CECIL LEAR
It was 1967 and it happened to be in New York of all places when Cecil Lear, a young advertising executive from New Jersey, and Rudy Huber, a jet setting trust fund baby from Connecticut with connections to the world of international surfing got together to plot out the creation of what would come to be the largest and longest lived amateur surfing body, the Eastern Surfing Association. Backed by Hoppy Swarts, the “Duke” of competitive amateur surfing in America, and at a time when the dissolution of the original U.S. Surfing Association threatened to destroy the only coherent amateur surfing program in the U.S., Cecil and Rudy conceived the basic outline of an East Coast-based, East Coast-run surfing organization that would unite what were then a scattered group of little independent surfing “fiefdoms” which were emerging at that time up and down the East Coast.
Cecil was a product of the Jersey Shore, a lifetime waterman who was turned on to surfing in his early 30's. He founded the New Jersey Surfing Association in 1963 and at the ripe old age of 32 found himself bitten by the magical bug called “surfing”. He began to travel the East Coast, chocolate chip cookies in hand, exploring strange new places with exotic names like “Narragansett”, “Gilgo Beach”, “Cape Hatteras” and “Canaveral Pier”. While it may be hard to believe, at that time these destinations held the same mystical attraction that Tavarua, Bali, and Hawaii's North Shore hold for today's young surfers. Along the way he ran into the little bands of surfers who populated these areas, isolated from each other like Stone Age cultures yet beginning to reach out and come into contact with each other. As they did, these tribes did what every other social structure ever created by human beings had done when they bumped into another tribe-they went to war. The only difference was that this time the weapons were surfboards and the battlegrounds were the pristine beaches of the East Coast.
