Eddie : photo Leroy Grannis / Legendary Surfers

Leroy "Granny" Grannis

Legendary Surf Photographer Leroy Grannis needs your help

Surfersvillage Global Surf News, 25 April, 2009 : - - It's gonna be hard to write about this, but bear with me and please read on... The care of our elderly is one of the greatest things we can do while we're on the planet...

Leroy Grannis -- Granny -- has fallen on hard times. Famous for his surfing photos and as an elder of the tribe -- a local of Carlsbad and Hermosa -- you would think he'd be able to supplement his Social Security and MediCal with modest earnings from his photography and his life savings.

Unfortunately, what "estate" he had has been eaten up by executors, and others. 

Granny no longer can afford to stay in the assisted living home he has been living in and has moved to his son's home. John Van Ornum has been helping Leroy's daughter Katie get the word out and is exploring setting up a fund for donations. For more information, you can reach John at: jvo_v101@yahoo.com

Click here to read about Granny's contribution to surfing

See the LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter, updated 2/15/2005:  LeRoy "Granny" Grannis

www.legendarysurfers.com

Leroy Grannis : Self Portrait / Legendary Surfers

Glimpses:

GROWING UP: "I've been around the ocean ever since I was born. When I was born, we lived a half block from the Strand in Hermosa Beach, on 10th Street. My earliest recollection of the ocean is when I was 5 or 6 years old. My dad used to get up early and go down and jump in the ocean in the summertime. I went along with him. I learned to bodysurf. Eventually, I got into belly boards".

DEPRESSION: The Great Depression kept us kinda limited in certain ways but we had surfin' to take care of everything. Long as there's waves, why, you didn't have to pay for those. All we had to do was buy the gas to get there. I don't know how it affected us, It made us appreciate money when we were older, cuz we never had any during the Depression. I would go for weeks without a penny in my pocket. I went to high school stone broke most of the time. You'd take a lunch with you, of course, so you could eat. There just wasn't any money available. Those that had steady jobs were the kings."

WORLD WAR 11: "We were down at the beach on December 7 of 1941," Granny vividly remembers much in the same way later generations of surfers remember where he or she was when President Kennedy was assasinated, when we first landed on the moon, or when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. "A whole bunch of us down there, right next to Hermosa Pier. I don't what we were doing; playing volleyball or something. All of a sudden - somebody had a radio - and we heard over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and we all looked at each other and we knew that nothing would ever be the same. Eventually, just about all of us ended up in one branch [of the armed forces] or another."

PHOTOGRAPHY: At age 42, LeRoy took up surf photography as a hobby in 1960. "I thought, well, Doc's (Ball) gone and I don't know too many guys taking pictures of surfers, so I decided to jump into it. I built a third garage and made half of it into a darkroom and started shooting the kids at 22nd Street and Hermosa; sold 'em 8 by 10's for a buck a piece to get a little money back. I actually started in late '59, but I didn't have any decent equipment. In the spring of 1960 I decided to build a darkroom and get some better equipment. I bought an East German 35mm camera and a 400mm Meyer lens (I had been using a 50mm lens). The lens was all right, it did the job, but it had a flaw that left dark spots at the bottom of the images."

HAWAII: "In '61, I started going to Hawaii every winter cuz my wife's sister lives over there. So, I combined the visits with surf photography. I went to Hawaii every December from '61 to '66." In attempting to shoot Sunset, he first shot from a surfboard, hand-holding a Pentax with a 200mm Takumar lens wrapped in a plastic bag. "When a sneaker set broke in the channel," wrote Brad Barrett, "he almost lost the rig and decided maybe the plastic bag idea wasn't such a good one."

SURFING MAGS: "What bothers me is that the two top magazines are pushing professionalism. These young kids get the idea they want to be professionals and let everything else go - including their education. That's the wrong way to go… I've seen a lot of kids go down the drain trying to become professionals."

Click here to read about Granny's contribution to surfing

www.legendarysurfers.com

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Malcolm / Legendary Surfers
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