Thanks to everyone who contacted me to let me know about the photo of my dad that accompanied Bob Sigall’s column in yesterday’s Star-Advertiser.

My dad arrived in Hawaii on May Day in 1939. He had a new car, a trunk that his father made that was full of clothes, a surfboard, and a hollow paddle board.

He was fresh from organizing the Long Beach Surf Club in Long Beach, California, as well as a “national” surfing competition the prior year in which the surf didn’t cooperate and only paddling races were held.

Soon after arriving in Hawaii, he helped organize the Hawaii Surfing Association, which I believe then put on events during the war years. After WWII, he was one of the founders, and the first president, of the Waikiki Surf Club, formed as an alternative affordable to regular surfers and paddlers who couldn’t pay to join the Outrigger.

He was there for the beginning of the Molokai-Oahu Canoe Race, and credited with envisioning and founding the Makaha Surfing Championships, the predecessor of the modern surfing circuit.

He was an avid advocate of amateur athletics, and pulled back later in the 1960s or early 1970s when the big money from television contracts started the move to professionalizing competitive surfing. It was too far from his roots in the openness and accessibility of amateur surfing for him to feel comfortable.

Anyway, the photo yesterday was a pleasant surprise.

See also: The headline read, “John M Lind is too modest”