Aloha Leroy Grannis
Pioneering Hermosa Beach surf photographer Leroy Grannis has passed away at age 93. During the Golden Age of surfing, in the 1960s, the pictures in people’s minds, worldwide, when they thought of the newly popular Hawaiian sport was almost certainly a photograph taken by Leroy Grannis. Dewey Weber cutting back at 22nd Street, Greg “The Bull” Noll at big Sunset, Mike Purpus at Makaha, “Mr. Pipeline” Gerry Lopez at Pipeline, Corky Carol on the podium at Huntington all made their way from the pages of Surfer magazine, which Grannis helped found, to Life, Sports Illustrated, and newspapers around the world. Katie Tracy and Leroy Grannis at San Onofre in 1938. Leroy proposed to Tracie on the Beach in Hermosa, in front of the Grannis Hotel owned by his mother. Photo Courtesy of the Grannis family If there was a preponderance of South Bay surfers in the photos, it was because Grannis was a third generation Hermosan. He was born on the kitchen table of his family’s beach cottage on Fourth Street, on August 12, 1917. Granny, as he was known to all, caught his first wave when he was 12, at 14th Street in Hermosa in 1931. Four years later he was a founding member of the Palos Verdes Surf…
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