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The first edition of the Surfer was more an homage to the low-budget surf movies Severson began filming while stationed in Hawaii during a stint with the Army than a realistic commercial venture. “Before John Severson, there was no surf media, no surf industry, and no surf culture,” editor Sam George wrote in a 1999 appreciation in Surfer Magazine.
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To many - particularly the rugged few who first challenged the waves from San Diego to Malibu with crudely made boards and still-emerging skills - Severson stood as a patriarch of the sport and offered surfers a voice and sense of identity with his magazine. They’re lined up around the block.”Ī lifelong surfer, artist, filmmaker and publisher who helped define the early outlines of Southern California’s surf culture, Severson died Friday at his home near Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Great, he told himself - stuck with a garage-full of magazines nobody wants. John Severson had put up $3,000 to pull it off, and when he got a call from his brother that there had been a near-riot at a San Clemente, Calf., surf shop when he dropped off the first bundle of magazines, the young publisher cringed. There were black-and-white photos of towering waves with surfers zipping across their glassy faces, cartoons, sketches, a cluster of ads from surfboard makers and shapers, and even a short piece of fiction. When the first issue of the Surfer rolled off the press in 1960, it looked more like a hastily thrown together yearbook than the glossy magazine it would become.