Dewey Weber

David Earl Weber (born August 18, 1938, in Denver, Colorado; died January 6, 1993), known as Dewey Weber, was an American surfer, a popular surfing film subject, and a successful surfboard manufacturing businessman.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he distinguished himself with a surfing style unique at the outset of that era. Out of the water, he had already become a national yo-yo champion and a CIF champion in wrestling, then appeared in several feature films, and eventually established a successful surfboard manufacturing company. On November 14, 2015, the city of Hermosa Beach unveiled at its Community Center a sculpture inspired by a photo of Dewey Weber taken by surf photographer Leroy Grannis.

Weber was an only child in a German working-class family. He learned early about the water at his lifeguard-babysitter's nearby swimming pool. His father, Earl, was a truck driver. His mother, Gladys, worked at Denver's Nabisco cracker factory. When Weber was five, his family moved to Manhattan Beach, in California.

When he was eight, his mother took him to an audition at which he won the part of Buster Brown, a comic book character adopted by the Brown Shoe Company.

The local surf club included such relatively well-known surfers as Dale Velzy, Bob Hogan, and Barney Biggs, the last of whom noticed Weber first, and lent him a surfboard when Weber was only nine.

When Weber was fourteen, Groucho Marx featured him, on his national television show You Bet Your Life, as the three-time National Duncan Yo-Yo Champion.

Weber's short, stocky frame (5'3", 130 pounds) helped him to earn a varsity letter in wrestling in his very first year of high school. By the time Mira Costa High School graduated him in 1956, Weber had become a three-time CIF westling champion. He became an All-State performer at El Camino College, and although he subsequently qualified for the Olympic wrestling team, an injury immediately before the Olympic event prevented him from competing.

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