Mary Kerwin Riehl, at 91; pioneer in women's surfing
LOS ANGELES -- Mary Kerwin Riehl, who won the women's division of the 1939 Pacific Coast Surfing Championship and who is the only female surfing pioneer honored on the Hermosa Beach Surfers Walk of Fame, died March 16 in a Santa Maria care facility after suffering a stroke several weeks earlier. She was 91.
One of three girls in the Kerwin family of nine children, Ms. Riehl would take to the water at an early age. Her family's home was on the floor above their bakery on Pier Avenue, less than a half block from the beach.
"You could spit out the window at the water, and that was our playground," recalled Ms. Riehl's brother Ted Kerwin, who still lives in Hermosa Beach.
"We were born and raised with our feet in the ocean, all nine of us," said Ms. Riehl's sister Emma Halibrand of Westchester.
As children, Ted Kerwin recalled, they rode waves on everything from belly boards made of scrap lumber to discarded wooden ironing boards before progressing to much larger and heavier paddleboards and solid-wood surfboards.
In 1934, Ms. Riehl's older brother John founded the Hermosa Beach Surfing Club, whose 14 original members included his brothers -- Joe, Jim, Fred, and Ted. Ms. Riehl, however, could not join the club: It was a strictly male organization, although she represented the club in contests.
When Ms. Riehl started surfing in the 1930s, the sight of a woman riding the waves was a rarity.
"There were very, very few women surfers," said Ted Kerwin. "It wasn't the thing to do for many women."
Jim Kerwin still has the 12-foot, 65-pound paddleboard he made out of pine and quarter-inch plywood for his sister in 1939.
It's the same board she used to win the Pacific Coast Surfing Championship in Long Beach. She also used it to compete in other contests, including the 1939 national paddleboard and surfing championship in Long Beach. She placed first in the women's division for the quarter-mile national paddleboard championship, with a time of 4 minutes, 32 seconds.
The gregarious Ms. Riehl -- "I always called her Molly-O because she was a typical Irish gal," said Ted Kerwin -- loved all sports and was an avid tennis player. "She was in the middle of everything," he said.
She was born in Hermosa Beach in 1912, two years after her Irish-immigrant father launched the family's bakery business. As teenagers, Ms. Riehl and her sisters worked at the front counter.
A 1931 graduate of Redondo Union High School, Ms. Riehl married Ward Riehl, a 
