I’ve noticed that Matt Warshaw’s forthcoming book The History of Surfing has a photograph of my dad Pat and his old friend John Elwell on its cover. My dad lived in Hawaii from ’57–’61. The photo is of he and Elwell checking the surf at Yokohama Bay on Oahu’s West Side taken by Surfer Magazine founder John Severson in 1957, the year Elwell visited my dad.
The following black and white portraits I took of Elwell this summer at his house on Coronado Island in San Diego, which is just down the coast from Mission Beach, my dad’s hometown. It was actually Elwell who introduced my parents to each other. Elwell met my mom (who also grew up in Coronado) when she was 16 and then introduced her to my dad at Wind N’ Sea in La Jolla. My dad asked my mom if she would go tandem surfing with him. The surf was about 8-feet that day but my mom, who’d never surfed before, agreed to go. The rest, as they say, is history.
Elwell holding a photo he took of my dad surfing Waimea Bay
From L to R, Elwell, a lady friend and my dad during their time camping on the beaches of the North Shore Photo: Tom Keck