Gary Propper… East Coast Surfing Legend
From The Encyclopedia of Surfing, Harcourt Books, 2003

Gary Propper…the baby-faced surfer from Cocoa Beach, Florida. Winner of the 1966 East Coast Surfing Championships, and the first international-caliber surfer from the eastern seaboard. Gary was born in the Bronx, NY in 1946, raised in Miami Beach, and began surfing at age 13 after moving with his family to Cocoa Beach. Five years later, the fast-talking regular footer won the Juniors Division of the 1964 East Coast Surfing Championships.

Propper rarely left the East Coast and was leary of waves over eight feet, but from the mid-‘60s to the early ‘70s, he was omnipresent on the surf scene. Propper was a successful contest surfer as well. In the finals of the 1966 East Coast Championships, he beat West Coast stars Dewey Weber and Tom Leonardo. He also competed in the World Championships in 1966, 1968 and 1970.

Propper was the top-paid surfer of his generation. In addition to his surfing accomplishments, Propper was also a very successful surf products promoter as well. He later claimed that his 1967 Hobie signature board royalties, added to the money he earned as a salesman for both Katin surf trunks and O’Neill wetsuits, amounted to almost $100,000 for the year.
“I put down Professional Surfer/Athlete on my ’64 tax returns,” Propper said in 1996. “It was the coolest!” There is no doubt that Propper was always a savvy businessman, whom many say was way ahead of his time.

Propper also marketed & sold his own line of products and clothing to every major East Coast surf shop during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s under his own brand name label called
GP Merch.

Propper also earned a reputation as one of the sport’s most volatile figures. “You never knew what he was going to do next, in or out of the water,” longtime Florida surfboard builder Dick Catri later recalled. “I saw him throw away a trophy because it was for second place or turn around right there at the presentation ceremony and give it to some girl he’d never met.”

Propper was the top East Coast vote-getter in International Surfing magazine’s 1967 Hall of Fame Awards, and was inducted into the East Coast Hall of Fame in 1996.