Sam Reid*
New Jersey-born Sam Reid was an American surfing pioneer, distinguishing himself as the first person — along with Tom Blake — to ride Malibu in Los Angeles County. Reid was 7 years old in 1912 when Duke Kahanamoku of Hawaii surfing fame gave a demonstration in Atlantic City near Reid’s childhood home. The following day, Reid began riding waves on his mother’s ironing board and he continued to surf in Atlantic City until the family moved to Washington D.C. when he was 15 and a year later to Santa Monica.
Reid traveled to California at age 19 and became a lifeguard for the Santa Monica Swimming Club. He made the first of many visits to Hawaii in 1925. Two years later, while Reid and Blake were taking a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in Blake’s Essex roadster, they stopped at a private property at the mouth of Los Flores Canyon. They pulled their redwood planks from the rumble seat and paddled one mile north to a never-before-surfed break, known at that time as Malibu Ranch. They rode their first Malibu wave together, and Reid later said that the experience “Made you feel like a king!”
In 1929, Reid became the first haole, or non-Hawaiian, to win the Hawaiian Surfboard Championship, and he took home the title twice more in 1931 and 1932. He paved the way for surfing in many of the country’s mainstream spots on both the East and West Coasts.
After settling in Santa Cruz in 1946, Reid would frequently write for national surf magazines, offering up commentary that gave him a reputation as a surfing purist. In a 1966 piece for Surfer magazine, Reid, who preferred an understated style of wave-riding, said that “A mature man will never remain a hotdogger.”
Reid was one of the most influential surfers of the sport’s earliest commercial era and is a revered elder in the Santa Cruz surfing community. He passed away in 1978 at age 73 and was inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 2006.
