Fifty-seven years later Severson's words may still be the finest working definition of surfing.

But then Severson was single-handedly responsible for presenting surfing to the world. His magazine was not the first surf publication, but it reflected a sort of California dreaming to baby boomers who hit their teens and started searching how to break loose from the generations who endured the Depression, World War II and the stultifying comfort that came with peace.

Severson has died of leukaemia at his home on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He was 83.

Before SURFER appeared, surfboard riding was the preserve of a few groups of men scattered along the Californian coast and Hawaii's North and South shores. Severson not only opened up the lifestyle/sport to a wider and younger audience but remained a gatekeeper between the burgeoning commercial interests and its rag-tag adherents.

The son of an inland service station owner, Severson spent his teen years in the surfside town of San Clemente, taking a BA in art education when in 1957 he was drafted into the US army and Germany-bound. Fortuitously, he was stationed in Hawaii, where he surfed and, armed with a 16mm Keystone movie camera, filmed the crew who pioneered riding the North Shore's big waves for his first movie, 1958's Surf.

Returning to civilian life in California as the saccharine movie Gidget took the state's beach culture to the American teen heartland, Severson stayed with more full-blooded waveriding fare, Surf Safari (1959), Surf Fever (1960) and Big Wednesday (1961), and joined other surf filmmakers Bud Browne and Bruce Brown barnstorming their movies up and down the coast.

To promote Surf Fever, in the summer of 1960, he put together a 36-page horizontally formatted magazine with black-and-white photos, cartoons, fiction, a surf map and a how-to-surf article. He called it The Surfer, and the 5000 copies he printed sold out. Severson had found the perfect wave. The following year he published Surfer Quarterly, using coloured photographs and a clean uncluttered design not unlike the Saturday Evening Post.

The magazine boomed, evolving in a monthly SURFER, and Severson kept churning out movies while becoming surfing's pre-eminent voice.

If his impact on coastal and heartland America teenagers was huge, he also had a singular influence on many Australian boomers, especially in Sydney's beach suburbs, where SURFER magazine captured for many the essence of California. England had started to lose her grip on the imaginations of young Australians - although many still went to London by boat for the grand tour, others had started looking to the US and surfing, along with rock music, was a leading edge of their Americanisation.

Two years after the first SURFER appeared, Jack Eden's Surfabout and Bob Evans' Surfing World, both black and white photographs and newspaper font affairs, appeared on Australian newsstands. They lacked Severson's flair and style but somehow captured a certain raw exuberance that was to become the trademark of Australian surfing culture.

In 1966, Evans sent his acerbic surf writer, John Witzig???, to California to cover Australian champion Nat Young's successful tilt at the world surfing title. The following year, Severson ran Witzig's brash exposition of Young's shortboard victory over the nose-riding obsessed Californians as SURFER's cover story. It carried the rude chip-on-shoulder heading "We're Tops Now".

"Severson just loved the reaction to that story I wrote," Witzig told the Herald from Gu??thary, France. "There were letters heaping scorn on my head for a whole year."

But Witzig's story opened the door to shortboard design and made Australian surfers the flavour of the month in the US. It also prompted him in late 1967 to launch Surf International, a colour magazine featuring articles by the pantheon of Australian surfers, Young, Bob McTavish and Wayne Lynch that also was the first surf publication in the world to reflect changing mores on sex and drug usage.

Severson took one look at Witzig's mag and knew instantly which way the wind was blowing.

By 1968, the very thing that had made SURFER one of the world's first "youth magazines" had moved off to the golf club. Circulation in the US was healthy and over 100,000 - in Australia, the bi-monthly carried a pricey $1 cover price - but Severson had disconnected from his younger readership, editorialising against marijuana, ignoring the Vietnam War draft that young surfers faced while allowing older surfers to write rants against shortboards. As the icing on surf media conservatism, Severson also moved into a gated community next door to newly elected president Richard Nixon's Western White House at San Clemente.

Sometime in 1968, so his biographers have it, Severson reputedly toked on a joint, dumped his longboard, grew a Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club moustache and appointed Drew Kampion??? editor.

Kampion was a rarity in the surfing world: he had an East Coast English degree and wrote fine stream-of-consciousness journalism fulminating against the Vietnam War, while pushing surfing as the meaning of life rather than a beer and suntan California sport/lifestyle.

Under Kampion's reign, McTavish wrote an article about the approaching 1970 world title on Victoria's west coast, warning/welcoming the American team, "we await you with open minds and open hearts, and our girls await you with open legs".

One old longboarder lamented in SURFER's letters section: "What happened to your magazine?" It used to be a colorful portrayal of a good, clean sport. Now you've stooped to yellow journalism, poetry, rabblerousing, 'cosmic communion,' 'soul encounters,' and all that other psychobabble."

Severson's evolution as a middle-aged flower child saw him spend most of 1969 and 1970 making a somewhat drug-drenched movie, Pacific Vibrations, featuring his old friend cartoonist Rick Griffin, who had created the character Murphy for the third issue of SURFER before venturing north to San Francisco to become one of the leading psychedelic poster designers. Warner Brothers put the movie in mainstream theatres.

The following year, 1971, Severson sold the magazine to a publishing company and moved to Maui with his family to build his own homes, garden, paint and surf.

Drew Kampion remembered Severson: "He felt, understood, and translated the magnificent power of ocean waves into food for all our souls. What a great gift to humanity."

Severson is survived by his wife Louise and two daughters Jenna and Anna.

Damien Murphy