Gaulden Reed - Founder of Hobie Fleet 80
"Life is tenuous and
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 Gaulden Reed 1918-2007 - RIP |
"Life is tenuous and
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Gaulden Reed 1918-2007 - RIP |
November 07, 2007 - (original - Daytona Beach News Journal)
DAYTONA BEACH -- Area residents "should take their bathing suits to work and take advantage of what we have" on their way home -- The World's Most Famous Beach -- was the unsolicited advice of Gaulden Reed.
Reed, whom some considered this area's No. 1 ambassador for the beach and its natural resources, died Tuesday afternoon at his home after a battle with cancer. He was 89.
A native of Volusia County, the beach was Reed's playground and he found joy in every moment he spent there. He was a pioneer of the surfing scene here, paddling out on his 14- to-16-foot-long plywood board with a mahogany nose.
"That baby would catch any wave," he once said. If the waves weren't good, he'd paddle out to where the big tarpon run and spend his time on the water fishing. For years, he made an annual trek to Hawaii for the Buffalo Big Board Tournament, but it was his love for surfing off Florida's East Coast that landed him in the inaugural class of the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in Cocoa Beach.
His love of the beach and his feeling that it should be open to everyone led him to organize the No Ramp Toll Committee, a political action committee, as well as Sons of the Beaches, a grassroots movement to keep toll booths off the beach. This issue and denial of nighttime beach driving was at the heart of his 1985 run for mayor against the incumbent Larry Kelly, who won.
"It's fitting that the service to sprinkle his ashes will be at the beach, and the people attending won't have to pay a toll," said his younger daughter, Ellen DeVore of DeLand.
Reed not only played at the beach, he worked there, too. He and his wife of 66 years, Nancy, had three beach concessions, renting floats, chairs and umbrellas.
In 1940, he moved his float stand from the Harvey approach to the Boardwalk area "because we found that at times there were as many as 20 cars up there," he said.
A past president of the Daytona Beach General Contractors Association, Reed built perhaps hundreds of sea walls. For years he operated the Ormond Pier, which he built, and Aloha Marina.
A World War II veteran of the Army Air Corps, Reed loved flying, especially when it was coupled with fishing. He and a friend took an old Piper Cub and added pontoons, skimming the waters offshore to look for schools of fish.
At times he would swoop down close enough to Capt. Redwood Wharton aboard the Gay Wind so he could yell out the location of fish activity. Other times he would land near the inlet and hurry over to fish in the surf where he had spotted some cobia.
Reed also proved adept at catching the wind in his catamaran. An accomplished sailor, Reed started the Hobie Cat club in Volusia County and competed in many regattas, placing 2nd in the National Hobie Cat races a few years ago.
This man with a heart for adventure also was passionate about the arts. A music lover, he took piano lessons as an adult and had a music room in his home at The Pendleton Club -- a place with a piano and keyboard where he could play his favorite songs. Reed's restaurant choices often depended on where there was live music, and they loved attending concerts. A voracious reader, Reed also loved to write and recently completed his memoirs, "Once Upon a Wave."
The final chapter in the life of Drueury LeSueur Gaulden Reed, this Renaissance man, has yet to be written. In 2001, Reed approached the city of Daytona Beach about building a butterfly garden on Manatee Island. From that has come the Daytona Beach Butterfly Conservatory and Educational Foundation Inc., a nonprofit environmental education-based organization.
Missy Reed, the wife of Reed's grandson, Renny, has taken up the torch and serves on the board as vice president. The group is partnering with the city, which is seeking grant funding, to build the environmental learning center on an acre and a half. The city then plans to lease the facility back to the foundation, which will operate it.
Memorial donations may be made to the Butterfly Conservatory and Educational Foundation, 111 N. St. Andrews Drive, Ormond Beach, Fla. 32174.
Additional survivors include a daughter, Rebecca Herrero, San Anselmo, Calif., six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Hannah Cremation Service, Holly Hill, is in charge.
margie.schlageter@news-jrnl.com
November 07, 2007 - (original - 2nd Light Forums)
" ... Still, the best quotes weren't even by one of the inductees. They were reserved for the group's oldest member, Gaulden Reed, a Daytona Beach pioneer from the thirties who regaled the audience with a list of stories about Tom Blake and the Duke, moving everyone with his inspirational tone and a list of hilarious one-liners, most notably imploring the shortboard community to try riding longer equipment. "You guys don't know what you're missing," said the man of the sixteen-foot, 100-pound boards of yore. "We brought our girls out with us! And let me tell you, when we'd paddle with those girls in front of us, we were just two inches from paradise." And while that joke received the most laughs, it was his closing comment that summed up the celebratory feeling of the evening and the very reason for its existence.
"I feel sorry for those people who don't surf," he stated solemnly. "They don't know what it means to be alive."
November 08, 2007 - (original - Daytona Beach News Journal)
No history of Volusia County's beach would be complete without D.L. Gaulden Reed. A sportsman, businessman and conservationist, Reed's boundless love for the beach made him a natural ambassador. An adventurous spirit took him around the world, but he always ended up back here --fighting for shoreline access and for ways to better the beach and its surroundings.
In the 1930s, Reed was among the first brave souls here to paddle out on a plywood surfboard. He built hundreds of sea walls in Volusia County as well as the Ormond Pier, and he operated long-running beach concessions. He didn't always win: As a founder of Sons of the Beaches, he couldn't stop beach tolls or bans on night driving, but setbacks never cooled his enthusiasm.
Reed -- known by his trademark palm-frond hats, which he wove himself -- was still fighting for Daytona Beach when he died Tuesday, at 89. He was working with others to build a butterfly conservatory on Manatee Island in the Halifax River. City leaders are seeking grants. It would be a worthy investment in family-tourism and a tribute to a passionate advocate.
Reed summed up his personal philosophy in a pithy 1993 interview with News-Journal columnist Scoop Baslee: "God said go do it. Go do everything you can do." He applied that philosophy over decades of leadership, and Volusia County is the better for it.
November 09, 2007 - (original - Daytona Beach News Journal)
The post-election cool-off can bring out the three dots
By MARK LANE
FOOTNOTE
With the arrival of the good-sleeping-weather season and the end of election season, this is a time to catch one's breath, enjoy the cool and indulge in the simple, retro pleasures of the three-dot newspaper column:
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. . . Part not about Gaulden omitted . . .
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Although I used to run into Gaulden Reed all the time, I always considered him something of a local mythic figure. An amphibious guy who spent more time in, on and near the water than most us can ever aspire to, Reed was a surfing pioneer and a legendary fisherman.
Born in 1918, he could tell you firsthand, or at reasonable second, just about anything about this place's modern history -- all delivered with color and the rich spice of personal opinion. Once, after I wrote about the first air mail flight from Daytona Beach, (the plane fell into the river on takeoff), he called me to confirm things because he had been there as a little kid.
Not long ago, I saw some of his old wooden surfboards on display at the Halifax Historical Museum. They are something to see. From the looks of one of them, it must have been like surfing on a door, but he maintained it worked for him.
He died Tuesday of cancer, and I'm sure going to be missing him.
November 09, 2007 - (original - Daytona Beach News Journal)
If you have ever found that life in Daytona Beach is loved to its fullest while riding or fishing the surf, beach combing or just taking a drive down the beach, you owe a debt of gratitude to a man who died Tuesday.
He was 89 and his name was Drueury LeSueur Gaulden Reed, but everyone called him Gaulden.
And without him, Daytona Beach may very well have become like so many other beach towns, where a soul is not free to wander the sands unfettered by ropes and signs cordoning off access.
You see, Gaulden led the charge again and again in the fight against the privatization of our beaches, proving more than once to be more than a handful on this issue.
He fought the ban on night driving on the beach. He fought tolls to drive on the beach. He sued the city repeatedly.
The grassroots activist groups he helped establish made headlines like this one in the Morning Journal on July 24, 1982: "Who are The Sons of the Beaches? Small group of ramp toll protestors has mushroomed into political force."
He told News Journal reporter Bob Desiderio in 1978, "I'm used to politicians trying to throw me off the beach, but I'm still there."
He was referring to a legal battle that ensued in 1948 when the City Commission passed the first beach concession ordinances, shutting him out of a float rental business he had been operating for nearly a decade.
When the city wouldn't grant him a single license, Reed not only sued, he reopened his stands, this time in the ocean. He stashed his floats on poles stuck in the sand below the low tide water line, outside the city's jurisdiction.
A true native son, Reed was born in New Smyrna Beach in 1918. His grandfather drove a team of horses from DeLand to Daytona Beach to get to work.
In the 1930s, Reed became one of the handful of men who pioneered surfing in Florida. He was a world champion catamaran racer. He flew gliders and seaplanes. Gaulden Reed was like the Davey Crockett of Daytona Beach, without all the shooting and office taking.
While alive, his memories were invaluable as a looking glass into this area's past, and boy could he tell a fishing story.
GAULDEN KNEW WHEN. . .
Reed knew the days when the menhaden schools moving down the coast were so vast they looked like the shadows of the clouds.
He saw the days when sailfish were so numerous, he said all their bills waving at the surface "looked like a field of wheat."
Among his projects as a developer, Gaulden built marinas and the Ormond Pier, which is now just a memory.
He dumped truckloads of coquina rocks off that pier, creating what he called the world's first artificial reef "baited" pier.
The crane on his pier, inching its way out to an eventual 750 feet in 1959, doubled as his personal fishing gear.
"I used to watch for the tarpon to come through, feeding on schools of menhaden," he said. "I'd snag a menhaden and throw it out. A tarpon would hit it and I'd get on a sling rope on the crane and go down and gaff the tarpon and bring him up. I called the crane the world's largest fishing pole!"
He said a sheepshead, or "stripe-ed pork chop" as he was fond of calling them, was the only fish he ever felt sorry for catching. Its mate followed it to the surface, rubbing against its hooked hubby, frantically trying to help him stay in the river.
He released that fish, said he'd never forget it. Those two fish were in love.
HIS SEAPLANE AND A PRANK
My favorite of Gaulden's fishing stories were about adventures in his seaplane.
"I'd fly around and whenever I'd spot a pod of bass, I'd land and ease over there and get my rods down and climb out on the wing. I'd throw a bait into the middle of that pod and wham! Reel it in and cast back out for another one. I'd clean 'em right there on the pontoon."
He said a quick turn in weather gave him real trouble taking off again a few times. Can you imagine struggling to take off in rising seas, trying to ride rolling swells like ramps into the sky?
Reed said he always gave what fish he couldn't eat to friends and neighbors, and he loved to tell how this resulted in a memorable prank when a particular woman complained that she'd yet to benefit from these frequent deliveries.
So when he caught a several-hundred pound goliath grouper, a jewfish they used to call them, he put it in a wheelbarrow, rolled it up to her back porch, knocked on the door and ran.
It was absolutely hilarious to him thinking about her opening the back door and seeing that monstrosity of a fish still gulping for air, eyes bugging out of its head. His punchline went, "She never asked me for a fish again!"
EVER MISCHIEVIOUS
Gaulden was full of good-natured mischief and he'd try anything.
In an Oct. 2, 1974, News-Journal article by Phil DeBeaubien, it says, "It was Gaulden who hand walked down the anchor chain of the bell buoy at the inlet into a 'herd' of monster jewfish and figured out a way to catch them with a nylon rope and play them by hand."
Top that!
Reed once told me he wanted to invent a robot fish that would fight like a marlin and strike like a rattlesnake. He said anglers from far and wide would come to fish for such a beast. It could end overfishing, he said.
One time he telephoned to say, "I have declared war on the fish!"
He had a remote-controlled World War II era battleship and he wanted to stream fishing lines baited with shrimp from its guns.
If it caught on, a generation of children with butts glued to couches and thumbs to video-game remote controls might get outdoors to go joystick fishing, he said.
Talking fishing with Gaulden was never mired in technical descriptions of how-to and what-for. It was just a joyful thing to do while exploring this beautiful, amazing world where we are blessed to spend our short time alive. And he wanted to play hard.
He famously would say, "Life is tenuous and when you are dead you are dead for a long time. God said go do it, do everything you can."
Gaulden's granddaughter, Heather Kountanis, said her grandpa said he didn't want to show up at the Pearly Gates in an unmarked, unbroken body. She said, "He wanted to have to get slid in sideways and he said when he gets there he'll say, 'Man, what a ride!' "
Editors note: Gaulden Reed made a lot of News-Journal headlines. This is perhaps the most distinct fishing-related article about him. Here it is, with its original headline, as published July 12, 1962. Bernard Kahn was the longtime sports editor and was outdoors writer Jordan Kahn's grandfather.
Surf board fishing in deep ocean water for fightin' game fish is not a recommended sport for the squeamish. Nor is it an advisable recreation for a dog paddle swimmer who needs a friendly float to avoid sinking like an anchor.
The sport is said to be exhilarating, but I compare it to riding on a roller coaster with a team of wild tigers furnishing the locomotion.
An avid surf board fisherman in our town is Gaulden Reed, who pursues same with the tenacity of a FBI agent tracking down a much wanted criminal. No hour is too early, no difficulty too difficult for the confirmed surf board angler -- if he can hook a big 'un.
You have to see it to believe it. Last Monday a lot of passersby on the beach in front of Bellair Plaza saw it.
Fishing from a surf board, Reed caught and fought to shore two tarpon, weighing 130 pounds and 80 pounds. Baxter McBain, a Californian who rides a surf board as deftly as Bill Hartack does a thoroughbred, hauled in a 32 pound king mackerel.
By then the curious crowd had grown so large one late comer mistakenly thought that Miss Dixie had lost her bathing suit out there in the surf.
Ideal conditions prevailed in the ocean Monday. The water was clear as a spring. The breakers were rolling cozily. And schools of menhaden, favorite fodder of many game fish, were so thick the water turned black and it almost seemed as if you could walk on them.
Clear water is safety insurance. As Reed explained, when the ocean is muddy "sharks may see a foot flashing in the water and hit it, but they aren't likely to do so if they can see clearly.
"I think the shark danger is overrated," said Reed, "except when the water is muddy. You've just to keep your eyes open and watch out. That's all."
Tall and greyhound lean, Reed is a contractor by trade and a human water bug by hobby. Now 42, Gaulden was born and raised here and the first time I ever saw him was when we were small fry swimming together in Pep's Pool, now extinct.
While most local kids were playing baseball or other land games, Gaulden and his pal Dick Every were fishing off the Main St. Pier. And catching more than their own weight in fish, too.
Reed and Every, now a lawyer, are still pals and still fishing. Three years ago, fishing from a motor boat out of the mouth of our Ponce de Leon Inlet, they caught five tarpon weighing a total of 590 pounds. That's a heap of fighting fish.
Every missed the fun Monday, but Reed and McBain didn't.
All you need to engage in this rarified sport is a surf board -- nine feet, six inches long, weighing 28 pounds, with a stabilizing fin on it. Plus ability to swim like a fish yourself, the proper tackle, and a large appetite for adventure.
Reed and McBain watched a flock of pelicans diving just beyond the last line of breakers.
"The pelicans were a signal that the menhaden were there," said Reed. "Out we went. You can just park your surf board and watch the tarpon and sharks feeding on the menhaden.
"You don't need bait. You catch that, too. Just throw out into a bed of menhaden with a bare hook and haul one in."
The tackle was a 6-0 reel, an 8-0 hook and 300 to 400 yards of monofilament line.
"We spotted 50 to 100 tarpon rolling and feeding on the menhaden," said Reed, when I asked him about it. "Cast out a menhaden into them and it's amazing. Out of the millions of menhaden, they can spot the cripple on your line and they'll hit it."
Then the fun, and the fight, begins. The silver king, as the tarpon is aptly called, leaps majestically in its struggle to shake the hook and its tormentor.
"Oh yes, we lost five strikes," went on Reed. "It wouldn't be an enjoyable sport if some of 'em didn't escape."
Dunking off the surf board is no problem, Reed said. You straddle it and your feet dangling in the water serve as a drag on the hooked fish as it tugs man and board.
"You can apply the drag on your reel and you can kick your feet in the water to try and direct the flight," said Reed. "The more times you can get a tarpon to jump, the better. The jumping tires him.
"The biggest one I caught Monday made five leaps. You always try and work your way towards shore until the water is shallow enough so you can stand up and then fight 'em to the beach.
"It took 30 minutes to get the biggest one. It's a good idea even if you're not afraid of sharks to watch out, because a shark will see a crippled tarpon on a line and cut it in two, no matter how bit it is. Some of the sharks are a lot bigger.
"When it's all over you feel almost as tired as the tarpon you've brought to shore."
Anyone for surf board fishing?
November 24, 2007 - (original - Daytona Beach News Journal) Photos of ceremony
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DAYTONA BEACH -- The ashes of surfing pioneer and all-around sportsman Gaulden Reed were scattered in the Atlantic Ocean Friday afternoon at SunSplash Park. Dozens of friends, surfers and admirers of the 89-year-old Reed, who died of cancer Nov. 6, gathered on the blustery beach just after 1 p.m. and watched as his grandson Renny Herrero, his great-granddaughter Isabella Herrero and others dropped Reed's remains into the choppy sea. At least four surfers -- including local champion Mimi Munro -- donned wetsuits and plunged into the water with their surfboards to honor Reed. As the surfers paddled out, four planes flew overhead and performed the missing man formation, in which the third plane separates from the other three. |
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Reed's daughter, Rebecca Herrero, a pastor and psychotherapist from San Anselmo, Calif., talked about her father's life and accomplishments. She also read a poem about freedom and the ocean, written by world champion surfer Frieda Zamba of Flagler Beach.
-- Lyda Longa
Last modified: Saturday, 2009-Mar-07 05:26:37 PM EST
