. That's a thrill, [your] first start in surfing.


Los Angeles was a much smaller city [when I first arrived]. I think there were three- or four-hundred thousand people. Very few cars, the air was clear most of the time, and from Los Angeles you could see the mountains every day—this was before that smog started to build up. Down on the beaches, the air was real good. There weren't many buildings around. It wasn't settled very heavily then. Santa Monica was just a small community.

In the early '20s, living in Los Angeles, I tried to make a living working in pictures, which was difficult because you had to know somebody to really get in there. But once in a while I'd get a job, make a few dollars, and that would last maybe a week or a month. [But] it was hard to get enough to get food to eat. And I had no automobile at that time. I used to walk a lot. I remember some fellow from a foreign country built a little place where he sold whole wheat bread, wonderful whole wheat bread, ten-cents a loaf. And that was attractive because you didn't have much money. I used to walk from Hollywood across Los Angeles maybe four or five miles to his shop, and buy three or four loaves of this wonderful whole wheat bread. Then I'd walk back, eating on the way. And that's the way it was in the early days. You're hungry, always hungry, and always almost broke.


I found work in a theater, and I'd do everything the manager asked me to do. He put me on a nasty job changing the lightbulbs up on top of the theater, and it took days to change 'em all. It was unpleasant work, and I gave up the job. There was no future in that. That's when I got into lifeguard work down at the beach, and I loved it. Of course, the lifeguard business didn't amount to much. They wouldn't hire lifeguards in the winter because there were very few swimmers. When spring came, the people of Los Angeles would start coming down to the beaches, and a half-dozen would drown before anybody would hire a lifeguard.


When I first went over to the Islands, you didn't fly. You went over on a boat. It took six or seven days; it was a nice journey, and there was always plenty to eat on board. That was important. So I went over to the Islands and picked up my first board, a narrow tail redwood, a beautiful board. Light, and $25 bucks bought it. I probably surfed that for a year or so and found it to be a good board. That was before fins, so it was a little squirrely, but it was a good board, light and easy to catch waves with.

In those early days at Waikiki, the beach wasn't crowded—just one or two hotels on the beach, including the old Moana Hotel, the Royal Hawaiian wasn't built yet. [There were] probably less than a hundred surfers altogether living in Honolulu and Waikiki. They got to love surfing so much, the young fellows, that they made a career out of it. They wouldn't take a job or go to work. They'd spend all their time on the beach at Waikiki. They made a few bucks from the tourists who used to come over there, the rich people from all over the world, teaching them how to surf. That's how the [beachboy] thing got established, and they were able to exist. I got into that same routine over there with 'em when I went over, because I was about the first [surfer] from the Mainland to do it, to actually go over there and live there. It was a very free and open life, a healthy life. You didn't think about smoking or drugs or anything like that, or alcohol. Surfing took up your time and your energy, and it was all positive.



After getting to the Islands, I roamed around for a while. Having been a swimmer, I knew the Kahanamoku boys, Duke and his brothers, and I was accepted at the beach on the strength of my swimming past. They treated me like a king. Taught me about Waikiki and the surf. But outside of that, they paid no attention. You roamed around there, nobody knew you, and it's a wonderful way to live, when you keep a low profile. Like, nobody's shootin' at you, you know?

That went on for years, and I got interested in their sports, surfing and paddling, and managed to build a little better board than they had, and beat them in their [paddling] contests. And then they began to look at [me]. There's something we don't like [to be beaten], and that was the end of the real good days.


I saw the potential in that, way back before 1930. I bought a Graflex camera from Duke Kahanamoku, and was going to take surfing pictures, but to take it out in the surf . . . I had to build a big wooden box, about two feet high, around the camera, and put the controls on the outside. The idea was to take it out in the surf on a surfboard and shoot pictures the surf riders close up. That first box was crude and clumsy, and it had a tendency to steam up inside, which would fog the lens. So I'd take it out, shoot all day, come in and there's nothing on the film. That was highly disappointing to the riders. And everybody on the beach wanted their picture because it'd never been done before, except from a speedboat.

Finally, I put a little windshield wiper inside the box, inside the front window, and I could use that to get the steam off the lens, and I got a few pictures, and they were pretty good. The boys on the beach went wild over them. They couldn't get enough of 'em, and I didn't want to give 'em away, I wanted to hoard them myself, and put them in the book I was writing [

published in 1935]. So that created a little ill will, there was a little difficulty on that score. Something I would avoid if I had to do it over again.

I'd send the photos around, I sent some to the 

, and they printed them. I got [a few printed] in 

, and that spread it all over the world. [Surfing] really started to grow after that.

That's what got Doc Ball started [in surf photography]. I discarded that old, clumsy camera and built a new one, and Doc Ball started building a waterproof camera. He built a good one. I built a good one too. And this picture thing started spreading the word [about surfing] more than my book did because the newspapers had wide circulation.


That was before 1930. There were no fins on boards. The boards at Waikiki were mostly squaretails; you'd get into steep slide on a wave and your tail would spin out. You'd skid out. Tail-sliding, they'd call it. It spoiled a great many rides. I got the idea of trying to correct that because I'd seen skegs on small outboard motor boats, and when they'd go around a turn in racing, they had a skeg four inches deep, six inches long on the bottom, right on the bottom, made of cast aluminum. And that would keep [the boat] from skidding out if they weren't going too fast. I figured it'd work on a surfboard too, and I finally found one, a skeg, and took it off a wrecked boat. It was pitted from the salt water, and it was too sharp to put on a surfboard. So I had to cover it with a piece of hardwood, 

I put it on a 14-foot paddleboard and took it out in the surf. While paddling, the board had an entirely different feeling, and it wasn't exactly a likable feeling, and I remember having the thought, Well, this thing's no good. But then I caught a pretty good wave, a six-foot wave, and it was remarkable the control you had over the board with this little skeg on it. It didn't spin out, it steered easy, because the tail held steady, and it turned any way you wanted it. I knew right from that moment it was a success. But that was the only [skeg] in existence, and nobody else paid any attention. It took ten years before the thing really caught on.


Nowadays everybody has what they call a surf leash. That idea originated way back in the '30s. At Waikiki, at Canoe Surf or Blow Hole Surf, if you fell off you'd have to swim 100 feet, 150 feet, to get your board. The waves would take it in, and that wasted a lot of time, a lot of good surfing time. So that was the inspiration for the leash. I had a 10' of cotton rope tied to the stern of my board, but instead of putting it around the ankle, I had it attached to a belt around the waist because the board was too heavy, it'd pull too hard if you put it around your ankle. And it worked well there, the board wouldn't get away from you. But for big surf, I had to forget the idea, because the wave is too powerful, and a big board on a leash attached to you, you could get killed. So [instead], I put a metal handle on the board, the front or the back. You'd get off the board, and you'd be able to hang on in a fifteen-foot break. [The leash], I never used it again at Waikiki [after coming up with the handle], and nobody ever picked it up.


I was always interested in getting back to the beach, and surfing, and I didn't care to spend all my life trying to commercialize these boards. [But I worked with] different companies. The Rogers Company of Venice made [my boards], and sold them to lifeguards around California. Then the Mitchell Company, in Cincin­nati. They sold them to the Red Cross. The back to California, with the Los Angeles Ladder Company, [then] the Catalina Equipment Company. Finally, the war comes along, World War II, and the waterproof glue they were putting the boards together with, sealing them up with, that was was taken up with the war effort. The Catalina Company put some other kind of glue in the boards, but it did not hold, and the boards leaked and come apart. So the Red Cross got mad and quit buying them, and that was about the end of the commercialism, as far as I was concerned. I never did make any money on it.


I followed the game [surfing] between California and Florida and Hawaii for thirty years or more. In 1955, [when] I was 52, the Islands, the sun—especially the sun—and other unknown causes, all started to get me down. I thought it was a heart condition. I'd go after a big wave and almost pass out. I knew I'd had it by that time. I gave up surfing and came back to the Mainland.

The lifestyle of surfing, young surfers nowadays get going on that, and it's so attractive, so fascinating, so beneficial, so positive, that they neglect to make a living, or buy a home, [or get] married and things like that. So it's a tossup which way to go. It'll always be go one way to make the money, and the other to have fun surfing. And surfing, once you get started, it's so attractive that you'd never give it up as long as you're able to do it.


Some people considered me antisocial and so forth, a loner. Doc Ball called me a loner. That's just the way life came about for me. I found my greatest interest in swimming, surfing, and camping, traveling around—it's a lonely life, that's true, but your friends are the trees and the forests and the birds and the animals, and the different people that you meet briefly. Traveling by camper around the country, to every state in the Union—there's something new to see every day. You forgot about the social life.


Reality in life is contrast, and the beach life and surfing, and just being around the ocean, is very good contrast. It leads you through life, especially when you're young and with hope in your heart. And when you're young, things are never going to end. Then suddenly you get old, it seems, and you know it 

 going to end. But it doesn't—if you have the right philosophy, a nature philosophy, like the Indians had. You reconcile yourself to leaving it all. You know that things are going to carry on, and that all will be well after you're gone. The earth will still spin for a long, long time to come.

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