Taps for a Surfing Pioneer : Hall of Fame Founder’s Ashes to Be Scattered Over Redondo Sands

A long chapter in surfing history will Agently come to a close Sunday when the ashes of Lewis (Hoppy) Swarts are scattered on the sand at Redondo Beach, where he surfed for six decades.

Swarts, who died late last week at 71 after a stroke, is credited with organizing a sport thought to be unorganizable when he began riding the waves in the 1930s.

He was called a “primal figure” and the “father of organized surfing” this week by Surfing magazine publisher Steve Pezman. Swarts is in the magazine’s Hall of Fame.

After a brief eulogy at Sunday’s 8 a.m. service, the remains will be returned to the waves as Swarts requested. The service on Redondo Beach at the foot of Avenue C is public.

Swarts’ son, Buzz, who began surfing with his father at age 10, called him “a classic, recognizable by almost any surfer. To a lot of people he was one of a kind.”

The younger Swarts recalled his teen-age days on the Strand in Hermosa Beach with a group of surfers always around. “We had a surfer gang of guys my age that hung out at our home. Dad was almost like one of us.”

After graduating from Redondo Beach High School in 1935, Swarts was a West Coast surfing champion in the late 1930s and early ‘40s and continued to surf after he was eligible for Social Security. In August, 1983--at age 67--Swarts won a Grandmasters West Coast Surfing Assn. championship at Ocean Beach, competing against surfers 20 years his junior. In his days as a member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, Swarts was considered a premier stylist and is featured extensively in “California Surf Riding,” a ‘40s-era book by Doc Ball, another P. V. Surf Club pal.

But Swarts--whose nickname derived from his fondness for movie cowboy Hopalong Cassidy--may be remembered more for his organizational accomplishments. He was the architect and founder of the U. S. Surfing Assn. in the early 1960s and was also involved in the Western Surfing Assn. Another pet project was the National Scholastic Surfing Assn. Lately, Swarts was involved in founding a Surfing Hall of Fame, which was first targeted for Redondo Beach and, more recently, for Ventura County.

Leroy Granis, who grew up surfing with Swarts and continues to surf near his home in San Diego County, recalled Swarts devising the first scoring system and his home looking “like a CPA’s storeroom” in the days before computerization. “He had stacks of results from competitions all over, and that was his living room,” Granis said with a laugh.

Swarts was a serious student and scientist, getting a bachelor’s degree from Occidental and a master’s in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. He worked on space radar systems at MIT, TRW and Hughes before retiring at age 55--to get a teaching degree. For about 10 years he taught mathematics in high school. That allowed him to have summers free for surfing, though he was largely removed from organized surfing for several years. He finally retired and was supplementing his surfing duties by tutoring. Swarts considered work the sidelight and surfing his real occupation.

He told a Times reporter in 1983: “Working is a good way to provide the wherewithal so I can go surfing. . . . The thrill of riding a big wave, I don’t have anything that I can compare it to.”

Swarts, who had recently moved to Long Beach, was on his way to help run a Western Surfing Assn. meet in Santa Cruz when he suffered the stroke at Los Angeles International Airport. His son said, “He was still doing stuff like getting up at 4 in the morning to get to San Diego by 6 to start setting up a tournament. I believe he just overextended himself. But he was doing what he wanted to do right up to the last minute.”