East Coast Surfing in 1912 – A Story About Sam Reid

The year was 1912. Sam Reid, a boy of seven, stood on the beach and was amazed by the experience of seeing Olympic champion, Duke Kahanamoku put on a surfing display in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Reid was so excited he took his mother’s ironing board into the surf the next day to ride waves like his new-found hero, the Duke. He rode the ironing board for four years.

Reid was born in Philadelphia in 1905, though he would change his year of birth in the early ’20s for reasons that likely had to do with starting high school at an age when most young men were near graduation. William Reid, Sam’s father, was a direct descendent of naval hero Samuel Chester Reid, who designed the 1818 version of the American flag.

By 1910, William had deserted the family and moved to San Francisco. One can imagine how the beaches of Atlantic City would become a playground for a young fatherless boy, and how seeing the great Duke Kahanamoku would leave such a lasting impression that it would send Sam down a path that would change his entire life.

Sam and the rest of his family—mother and older sister, both named Lucy, and an older brother named William—lived in Atlantic City until 1919, at which point Sam was building his own surfboards and had likely developed into a seasoned young waterman.

By 1923, the family had moved to Santa Monica; Lucy and Sam both attend Santa Monica High—Sam as an 18-year-old sophomore. This is likely where the discrepancy in his birthdate comes from.

Around this time, Sam came into contact with Duke Kahanamoku again, this time on the beach in Santa Monica. Duke was working in Hollywood and, as Sam later wrote, any chance the Duke got he would go to the beach to swim and bodysurf next to Crystal Pier. Duke would amaze onlookers by swimming out further than anyone and riding waves back to the beach. Closer to shore, he would sometimes bodysurf with young children on his back.

At 19, still living with his mother and sister, Reid got a lifeguard job at the prestigious Santa Monica Swim Club. Duke was often a club guest, and Reid would shoot him questions about Hawaii. What was the surf like? Should he go? If so, could he get a job? Duke encouraged him: “You’re young,” Reid later wrote, quoting the Duke. “Go see my brothers David and Sam; tell them I said Aloha.”

Reid was 21 in December 1926 when he stepped off the SS Calawaii after it docked in Honolulu Harbor. Reid notes that this was a Hawaii without streetlights and only one big hotel, the Moana, doing business on the beach at Waikiki. It didn’t take Reid long to meet the Kahanamoku brothers and find a job at the soon-to-open Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Within a day of his arrival, Reid wasn’t just surfing with Duke’s brother David but riding Duke’s personal board.

Reid quickly assimilated into the everyday life of Waikiki. His job at the Royal Hawaiian was to give information about the Islands to guests, and when he was not surfing or swimming, he was immersed in the Bishop Museum library and archives. Reid was so taken with the history of Hawaii and the Hawaiian people, that he taught himself the rudiments of their beautiful and poetic language. On the beach in between surf sessions, David and Sam Kahanamoku taught Reid the history of Hawaiian surfing as they maintained their roles as the leaders of Hui Nalu, the beachfront surfing and paddling club founded by Duke in 1908. Reid himself would eventually be accepted into Hui Nalu—quite an accomplishment as most members were Hawaiian.

In September 1927, back in California, Sam Reid and Tom Blake, another transplant Santa Monica surfer and lifeguard, together made a little surf history. Reid and Blake drove up the coast to surf Malibu—something that had never been done. Reid later described the day: “Visualize if you can, a beautiful September day in California. The coast highway was then a two-lane road, dirt most of the way. Tom Blake had stopped by the Santa Monica Swimming Club to pick me up. In those days, cowboys with guns and rifles still rode the Malibu Ranch, and the gate at Las Flores Canyon had a “No Trespassing” sign on it. We took our 10-foot redwoods out of the Essex rumble seat and paddled the mile to a beautiful Crescent-shaped beach that didn’t have a footprint on it. No buildings and, of course, no pier! There was no audience but the seagulls.” Blake described the day in simpler terms: “The place was deserted except for seagulls and pelicans and the Rindge house. To be the first to ride it, I caught a 3-foot wave, and we played around in it for an hour or so, real exclusive surfing.” The history of Malibu will note that one of the first two surfers to ride the wave at the fabled point was from Wisconsin, the other from New Jersey.

For the next ten years, Reid traveled back and forth from Honolulu to Los Angeles. For two years, beginning in 1927, Reid lived in Palo Alto for part of the year, worked in San Francisco, and took classes at Stanford University. (Reid wouldn’t graduate from Stanford until after World War II, in his early 40s.)

In 1927, during a return visit to Hawaii, Reid traveled with the great Hawaiian surfer and Stanford swimmer Jack May. The two would be connected for many years both as members of Hui Nalu and as rivals in multiple swimming, paddling and surfing competitions. In the 1930 census, Reid is listed as a lodger with the May family at their home on 1445 Punahou Street in Honolulu.

Reid’s achievements in swimming and paddleboard racing are thoroughly documented in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. He was Hawaiian surfboard champion in 1928 and 1932—although “surfboard” in this case is misleading, as the titles were for paddleboard races held in the Ala Wai Canal. Reid would win multiple swimming titles between 1928 to 1935.

By 1936, Reid had backed off competition but was still involved as a judge. He also became the aquatics coach for the Honolulu Athletic Association and continued to work for the Royal Hawaiian and as a lifeguard when back in California.

In 1940, Reid registered for the draft. Two years later he was a warrant boatswain in the Navy. As reported in the Los Ángeles Times, Reid received a Purple Heart in 1944 after his ship was torpedoed and sunk. The following year, while awaiting transfer to the DDS Reid—named after his great-grandfather Samuel Chester Reid—that ship was sunk in the Philippines with 103 men lost.

After the war, and after graduating from Stanford at age 42 with a degree in Political Science, Reid took a job doing promotional work for the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho.

Reid moved to Santa Cruz around 1950 and eventually became the city’s lifeguard chief. Records show that he was married in the early 1960s, but people who knew Reid in Santa Cruz believe that he lived alone. Still dividing his time between California and Hawaii, Reid found work with the Hawaiian Tourism Board. He also wrote articles and letters to the press. In 1955, Reid did a feature article for the Star-Bulletin titled “Surfing . . . Then and Now,” and here is where Reid’s reputation as a curmudgeon begins to take hold. “Surfing at Waikiki has become a dangerous, haphazard sport,” Reid wrote, “with seemingly no rules of conduct. The old strict code of surfing that I had been taught by the Kahanamokus was forgotten. What happened to the old boards, the old style of safe surfing?”

Reid continued in this manner while writing a trio of articles for Surfer magazine during the 1960s, in which he finds glory in the past and mostly criticizes the present; the title of his 1965 Surfer remembrance feature was “The Days of Great Boards and Real Watermen.”

In 1971, when Reid was 66, he wrote to the Star-Bulletin to address what he felt was a slight against Duke Kahanamoku by the organizers of the United States Surfing Championship, held annually at Huntington Beach. Duke had been the guest of honor at the US Championships in the previous decade. “Knowing Duke for 40 years, I know how much he must have suffered in having to watch the ‘Sport of Kings’ degenerate into exhibitionist tricks by modern midgets.” Huntington, Reid continued, picking up steam, “is a playground for awkward, off-balance, spreadeagled flat-footed squatters who inflate their egos by disappearing under an ugly mussel-encrusted concrete pier in a sea of discolored oil, toilet paper and other trash.”

Despite his often-pessimistic view of modern wave-riding, Sam Reid remained a fixture in the surf community of Santa Cruz. In previous decades—but well after foam boards had taken over the sport—Reid could be found paddling his heavy redwood plank into the lineup at Steamer Lane wearing wool bathing trunks and surfing in the style he was taught by his Hawaiian friends in the 1920s. In later years, when Reid could no longer surf, he still drove to the bluffs at the Lane every day in his 1938 Packard and was happy to share stories of the past with Duke and Tom Blake. He was also ready, at all times, to call out surfers who were not following the rules. On the cliff at Steamer Lane is a wooden plaque stating those rules erected by the city of Santa Cruz, quoting Reid. “First surfer up has the right of way. Paddle around the wave not through it. Hang on to your board. Help out other surfers.”

Reid died in his sleep, in 1978, at age 73. “It appeared [that he] died naturally in bed,” the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported, “with a dinner prepared Friday still on the table.” Reid would later have a place of honor in the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum, and his private papers and photographs were donated to the UC Santa Cruz Library.

Although Sam Reid was a true pioneering figure in surfing, his story has mostly been lost to surf history. There are a few reasons for this. First, he mostly pursued his devotion to the sport by himself. Sailing to Hawaii alone in the mid-1920s is very different from arriving in pairs or groups, as surfers did in later decades. Second, unlike Tom Blake, who himself was very much a loner, Reid never turned surfing into a commercial enterprise. Riding waves was at the center of his life, but his career was filled with traditional nine-to-five pursuits. Third, Reid was constantly looking back to the past. Surfing and everything important about it, to Reid, is directly connected to Duke and Hawaii. Finally, Reid was cantankerous. Even among people who knew and liked him, Reid was described as ornery and a complainer. His writings are filled with criticism about the state of surfing and how young surfers are going about it the wrong way. In an early ’70s letter to good friend Tommy Zahn, Reid complains about the ‘dirty hippies” in Santa Cruz, and how the apartments in Santa Monica ruined the area.

Reid had no interest whatsoever in being part of the surf culture that developed in Southern California after the war. He was from New Jersey, and part of him seemed to always be in “outsider” mode. His roots weren’t set in a place in which he had personal experience, but in surfing itself, and in his belief that all things great in the sport flowed from Hawaii. Nothing mattered more to Sam Reid than the fact that he was embraced by Hawaiians.