"Dudley Whitman: a Visit with Florida's First Surfer," by Amy Vansant, ran in the April 1994 issue of SURFER, when Whitman was 72. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

My brother Bill, who is five years older than me, and I started surfing in Miami Beach in about 1932, on bellyboards. My brother’s quite a craftsman, and we made some bellyboards that were beautiful.

When did you make the switch from bellyboards to surfboards?

John Smith and Babe Braithwait of Virginia Beach came to Miami with a typical 10-foot redwood Hawaiian surfboard about that time. My brother and I, being bellyboarders, were totally amazed, so my brother made the first Hawaiian surfboard that was ever built in Florida. It was 10' long and made out of sugar pine. A year later, I followed and made my Hawaiian-type board, but there was no piece of pine that was big enough, and we didn’t have any redwood, so I made it out of something like spruce and had it laminated together. Instead of 10 feet long it was 11.

You know, it would not ride properly. It kept swamping in, so we cut a foot off of it and then it rode okay, but, of course, I was outclassed from the beginning.

No, because I was just finishing that surfboard when along came this chap, Tom Blake, paddling in the ocean on the famous Tom Blake hollow board. As a kid finishing my first Hawaiian surfboard, it was outdated before ever even rode it!

I guess you were pretty surprised to see Tom Blake in Miami.

As it turns out, he came up to see my brother and me because he understood we were riding Hawaiian surfboards. He became one of our lifelong friends. When we first went to Hawaii, we had a letter from Tom introducing us to Duke Kahanamoku, so that we could join the Outrigger Canoe Club. At first they said they didn’t have room for us, but when we unpacked our boards, about 150 people gathered around, and they took us into the club and gave us a rack of honor because our boards were so nice.

We were the first people who ever built the Blake-type hollow board and rounded it off a little bit, more like the modern boards of today. Also, there were put together with wooden pegs instead of screws like everybody else had. I guess they were about the only ones that were ever built that way.

The surfboard I had in Hawaii wasn’t my first, of course. When I was 14, in 1934, I built my first Blake-type hollow. That board got run over by an automobile, so I made another. Of course, we made boards for many, many, years.

Did you do a lot of surf traveling back then?

We probably surfed more up in Daytona than in Miami, especially when Bill and I went to college. We went to the University of Florida, so every weekend we were in Daytona surfing. We introduced the sport there, and I think we started a lot of people surfing. Some of our friends are still surfing there, like Gaulden Reed, who is kind of a legend. He’s an amazing person.

What was that like, pioneering the sport in Daytona?

Nobody knew what we were doing. We carried our boards on our cars, these hollow boards that were 12 feet long, and people just didn’t understand it. Daytona was the focal point in Florida for surfing in 1936. Every time we surfed we had a crowd watch us, but it didn’t really take off until after World War II.

Did you help spread the sport to other places?

I helped in that I met Hobie Alter and surfed with him briefly during a business trip in 1955. I ended up being the first Hobie in Florida. It took Tom Blake and me over a year to talk Hobie into setting us up, but we really sold a lot of boards! Bill and I had surf teams and we pretty much discovered the spot in Eleuthera, Bahamas, where all the surfing goes on. I still have a home over there.

The interview below is excerpted from a conversation Gary Lynch had with Dudley Whitman in 2000 for Lynch's book Tom Blake: The Uncommon Journey of a Pioneer Waterman," published in 2001.

Tom was physically fit, a handsome man, and—he was a little different than a lot of surfers that you know. Some people might say that maybe he was a hippie type or something. No, he was simply his own kind of person. Always immaculately dressed and never far-out. He always presented well. Not a rundown-looking sloppy bum like what a lot of other surfers degenerated to.

What was Miami like back when you were a kid?

Back in those days [1930s], it was not much at all. Miami was just starting to develop, and we had a home on the ocean, on what was called Collins Avenue—which later became known as A1A. I remember there were crocodiles all over the place. We have photographs! And I remember the Miami Beach publicity department was sending out pictures nationally of bathing beauties in those gorgeous bathing suits they had in those days, which are pretty much a big laugh to look at now.

32nd Stree and Collins Avenue, and the closest place to us was about a mile and a half away, and that was the Firestone Estate. We could hear them on a Sunday start up their Pierce-Arrow automobile and come down, pick us up and take us to Sunday School. Today there are a dozen hotels between those two homes.

When you and Bill got to Hawaii, didn't you get right into the Outrigger Canoe Club?

Well, that’s a pretty good story. I don’t know how long we had known Tom at that point. A few years, maybe. So we were going to Hawaii and Tom wrote a very nice letter to Duke Kahanamoku, to introduce us to the Outrigger Canoe Club. When we arrived, we walked up to Duke, and he looks down at us 

 boys, read the letter, and says, “Sorry, we don’t have any room at the Outrigger Canoe Club.”

But hold on. My brother Bill is a tremendous craftsman and he’s really great at lofting and stuff of that nature, and we had arrived with some pretty nice-looking boards. So after Duke had shooed us away, there at Waikiki, why we immediately started to unpack our boards which were wrapped up in canvas. As we're doing that, maybe ten or 20 Hawaiian surfers gathered around, and by the time we got them all the way unpacked there must have been at least 100 people there. They took us straight to the Outrigger Canoe Club and gave us the racks of honor. I’ve been a member of the Outrigger Canoe Club ever since.

Who were some of the early pioneer Florida surfers besides your brother and yourself?

John Smith and Dave Brakeway from Virginia Beach. They came down and had an actual Hawaiian redwood board. They looked us up because we were fooling around, riding bellyboards and things like that. They allowed my brother and me to ride their board and became our lifetime friends as well.

Anyway, after that, my brother Bill made his board and I followed. So Bill made the first Hawaiian board ever built in Florida, and I made the second one, not that that matters. Then Bill made the first hollow Blake-style board here in Florida. We built numerous Blake boards. I don’t have to tell you that the Blake board dominated the scene in Hawaii from about 1935 all through until after World War II. Most of the surfing in Waikiki was done on the Blake board. There were a few solid boards, too, of course.

Tom lifeguarded in Florida up into the early sixties or mid-sixties. Did you still know him then?

Oh, sure. We knew Tom from about 1932 all the way for the rest of his life. The Last few years I kind of lost track of him, but we used to exchange correspondence occasionally.

Yeah. I visited him up there and Tom stayed with us, off and on, for years, when he was in Miami.

How would you sum him up? How do you remember him?

I think the thing that should really be stressed is that Tom was a dreamer, but he was also a doer. Everything he did, all the equipment he developed, was very carefully thought out and beautifully executed. I never saw Tom work much with his hands, but whatever products he ever had were always of good quality. Nothing was ever crude or anything.

Well, I knew a lot about him, but nobody ever knew everything about him. He sort of adopted himself to our family. He was very fond of my mother, and he never came to Florida without looking us up. He stayed with us. Or what I mean is, he'd pull up with an Airflow trailer or something, and stay out front. But he’d be on your doorstep every morning, and he used to take my mother to a piece of property she had up three miles north of where I lived. They’d go off swimming together probably five days a week together. He adored my family, that’s all.

My brother Bill—you talk to him and you’ll get a little bit of a negative thing. He saw Tom as a dreamer, you know? For example, Tom was always a health nut, experimenting with his diet and things, and sometimes he’d be on such an extreme diet that he wouldn’t be as well as he should be. I wouldn’t say he’s an unhealthy person, don’t get me wrong. But he did his own thinking. And he was a loner, there’s no doubt about it. There are very few people that were close to him.

I could tell you about Tom being the inventor of the fin. I think I was one of the first people that he asked to test it for him. We put it on my board, and you’d be amazed at what it looked like. Tom was great about having everything polished and chrome-plated to perfection. This fin, I’ll bet it weighed ten or twelve pounds. Unbelievable. More than my son’s surfboard weighs today. And it was about 16 inches long, and it was only, let’s say, four inches deep. Everything was rounded off, so that if you were touched by it or hit by it you wouldn’t get hurt. Tom was quite concerned about that.

It must have been at least half an inch. It was solid bronze or brass, I don’t know which. It was a casting. The base itself must have been at least a quarter of an inch thick. So it was a heavy, kind of a clunky thing. And to be honest, it didn’t do really much of anything to improve the ride of the board. Of course, it was tremendous on other boards, I don’t have to tell you that.

I probably tested it for a week or two, in the Florida surf, which is usually pretty sorry stuff. I might have taken it up to Daytona, too, but I don’t believe I did. Like I said, we weren’t terribly enthusiastic about it.

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