Retired Encinitas fireman John Richards, better known as “L.J.,” as in “Little John,” was born in 1939 and raised in Oceanside, California 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 as “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, he has traveled and competed in surfing events around the world. In 1989 he was the recipient of 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.”

Though Mary Lou 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 site of surfers in front of their beach house riding the waves, she was eager to give it a 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 to become 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 now 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.