LeRoy Grannis fell in love with the ocean and surfing at a very young age, and at a time when the sport was also at a very young age.
He was born at home, blocks from the ocean in Hermosa Beach on Aug. 12th,1917. The family made the most of living near the beach. Grannis’ father began teaching LeRoy ocean swimming and bodysurfing when he was only five, and he took to it immediately.
He attended Pier Avenue School in Hermosa, where he participated in activities including school plays, when he wasn’t at the beach bodysurfing with a belly board he’d fashioned out of a piece of scrap wood.
Surfing was still in its infancy. Pioneer George Freeth had introduced the sport in a demonstration at Redondo Beach in 1907. By the early 1930s, stand-up surfing had caught on big at the Hermosa Beach Pier.
In those days, there were no surf stores where one could go buy a suitable surfboard. Young LeRoy had to scramble around to find a full-length board, often borrowing from friends.
He still found time to attend Redondo Union High School, where he served as president of the Natural Science club. The club also included Lewis Earl “Hoppy” Swartz.
In the mid-1930s, Grannis and Swartz became early members of the Palos Verdes Surfing Club founded by dentist John Heath ‘Doc” Ball and Adolph “Adie” Bayer. Ball enjoyed taking photos of surfing action, and he encouraged the younger Grannis to pursue surfing photography.
Grannis met his future wife, Katie, after a surfing session at the Hermosa Beach pier, and the couple married in 1939. Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1940.
He worked at various low-level jobs until joining the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1943, where he served as a pilot flying supplies into war zones. (He remained on active reserve until 1977, when he retired as a major.)
After the war, Grannis got a job with Pacific Bell in 1946, a gig that several of his surfing bros also took. He didn’t much like working for the phone company, but it did allow time for Grannis to polish his surfing and photography skills.
Doc Ball gave his young protege’s career a boost when he used several of Grannis’ surfing action shots in his landmark 1946 book, California Surfriders (Norman B. Whale), an early visual portrayal of the surfing world.
He continued to surf during the 1950s, even winning a couple of competitions. He gradually began cutting back on competing and instead worked to improve the sport by helping his friend Hoppy Swarts get the United States Surfing Association off the ground.
He began devoting most of his energies back towards photography after doctors determined he’d developed an ulcer in 1959. He blamed his phone company job, where had become a supervisor.
At first, most of his photos came from the shore, and those shots comprise some of his best work. But he later began going into the water to get more closeups of the action.
He was not the first to do so, but he became masterful at it. He introduced innovations such as a waterproof box to hold his camera that also allowed him to change to a new roll of film without having to leave the ocean.
1959 was a banner year for focusing on surf photography. The film “Gidget” had just come out and it helped bring the sport into the nation’s consciousness. Also, the first surfing magazines were starting to appear.
Grannis sold his first photograph to the short-lived Reef magazine for $7, and it was published in 1960, the same year that Surf magazine started. In 1964, Grannis would go on to co-found International Surfing, now known as Surfing magazine. He now had a market eager for his photos, and they would continue to appear in surfing publications for the rest of his life.
He didn’t just shoot surfing action, but also documented the look and ambience of the vibrant lifestyle on shore as well.
When he grew frustrated with a new generation of less well-behaved surfers during the 1970s, he began documenting other active sports such as hang gliding and windsurfing.
After retiring from his phone company job in 1977, Grannis and his wife, Katie, moved from their longtime home in Hermosa Beach to Carlsbad, California.
Appreciation for his artistry and contributions to surfing history and culture began to grow in his later years. He was inducted into the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame in 1999 and the Hermosa Beach Surfers Walk of Fame in 2003, according to John Grannis, one of the couple’s four children, along with Kit, Frank and Nancy.
After 69 years of marriage, Katie died at 89 in 2008. Grannis passed away on Feb. 3, 2011, in a Torrance nursing home. He was 93.
On June 25, 2011, a well-attended memorial paddle-out was held in his honor at the Hermosa Beach Pier.
Sources:
Beach Reporter archives.
Daily Breeze archives.
Los Angeles Times archives
Wikipedia.
