Hall of Fame Profile - Cecil Lear
Enjoying the Real Ride
- November 16, 2007
- 0 Comments
- By Story by Dharma Mum Gayla Schaefer/ Photos Courtesy of Tom Dugan/ ESM
I had the opportunity a few weeks back to interview Cecil Lear, the President of the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame and one of the founders of the Eastern Surfing Association (ESA).
To say he was an amazing man is a complete understatement, yet the lesson this man had in store for me was not one I expected during my chronicles of East Coast legends.
Tom Hanks, as the infamous Forrest Gump, ended the movie of the same name with a statement that cuts to the heart of my most recent lesson in life courtesy of Mr. Lear - I just don’t know if we all have a destiny in life or whether we are all floating around accidental like on a breeze – perhaps it’s a little of both.
More than anyone I have ever spoken to or met, this man seemed to both understand that philosophy of life – and appreciate it in its entirety.
Lear revealed this epiphany not as a statement of such – but over the course of many short asides as he shared his life story with me – a life story that included a rather astonishing career shift late in life resulting not from his education or work history, but from a chance encounter with a man with a surfing magazine when he was 32-years-old.
Somehow the way he explained his life transformation from the world of semi-conductors and factories to the jet-setting lifestyle of a top advertising executive on Madison Avenue through his connection to surfing made me reflect on the course of my own life in a completely new way – and that is one of the reasons it has taken me so long to complete his profile.
The interview, and the insights gained from it somehow, actually threw my own little world upside down. I have a feeling this man has had the same or greater effect on a few others along the way, and I also got the impression he is probably unaware that he would have such an effect on any.
A very unique individual, indeed!
And, on top of it all, he was also one “heckuva” good old fashioned storyteller!
The co-founder of the ESA and the president of the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame, Lear is a legend unto himself.
Not only was he one of the original East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame inductees in 1996, Lear actually helped decide who the Hall should consider for that original honor and was humbled they also decided to include him.
That anyone could have considered not including him is unthinkable.
“Gregg Noll came up with the idea for the Hall of Fame and it was a great idea,” says Lear, current president of the organization. “We really should have thought of it ourselves but no one had.”
As the original Competition Director for the ESA, Lear was also one of the first to surf the “Jersey Shore” even though he was in his 30’s before he saw his first real surfboard.
He has been an active member of the ESA Board of Directors for decades is described in his bio on the Hall of Fame website as being “a major force behind the scenes in virtually every important decision that has ever been made in the ESA.”
In fact, Lear created the entire competition program for the ESA, which many of you will recognize as the guidelines still used by the United States Surfing Federation and worldwide.
OK, now all of that sounds pretty darn impressive. Right?
Digging a bit deeper, I found something less easily explainable but far more interesting about this man at the forefront of any history lesson on East Coast Surfing.
Talking to Lear for a few hours, albeit only by long distance call, I found that his story has more to do with that unique attitude about life I have now seen in each of the Hall of Famers I have profiled.
Actually, something about his story made that “special something” I have been trying to define finally clarify itself in my mind for the first time since I started this project.
Until I can find a better name for the thing, I’m going to call it the “Zen of Appreciating the Real Ride.”
Laugh if you will, but that is the closest I can come after three weeks of trying and I think it describes the attitude pretty well.
Lear truly appreciates that life is a combination of chance, destiny and hard work – a la Gump but without the twang and sentimentality. In reflection, he can point to the serendipitous moments that forever changed him and led to a fantastic life of the sort that many of us can only imagine.
Here is my longer than normal but still far-to-brief synopsis of his amazing life:
Born in 1930 in Irvington, New Jersey, Lear grew up in the nearby town of Caldwell. His family summered on the Jersey Shore at Belmar, where Lear now lives. The summer property was bought by his grandfather in 1920 and his family moved to the area permanently in 1946.
“From what I have been able to research, there were tents on the property way before I was born,” says Lear. “My family built a little bungalow and we moved here right after World War II.”
He finished high school at Manasquan High School (coincidentally the alma mater of Jack Nicholson).
“Being around the water and growing up at the shore in the summer time, I was always around the water,” Lear recalls. “The river opens up to the bay on west side of town and we learned to swim there. We used to clam and crab and fish and all that.”
Hitting the beach at low tide as a kid, he grew up like many Hall of Famers - surfing with surf mats. Lear also learned to body surf when he was 10-years-old and became a lifeguard with many of his buddies during his junior year of high school.
“I got involved with all the water sports available in the area,” he remembers. “Rowing, swimming, and anything we could ride waves on. Then, going on to college with all my friends, I still worked as lifeguard and we would ride waves with a surf boat.”
In 1948, Lear went to college at Drew University to major in Economics. After that it was on to SH Cress and Co. for a few years of Retail Management training before joining the Bendix Semiconductor Corporation in 1953 - first in manufacturing control and then moving into marketing of the transistors which were paving the way from the vacuum tubes of the past toward the microchips of today.
During the early 1950’s, a buddy’s preference for blondes with ponytails led Lear to his wife of more than 50 years, Mary Lou.
“I met her on the boardwalk, not to far from where I am right now, on Memorial Day weekend,” recalls Lear. “She was with a bunch of girls and I was with some friends cruising. One of my buddies loved blondes with ponytails and he jumped out when he saw one. She was in a group with my wife. We started hanging out and dating and then we got engaged a few years later.”
The Lears have three daughters: Jeanne, Susan and Nancy; two grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Surprisingly, none of his own kids became surfers since, in his words, “they were kind of dubious about it after watching everybody get whacked by leashes when we first started.”
Lear, who laughingly admits his wife regularly chides him for his habit of telling stories in a manner similar to a tree with branches expanding in several directions at once, veered of the topic of his introduction to his wife to explain how many of the buddies he was with had recently returned from Korea. He says he was lucky to be spared from the conflict and instead served in the Naval Reserve at Lakehurst.
Maybe it was Lear’s way of “branching” out from the story that really drew me in. I have been told I have a similar manner of storytelling and after some thought I have decided that is because I am always as interested in the side stories as the main one.
Who can look at a life and not recognize that a million different related and unrelated moments are what made it come together? Without a few asides, you can miss the heart of the tale in my opinion.
Anyway, as Lear entered his thirties, he was working on his career at Bendix, which included a stint at the factory floor as a “spy” for the company. He said he learned a lot about how companies should listen to their ground people more during that experience.
He also was starting a family at this point when, at an otherwise inopportune moment, fate intervened and brought him a surfboard.
(Well, actually, it was a picture of one in a magazine but I like the continued Tom Hanks movie reference as the story reminded me of the “sail” that washed ashore to save Chuck Noland in the movie, “Cast Away.”)
“At Bendix, in 1961, we had salesmen from the West Coast and all over the country come in for training,” he recalls. “I got to talking to one from the West Coast and he asked me if I surfed. I said no, we don’t have surfboards where I live. So, he sent me some brochures from Greg Noll and Dave Sweet and the first issue of Surfer Magazine and when I saw that I couldn’t believe it. We used to watch news reels about surfing in Australia and Hawaii, but we never really had surfboards.”
Lear and his lifeguard pals had tried to make one in his younger years, “but it never really worked well.” He went on to college and never followed through on the idea until the West Coast Bendix salesman reminded him.
“I brought the magazine to some of my friends in wintertime and talked my wife into letting me get one,” he says. “I ordered one from Hobie and had the first one in this area.”
While there were other “little tribes of people like Bill Yerkes” in the New Jersey area who were staring to surf as well, Lear was the first on his beach. It took him and his pals about two weeks to learn how to use the thing and then some of his lifeguard friends went to Hawaii and came home to set up a Hobie dealership in the area.
“You have to remember that in North Jersey at that time, down to about Seaside Heights, to get on the beaches cost anywhere from $50 to $100 for a season pass. Daily badges are around $7 a day. It was kind of restricting but it was the way Jersey has been since the late 1920’s.”
Lear explained that when he was a child, he had tried surfing on a different kind of board.
“We had what were called Ironing Boards,” he says. “They were planks shaped with a round nose and a square tail. They were only four or five feet long so little kids could stand on them. I got one when I was eight or nine and you belly boarded on them with no leashes. You’d lose them and they would crash into people on the beach so they wrote ordinances into the town laws that you couldn’t use anything hard in the water. There were no set aside areas. We couldn’t use anything. We would go in before beaches set up and then in again after they closed at 5 or 5:30 p.m. So, myself and about nine other guys formed the Jersey Surfing Association and they elected me president in the winter of 1962.”
Lear and the crew presented a proposal for the town leaders, which they presented pre-sunshine laws, for opening a purely surfing beach. As a result, in 1963 Belmar became the first beach in the area that allowed surfing.
“We had to have our own little surf patrol but we were all lifeguards that started this so we’d take turns watching the kids,” he says. “I wrote away to the U.S. Surfing Association for the rules of the road and rules of competition. We made sure there weren’t any problems like in Ft. Lauderdale since the town leaders said they didn’t want any problems. It was the beginning of the ‘Hippie’ season, with people sleeping on beaches. We told them not to worry about that and so they let us try.”
From 1963 to 1964, Lear and his pals helped open the surrounding towns to the idea of surfing.
“We got the local people in those towns involved because at that time people were looking for someone to surf with,” he says. “We had to make sure everyone dressed up in a tie and jacket to go to town meetings and we used our model to convince the town leaders.”
Lear says that since typical surfers have a drive to compete, they got the judging rules and started holding contests in different towns. The disjointed groups started communicating and the media helped spread the word.
“It was something new,” he says. “They’d have some picture and we’d call up that area and find out who was in charge there and that is how we all got together. With the interest of surfing bringing us together, we were able to have communication before computers and cell phones.”
Then Lear met Hoppy Schwartz.
“He was my mentor,” he explains. “I used all of his rules. At the time, when you would go into a town if you didn’t bring enough judges and had to use locals, there were always a lot of complaints on local biasing. So, what we did was get a group of people to use the rules and when they had a contest we’d bring judges from different areas. That is how I got to know Hoppy.”
At the time, the USSA was disbanding and forming regional groups for championships. It was the summer of 1967 and a lot of Californians were coming out to gather at Virginia Beach.
“I brought Hoppy out to Seaside Heights,” he says. “I paid half the airfare and had judges from all up and down the East Coast and some California judges too. That really solidified us. The guys from the West Coast were coming out to promote their boards and surf shops were starting to grow like crazy between ’64 and ’66, so we got to know those guys and it all came together.”
Schwartz asked Lear to help form what would become the ESA.
“Hoppy wrote to me and to a couple other people and told me he wanted me to see Rudy Huber in New York who was working on getting the East Coast Association together,” recalls Lear. “Huber was very involved with Wildwater Sports and Larry Lindbergh was the producer of WildWater Sports. He became executive director and I became the competition director.”
The ESA was thus formed in November of 1967.
“They had already formed the WSA and Hawaii, and we each had our competitions and used all the same competition rules to make it nationwide. We tried to get worldwide use of the same rules, which it is now within reason.”
After that, the East Coast had equal representation at the World Championships in Puerto Rico where each of the three areas of the U.S. sent eight surfers a piece.
“We actually had more competitors at that time than rest of the countries because of having such a large continent, although Australia is larger,” he says.
Although none of the East Coasters won any spots (Fred Hemmings won), it was a huge moment for surfers from the East that coincided with a revolution in surfing on another front.
“1968 was our first competition year and the summer of ‘68 was when the short board revolution started – but at the time short boards were maybe 8 feet instead of 9 or 10,” he recalls. “We were right on the cusp of everything new.”
Lear paused his story to point out that his involvement in the whole thing was really “total luck of the draw.”
“I was really interested and motivated and my feeling was that it was just like any sport where the athletes are the ones you are setting up the referees, in our case the judges, for to pick the best of any given group and if we didn’t have best judges and organization in a like manner, we weren’t presenting the best of what could be accomplished. That was my goal from our side of the country: to put our people in the water and get equal representation and the best competitive forum so that surfing would be recognized around the world.”
Lear was more on the “cusp of everything new” than he realized.
In 1969, his division at Bendix was sold and moved to West Palm Beach. Lear says he would have relocated in a heartbeat but there were no jobs available at the newly reorganized company.
Since he had gotten to know the publishers of Surfing Magazine well as part of his extreme hobby involvement in surfing, he sort of fell into a completely new career.
“The publishers were very interested in us because the East Coast was the largest market because we have the longest coastline. All the way to Pensacola it is maybe 14-1500 miles of coastline so it was a huge market, and Dick Graham the publisher of Surfing Magazine from 1966 to 70 would ask me for contest results for our major season,” he says. “Through that I had gotten to know the guys at the magazine and when they shut down and sold our division… and I was out of work and looking for job and talking to Rudy he said I should come to the magazine.”
Lear’s initial reaction was to say no because he felt he was already too old, at 38.
“There were a lot of problems in surfing with drugs and I didn’t know if I still wanted to be involved,” he admits. “Dick convinced me.”
Lear then became the Eastern Advertising Director for Surfing Magazine, which was published by the same company that did several male special interest pubs like Auto Trend, Personal Pilot and Skin Diver. His stint at the publication segued into selling for bigger mags when “Surfing” folded in 1971.
“Beside the fact I liked surfing, it changed my whole career,” he says. “I can’t tell you how great it was to make money surfing and then to go into advertising. I was just at the right place at the right time and I have tried to give back to surfing because it has been so good to me. It is really neat when you are working in an area you like.”
Lear knew something about stockcar racing through a brother-in-law and got involved in NASCAR in 1971. Twelve years later he went to Gameday programs, did the Breeders Cup, Triple Crown, 140 college game day programs, etc.
“It was just an unbelievable career,” he says with obvious gratitude.
Lear retired in 2002 from working for professional sports publications in New York City where he spent the last decade or so of his career as an outside contractor after being an Advertising Director in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s.
“I was what they called the Captured Rep because I wouldn’t sell other magazines or publications, only their product,” he explains. “The only difference was that I had my own office, secretary, used their facilities but I had to pay my own expenses.”
As a proven revenue producer who had clients such as Panasonic, Hoffshafner and Marx, and Sony for Peterson and Professional Sports for 31 years, he was a safe bet.
“I sold products and services that I could identify with,” he says. “If you like the clothing or electronics equipment, that comes across the table because you can talk enthusiastically.”
The example Lear gives is when Surfing Magazine closed down and he was on a trip with the ESA to set up the Championships in Hatteras.
“Dick Grahm called and said he wanted me to see Derek Carrol from Time Magazine and he said, ‘don’t worry, you have a job.’”
Lear had to call on all the movie and record companies who would obviously be interested in a car mag’s target market: men between the ages of 24 to 34.
“That was what everybody wanted and we said, ‘ok they are not in car all the day. They spend a bit at home in their room and they want the best sound.’”
Lear came home once with 30 albums by Springsteen, the Grateful Dead, the Beach Boys, etc.
“I called the guy a block from our office and told him I had been assigned the entertainment industry and I went over to see him at lunchtime. They handed me 30 albums and I told them I didn’t know anything about entertainment. It was just a fun type thing.”
Since the guys in NYC didn’t know anything about NASCAR, Lear convinced them to go down and check it out to understand the market they were selling to. His involvement later led to experiences right in the pits talking with Richard Petty, and other such fantastic experiences like having a suite on the finish line.
“I never planned it is what I tell young people,” he says. “I was lucky. Pick something you like. I just said, ‘ok, let’s do it.’”
In the 1990’s, Lear became involved with the new East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame.
“What happened was Greg Noll was putting together a West Coast group he called the Surfing Legends and he would do trips down to Costa Rica would have fun and awards ceremony. I don’t know as much as I should really. He called a couple guys in Virginia and said he wanted to do the same on the East Coast.”
Guys like Bob Holland and Pete Smith told Noll to call Lear since he knew so many people. In 1994, the group started working on the project.
“We have all been friends forever. It’s like a huge community up and down the East Coast, at least with the older guys. Through him (Noll) doing this and coming up with the idea that we should have come up with, we put together the first East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame induction at the Orange County Convention Center in January of 1996.”
“The first one was really special,” says Lear. “After that we continued it and we decided it was a collective thing we should do every two years. The Expo worked with us and gave us a hall and it was the first event that was held in the big ballroom in the new part of the convention center at the time, right next to the Rosen Center. It was a huge ballroom and it was a really beautiful thing and very emotional. I still get teary eyed about it. I am that kind of person.”
The event was so beautiful and meant so much to all involved that it kept going and growing.
“We have a lot of great people on the East Coast who should be honored,” says Lear.
“When we started the ESA, Dick Catri was a complete doubter and we argued in my kitchen into the wee hours of the night. But, we have all been friends. We have our differences at times but we can come to common agreement and move forward. That is what is so beautiful about the East Coast. We stick together, I think, because we were all trying to rise to the West Coasters level of competition and what you have now with 18 World Champions from between Ormond Beach to Sebastian Inlet, we have come to that level.”
It is something Lear is proud to have been a part of.
“I am proud of what I helped create,” he says. “When you start something like the ESA, you may look four or five years out, but to watch what it can become overtime is amazing.”
Noting that he was only competition director until the end of 1970 when Surfing Magazine folded and he had to get serious about making a living for his family, Lear points out that he has had the privilege of watching the ESA develop as an advisor to the leaders that followed.
“Doc Couture took over as Executive Director because Huber moved to Hawaii and he resigned,” says Lear. “Doc took over and he just took it to next level and then Cathy Phillips took over and moved it even further.”
He says that being able to see something he helped start, but never realized how far it could go, move so far along over the decades has been incredible.
“It is the people who succeed you that continue the spirit and energy and vision to carry it forward,” he says of the evolution. “When I left, we may have had not quite 1000 members and now its at over 10,000 members and is the largest surfing organization in the world, which is incredible. It happens because of the people who carry it forward and fill in the blanks when people leave and step forward with new ideas. I am still involved in the Executive Committee so I am still involved but it is the people there in trenches, the volunteers and those working in the districts that have made it what it is. I think there are 27 or 28 districts now and when I started it was 7 districts and only 7 people to talk to. The beauty of it is all of these people are not exactly alike but all work together for common cause to promote and further East Coast Surfing competition-wise.”
Since joining the Hall of Fame with the Cocoa Beach Surfing Museum started by Sean O’Hare, Lear has also enjoyed watching a new project take wing.
“The museum is great and they have done a fantastic job of getting it together and putting things in motion. They do a fantastic job keeping it going and we want to get our own stand-alone place down there someday. It is our vision and we are working towards it to have a very real East Coast Surfing Museum everyone will be proud of.”
Lear says the group chose Cocoa Beach because it is the center of surfing on the East Coast.
“Everyone interested in surfing comes there at some time. At one point we were thinking of having it in Virginia Beach but in Cocoa Beach there are a couple million surfers coming through every year so there is huge interest. It’s the capitol of East Coast surfing.”
So, once again, Lear is riding the waves as they come at him – working on a project that came to him because of that chance encounter with surfing when he was 32.
It would seem that the old saying may be completely validated in Lear’s case: Life comes at you when you are least expecting it.
Or maybe in his case it would be better to simply say that opportunities come along all the time and you never know how they will change the course of your life.
The beauty in this man’s story, at least to me, was that he recognized the serendipity of it all. He knows how lucky he has been and he appreciates it all in a humble and inspiring way so he tries to give back to the sport that blessed him so.
Whatever the path, would that we all will be so lucky to be able to see our lives in such clear focus and appreciate the ups and downs together as the patchwork of truth.