Pioneer Surfer Gets Final Ride, Fond Farewell

Lewis Earl (Hoppy) Swarts received the surfers’ equivalent of a state funeral Sunday at Redondo Beach, by sand and by sea.

Under a misty, early morning sky, nearly 200 of his admirers, who had traveled from as far north as Santa Cruz and as far south as San Diego, gathered by a lifeguard station at the end of Avenue C. They were a mix of older people and teen-agers; some in dark suits and some in sweat suits. A blue and white banner draped over a railing conveyed their message. “Aloha, Hoppy,” it read.

About 50 yards offshore, a county patrol boat was anchored, with 13 of Swarts’ relatives on deck. To the south, in the slate-gray ocean, nine old friends in wet-suits straddled their boards. Each clutched a single rose.

Everything went according to plan. First, speeches at the lifeguard station eulogized the 71-year-old man who pushed surfing from a shadowy subculture toward the mainstream of sports.

Then, Hoppy’s son, Buzz Swarts, and grandson, Craig Foster, changed into swim trunks. They left the boat with their boards and paddled toward land.

On the beach, Buzz Swarts picked up a wreath. Foster took a container of his grandfather’s cremated remains. With an escort of 11 others on boards, they returned to the water and paddled back out past the surf line.

Then the two men chose a wave, got to their feet on their boards and let the rising swell take them back in toward shore--a quiet farewell ride for Hoppy before his ashes were spread upon the ocean.

“He’s smiling down on this, I tell ya,” said Hoppy’s nephew, Steve Madden.

Changed the Image

Hoppy Swarts was the man who tamed surfing, working hard to change the sport’s image as the pastime of angry rebels. He brought organization to a group of athletes known mostly for the pride they took in living on society’s fringe.

Decades ago, Swarts invented the rules and judging systems adopted by both the national and regional amateur groups that he founded and the professional circuits that followed.

His white beard and broad-brimmed straw hat were still a familiar sight at every California competition. He stopped participating in meets--in the 50-and-over category--in 1984. But he continued to set up heats, monitor the rankings for 1,000 competitors and make sure mailings reached the members of the Western Surfing Assn., one of the organizations that he helped establish.

Indeed, his death of a stroke came while he stood in line June 9 at Los Angeles International Airport, en route to a contest in Santa Cruz.

He had lived to see surfing emerge as a professional sport, with contests broadcast on television from around the world and top stars earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Debt of Gratitude

Swarts’ leagues were the forerunners of the pros. “All the surfers making beaucoup bucks owe some thanks to Hoppy,” said Steve Pezman, publisher of Surfer magazine and one of the speakers at the 8 a.m. seaside ceremony.

For his life’s work, Swarts was revered by some and reviled by others.

Periodically over the years, he had to listen to the denunciations of angry young men who said his introduction of organized competition spoiled what was originally a celebration of a private, near-mystic relationship with the waves.

“This has been an ongoing thing ever since we started the organization,” said 70-year-old LeRoy Grannis, Swarts’ surfing buddy since their days at Redondo Beach High School in the ‘30s. “At Malibu, especially, we’ve had terrible times getting in the water for contests, with people saying, ‘You can’t come here. These are our waves.’

“With the money coming into it, we’ve had to hear, ‘You guys are selling out.’ ”

But there was never any indication that Swarts himself profited from the mainstreaming of surfing. Quite the contrary.

He did not manufacture the surf fashions that have become an American craze, or sell surf equipment, or work with the pros.

He volunteered his time until this year, when the Western Surfing Assn. named him executive director and started paying him an annual salary: $6,000.

Although Swarts spent much of his time in swim trunks and kept surfboards on his patio, his background was hardly that of a beach bum.

With a bachelor’s degree from Occidental College and a master’s from UC Berkeley, Swarts made his living as an electrical engineer, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during World War II, then at Southern California aerospace firms. At 55, however, he left engineering, got his teaching credentials and taught math in Barstow-area high schools.

But the top entry on his resume noted that he first put a board in the water at Hermosa Beach in June, 1934.

His nickname--bestowed at birth by his father, who was reading a Hopalong Cassidy book at the time--had little to do with his surfing style.

“He looked good in the water,” Grannis said. “Some people looked all stooped over, but he just looked like he was flowing.”

That was a difficult feat; the old wooden surfboards were 13 feet long and weighed more than 50 pounds. Today’s short fiberglass boards are much easier to maneuver.

The contests then were occasional local events, with no standard set of regulations.

But in the early 1960s, “when those Gidget movies were coming out, there was a lot of attention on surfing and unfortunately, a lot of the image was bad,” Grannis said.

“Hoppy said the best thing to do is get organized, start laying down a few rules.”

And so he created the U.S. Surfing Assn. and served as president from 1961 to 1967. He wrote the bylaws and constitution for the Western Surfing Assn. He served as treasurer for the U.S. Surfing Federation, the latest national umbrella amateur surfing group.

None of his three children competed in surf meets. But he campaigned to get surfing teams established at high schools and colleges. He lobbied the Assn. of Surfing Professionals to raise its minimum age for membership to 18. A corner of his Long Beach apartment overflowed with computer printouts of names, dates and rankings.

“It was a pretty thankless type of task,” Pezman said.

But Swarts’ family found out Sunday that plenty of people realized full well the importance of his role.

Binoculars Shared

Clustered in the stern of their boat, the old man’s relatives passed around a pair of binoculars so each could marvel at the throng on shore listening to half an hour of tributes, with music ranging from the Beach Boys tunes most commonly associated with surfing to the swing recordings that Hoppy, an accomplished ballroom dancer, preferred.

Then the family tracked the son and grandson as they made the farewell ride, paddled back to the boat and climbed aboard.

Once on deck, Buzz Swarts knelt by the boat’s rail with the box of his father’s ashes and started pouring a fine gray stream that dissolved into the sea.

The relatives tossed tulips and carnations overboard as the boat slowly drifted away. The surfers resting in the water threw their roses.

A Cessna piloted by an old friend flew in low, dropping a bouquet from the sky.

And from the beach, the crowd waved goodby.

Buzz Swarts forlornly lifted a right hand in response. “Thanks, guys,” he said.