Richard Lisiewski*
The first time New Jersey’s Richard Lisiewski saw a surfboard as a teenager in the 1940s, it was made of ink and paper — in an issue of Life magazine, which had run an article on the coming wave of Hawaiian surfing. The next time the New Jersey native saw a board, it was a 15-foot, 55-pound log made of marine plywood that he’d built with his own hands. He took his beastly creation to the beach in Seaside Heights and proceeded to ride waves for the first time in his life.
Though that early handmade board didn’t last long (it took a fateful flight from the car roof on the ride home from the beach that day and got axed by an oncoming tractor-trailer), the indelible experience of building a board and surfing were formative for Lisiewski, who followed both pursuits to great success for the rest of his life.
Lisiewski built a second surfboard in short order after the first board’s untimely demise — a shorter and lighter version that, following decades of constant saltwater shredding, now hangs in the New Jersey Surfing Museum as the state’s “first” surfboard. From the 1940s to the 60s, Lisiewski surfed up and down the state’s Atlantic shore, riding waves in Atlantic City and becoming a pioneer of the now-popular breaks in Montauk, New York, where he was stationed with the Army during the Korean War.
After a surf trip out west introduced him to foam-based boards, Lisiewski brought the novel technology back East and opened Matador Surfboards in 1961. Joining forces with master carpenter Frank Collier the following year, Lisiewski expanded Matador into a mass-production surfboard factory, blowing and shaping foam blanks and crafting custom wooden hollow boards — broadening in later years to include bellyboards, wakeboards and even early skateboards.
Moving into surf retail in the 1960s, Lisiewski opened the Brant Beach Surf Shop on Long Beach Island, selling a wide variety of surfing accessories beyond boards — including the then new-and-risqué bikini — and thriving on the rising tide of surf culture. After the Brant Beach shop closed in 1980, he opened the Brighton Beach Surf Shop in 1982, which he ran for many years with his wife Pauline.
Lisiewski passed at the age of 89 in January 2019. He was inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 2008, and the New Jersey Surfing Hall of Fame in 2016.
