By SDCN Editor
Oceanside, CA–The California Surf Museum will honor three local renowned surfers who brought international acclaim to surfing in the 1960s.
Mary Lou Drummy, Mickey Muñoz, and John ‘L.J.’ Richards have been named 2024 recipients of the California Surf Museum’s “Silver Surfer Award.” The lifetime achievement recognition is bestowed annually by the museum to surfers who have made significant contributions to the culture and lifestyle of the surfing community.
The recipients will be presented with their award at the museum’s 16th annual gala fundraiser at the Cape Ray Carlsbad Beach Hilton Resort and Spa on November 2.
“The images of surfing that came to dominate popular culture during the years 1958 to 1966 had a lasting effect on California, America, and the world,” said Jim Kempton, executive director of the California Surf Museum. “At the heart of this cultural shift were a select group of master surfers, visionaries, design makers, and artisans who inspired this societal happening. Many have already been recognized by our museum. The three recipients of this year’s Silver Surfer Award are important members of surfing’s golden years.”
Though Mary Lou Drummy grew up in the 1950s in the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth, the family-owned a shoreline home in Hermosa Beach where they would spend their summer months. Fascinated by the sight of surfers in front of their beach house riding the waves, she was eager to try. Within a few short years she had become a leading contest surfer, the first woman (or surfer) to grace the cover of “West,” a prominent pop culture magazine of the time, as well as a mentor to many women competitors who followed in her groundbreaking wake.
In 2016, she was named Woman of the Year by the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame. A year later, close to the summer home where she first learned to surf, she was inducted into the Hermosa Beach Surfer’s Walk of Fame. In 1975, Mary Lou helped found the Women’s International Surfing Association (later the Western Surfing Association). Since that time, supporting local competitive surfing and pushing the industry to support the inclusion of women has become her life’s work.
In 2015, she received the Surfing America Midget Smith Judging Award, named after her longtime companion who passed away in 2008. As a competitor and later as a surfing event organizer, it is readily acknowledged by many of her contemporaries that competitive surfing would not be what it is today without her leadership and unwavering devotion to the sport.
The shaping of Mickey Muñoz’s surfing career, which now spans more than seven decades, began in 1943 at the age of six when his family moved from New York City to Santa Monica. They settled in a home two blocks from the breaking waves that soon would become Mickey’s quest and calling. By 1950, he was a well-established fixture among the Malibu crew of “Gidget” fame. As his surfing progressed, and surfboard designs and materials improved, he began turning heads and making waves throughout the surfing world with his standout skills and fun-loving innovative trademark tactics, most famously, a maneuver forever known as the “Quasimodo.” Beyond his small wave antics, he also became a big wave-riding pioneer and was one of the original crew to take on Hawaii’s Waimea Bay in 1957.
In the 1960s, Muñoz became a top competitive surfer. He finished runner-up in the 1962 and 1963 West Coast Surfing Championships and in 1964 took third in the United States Championships. In 1965, he finished second in the U.S. Championships and took fourth in the World Championships. Today, he continues to design surfboards and live what has been a storied surfing life. As he recently explained to Liquid Salt, a website that celebrates surfing culture, “the ‘stoke’ I had on my first wave has never worn off.”
Retired Encinitas fireman John Richards, better known as “L.J.,” as in “Little John,” was born in 1939 and raised in Oceanside where he grew up a few blocks from the ocean. At Oceanside High School he was one grade behind Phil Edwards, then considered one of the best surfers around and dubbed “The Guayule Kid” by the surfing generation that preceded him. It didn’t take long for the two to become fast friends. An innovative surfboard shaper, Phil was shaping and selling balsa boards in his garage. L.J.’s mom purchased a Phil-shaped board for her son. A few years later L.J. won the 1963 men’s title at the U.S. Championships in Huntington Beach on a Phil Edwards-shaped board. He has kept that board to this day.
In a surfing career spanning six decades, Richards has traveled and competed in surfing events worldwide. In 1989 he received the Oceanside Longboard Surfing Club’s inaugural LeRoy Grannis Waterman’s Award for his sportsmanship in the true spirit of surfing. In 1991, he was inducted into the International Surfing Hall of Fame. In 2006, he was acknowledged with a plaque on the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach.
As his longtime friend, surfing champion Linda Benson once proudly proclaimed: “He’s truly one of the finest gentlemen in surfing, and definitely one of the greatest stylists of all time.”
The California Surf Museum, founded in 1986, has been in operation for nearly four decades serving tens of thousands of annual visitors from over 40 nations around the globe. With a permanent collection that chronicles the history of surfboards and wave-riding, the museum also offers many revolving exhibits each year.
