Tom Blake (surfer)

Thomas Edward Blake (March 8, 1902 – May 5, 1994) was an American athlete, inventor, and writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential surfers in history, and a key figure in transforming surfing from a regional Hawaiian specialty to a nationally popular sport.

Assessing Blake's significance, sociologist Kristin Lawler wrote that

Blake was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

His mother died of tuberculosis when he was eleven months old, and his father left him in the care of relatives in Hibbing, Minnesota; Ashland, Wisconsin; and finally Washburn, Wisconsin on the Lake Superior shore, where he spent most of his childhood.

He attended Washburn's St. Louis Catholic School, where, he later recalled, an educational film provided his first awareness of surfing.

Blake attended Washburn High School, but the 1918 influenza pandemic closed the school during his senior year, and local records are inconclusive as to whether he graduated.

After leaving school, Blake embarked upon the nomadic lifestyle that would characterize most of his life, working a succession of jobs in Detroit, New York, and Miami.

One episode from that period that presaged his later career occurred in Detroit in 1920, when he encountered the legendary Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku at a movie theater.

He shook hands with Kahanamoku and later reported, "I felt that somehow he had included an invitation to me to come over to his own Hawaiian islands... As I look back now I realize how much I was influenced by this first contact with the man who has become the best-known personality in the history of surfing."

Blake and Kahanamoku later became good friends.

By 1921, Blake was living in Santa Monica, California, where he supported himself as a lifeguard and occasionally worked as a stuntman in films.

Over the years he served as stunt double for stars such as Ramon Navarro and Clark Gable.

During this period he became active in competitive swimming.

Blake first attempted to ride a wave in 1921 on an old board he found while working at the Santa Monica Swim Club.

According to his account, he wiped out badly and waited several years to try again.

In 1922, he traveled to Pennsylvania to enter a ten-mile race on the Delaware River and triumphed over a field of the East Coast's top swimmers, breaking the existing record in the process.

By 1924, however, his interest returned, to the point that he traveled to Hawaii to learn more about the sport.

Upon arrival, Blake attempted to seek out Kahanamoku, only to find that he was not on the island.

However, he quickly became friends with Duke's five brothers, all skilled surfers in their own right, and became immersed in the study of surfing and Hawaiian culture.

For the next thirty years, Blake would divide his time between Hawaii and the mainland, shuttling back and forth every year except when interrupted by the Second World War.

Over the next decade, Blake Rose to eminence in a sport that had until then been largely the province of native Hawaiians.

On his 1926 visit, he was able to secure permission from the curators to study the boards' construction and restore several of them.

He then began his own experiments in improving surfboard design.

Up until that point, most modern surfers, even Duke Kahanamoku, used the shorter alaia boards due to the immense weight— up to 200 pounds— of the solid olo boards.

Blake initially sought to build lighter olos by drilling hundreds of holes in the board, then covering the openings with a thin outer layer.

Back on the mainland, in September 1927, Blake and his friend Sam Reid became the first to surf Malibu Point, and in 1928, he organized, and then won, the first Pacific Coast Surfriding Championship.

This was the style of board he used to win the 1928 Pacific Coast Championship.

Then after three years of experimenting, in 1929, Blake constructed a hollow board with transverse bracing.

In 1930, he entered the Hawaiian Surfboard Paddling Championships using a lightweight board of his own design.

He overwhelmed all opposition, setting eight new records in the course of the match.

However, his victory sparked some resentment among his native Hawaiian friends, feeling that the new board had given him unfair advantage, and Blake stopped entering races after this.

Nonetheless, he continued to compile an extraordinary record of athletic feats.

In 1932, Blake, with two friends, made the first successful attempt at paddling the 26 miles from mainland California to Catalina Island.

In 1932, he received a patent for his hollow surfboard design "and opened the sport up to hundreds of people who weren't able to muscle the heavy plank boards down the beach and into the water."

One historian remarked: "Blake changed the whole scene by working on these boards. He single-handedly, without really giving it much thought, changed surfing in a massive, huge way. It was because of this we are doing what we do on boards."

Blake’s internally braced hollow wooden surfboards were eventually superseded by laminated boards with an interior layer of balsa, then by foam-and-fiberglass designs, but another of his innovations remains a fixture of modern surf- and paddleboards, the "skeg" or fin.

Traditional surfboards were flat-bottomed, but in 1935, Blake experimented by tearing the keel off an old speedboat and attaching it to the bottom of a surfboard.

Then on August 1, 1936, he set a milestone that still stands: entering the waves at Kalehuawehe near Waikiki, he made a run estimated at 4,500 feet, the longest recorded surf ride in history.

While in Hawaii, Blake became fascinated by the traditional surfboards preserved at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

These included a variety of styles, from the shorter alaia to the heavy, 16-foot long olo boards traditionally reserved for royalty including one owned by High Chief Abner Pākī.