If you’re an outdoor enthusiast, he changed your life even though most people these days barely knew who he was.
Tom Blake, he didn’t just surf waves — he wrote their commandments. Before him, surfing was a heavy, wooden religion practiced by Hawaiian royalty and a few salty disciples. Then Blake came along in the 1920s, looked at a 200-pound redwood plank, and drilled holes in it.
He was an outcast, having dropped out of high school during the 1918 Spanish influenza to hitch around the mid-west before he came upon the Duke at a theater, changing the course of his life, and the course of all us wave riding fanatics, in turn. Reflecting on his encounter with surfing’s god-father he said, “I felt that somehow he had included an invitation to me to come over to his own Hawaiian islands” and so Blake set forth west to land in California and pitch his tent on a little known beach called Malibu, becoming the first to surf it with his mate, and picking up side gigs as a stuntman in Hollywood to support his wet habit.
He didn’t stop his tinkering after he turned board making on its head with the first hollow Frankenstein flotation. Other inventions attributed to his name are the first waterproof camera housing, lifeguard towers, and, the piece that revolutionized wave riding – the surfboard fin. But for all the accolades, he lived a nomadic life – a van lifer before van-lifing was a thing sustained on a vegetarian diet with healthy bouts of meditation and wave riding.
A proto-surf-yogi with a drill.
So next time someone tries to sell you on the “legend” status of a pro surfer because they launched a CBD seltzer line? Remember Tom Blake. A man who was already immortal before the marketing department even had a word for it.