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The Memories Come Back in Waves

“John Severson’s Surf” is a book that presents the languid-meets-extreme-thrills lifestyle of surfing through paintings and vivid photography.Credit...John Severson/“John Severson’s Surf,” via Puka Puka

It’s been easy to forget these days — this summer — what it was supposed to be about. How could it not be when we’ve just gotten a glimpse of the world’s first $1.3 million surfboard? Or when the brokerage firm Scottrade runs television ads with a surfer-investor equating stock picks with wave selection? Then there’s this new Brooks Brothers ad that has some stylized Biff in a sweater carrying a board under his woolly arm.

A time like this — when The (Surfing) Life as it’s been understood for half a century faces a hostile takeover by the very establishment influences its frontiersmen were speed-paddling away from — calls for a reminder.

Praise be Poseidon, one is here in the person of John Severson, 80. Mr. Severson is a founding father of American surf culture, having pioneered the surf art genre; joined the earliest ranks of surf filmmakers; developed the “Surf Fever” writing font now synonymous with surfing; and started the first major magazine dedicated to wave riding, Surfer, a holy book of the sport.

For the most part, Mr. Severson has been content to let others do the gabbing about surfing’s days of yore and how it all came to be. Not much point in going on about the past when one lives right on Honokeana Cove on the Hawaiian island of Maui, with a gorgeous wave breaking off the back deck and a chassis still seaworthy enough to ride it once in awhile. But after years of cajoling by friends and family, Mr. Severson put together a book about his life that is coming out next month and is simply entitled “John Severson’s Surf.”

Presented mainly through Mr. Severson’s paintings and photography, the book serves a dual purpose as a celebration of a Zelig-like life to envy and as an implicit slap across the cheek of those status-conscious, white-collar elements that are getting ever fresher in their advances upon the wave-riding lifestyle he helped start back in the 1950s.

Then, you could usually get in on a pot of rice and beans being cooked on the beach, scratch up beer money by exchanging some empties, maybe sell some paintings to tourists. No one needed a Fiat 500 ad to tell him how to make his ride surf-trip ready. Just pop out the windows of an old VW panel bus, throw a mattress in the back and voilà.

That’s what Mr. Severson did. Sure, it didn’t go over so well when he drove the thing to pick up his date, Louise Stier, at her house for the first time. “That was pretty radical,” she said last week. Her father was so displeased that they had to elope. But parents weren’t supposed to get it anyway.

As Tom Wolfe wrote of Mr. Severson and his beach crew in the 1968 book “The Pump House Gang,” “They never haired out to the square world even though they make thousands.” That is, they managed to “Keep on living The Life and not get sucked into the ticky-tacky life with some insurance salesman sitting forward in your stuffed chair on your wall-to-wall telling you that life is like a football game and you sit there and take that stuff.”

At the time of Mr. Wolfe’s writing, Mr. Severson had been running Surfer for six years. And he was indeed making “thousands” by then — far more than he ever imagined. This was a happy outcome for Mr. Severson. But it’s not why he did it.

“It was to be close to surfing,” he said in an interview from his perch in Maui last week. “As long as I had enough money to make the next issue and pay the little staff I had, I was pretty stoked.”

By the time Mr. Severson started Surfer in 1960 — it was first entitled “The Surfer” — he was 26, an old man by Southern California beach standards. And he had already made a name for himself in the budding surfing culture as an artist, photographer and filmmaker.

The straight life had beckoned along the way, but he veered away.

The son of a struggling gas station owner, he went to college but majored in art education. The Encyclopedia of Surfing notes his paintings from the time “have been called the original surf art.” The Army drafted him in 1956. It went and assigned him to Schofield Barracks in Oahu. He convinced the brass to hire him as a draftsman, but he was quickly ordered — ordered! — to join the Army surf team.

John Severson’s New Book on Surf Culture

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John Severson/“John Severson’s Surf,” via Puka Puka

So he served his country by storming the as-yet-untamed peaks of the island’s North Shore, an attack already underway by the legends Fred Van Dyke, Greg Noll and Buzzy Trent. “The Army’s full of scams,” Mr. Severson said with everlasting wonder.

Mr. Severson completed his Army service in 1958, leaving Oahu with a specialist second class ranking and steamer trunks of history making surf footage he shot at the time, which he began splicing into films

A visit by the Beach Boys to a high school auditorium showing of his 1959 live narration surf movie, “Surf Safari,” apparently inspired a national surf anthem. Mr. Severson was not initially impressed by their appearance. “We’d pretend to throw up when they came on the radio,” he said, explaining that at the time, he thought they offered only “a cheap, honky look at surfing.” But they got his attention a couple of years later, when they released their hit “Surfin’ Safari.”

“Just shameless appropriation,” Mr. Severson said last week. That said, just about anyone who attended a Severson movie wanted a piece of it, which led Mr. Severson to realize there was an appetite for a magazine.

He subsidized its first $3,000 printing with his surf movie proceeds and whatever advertising sales he could make. “There were only about six of us making surfboards,” said one early advertiser — and early cover star — Renny Yater, now 82, the inventor of the “Spoon” long board. “And there was no clothing industry.”

No matter. Its first printing sold out fast. The annual  became a quarterly, and finally a monthly. For a while, Mr. Severson enjoyed it. The issues grew thicker, the pictures and the articles got better. He even became something of a moral voice with a campaign to stop surfers from embracing the Hollywood-made rabble-rouser image that was drawing a backlash in the form of municipal surfing restrictions.

After all, as Mr. Wolfe wrote, The Life was not about railing against society’s terms but living on one’s own. And here was the thing.

About 10 years in, with a sales base of 100,000, growing ranks of advertisers and increasingly long workdays, Mr. Severson started to realize he had lost control of the terms.

In a final sign that something had to give, President Richard Nixon moved into the house next door to his in San Clemente, Calif., right in front of the Cotton’s Point surf break. When the Secret Service sought to close public access to the waves there, it fell to Mr. Severson to negotiate with the president’s team, led by the White House counsel and Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman. “He was one tough cookie,” Mr. Severson says. “I tough-cookied him right back.”

He sold in 1971, earning an undisclosed amount that was at least enough to never lose control of life’s terms again.

Looking back, Mr. Severson expresses wonderment at how surfing, and the surfing lifestyle, have evolved since. The creation of a $1.3 million surfboard, he says: “Tests the waters of ridiculousness. I always felt like surfing belonged to everyone, and not the guy with the most money.”

Yet there are new retailers like Pilgrim Surf & Supply and Saturdays that are trying to return to the classic style of the good old days. His fall book tour will take him to Saturdays’ West Village shop on Oct. 2.

“We haven’t lost it,” Mr. Severson says in his book, published by the Maui art gallery Puka Puka along with Damiani.

One fundamental truth stands: “The guy that’s having the most fun is the winner.”

A correction was made on 
Sept. 7, 2014

An article last Sunday about Surfer magazine’s founder, John Severson, referred incorrectly to the publication’s evolution. It was published quarterly following its introduction as an annual; it was never published semiannually.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Memories Come Back in Waves. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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