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Elegant regularfoot surfer and boardmaker from Santa Monica, California; often cited as California's best wave-rider in the late 1940s and early '50s; creator of the slouched, knees-together, neatly synchronized "Malibu" surfing style. "Many have been heavily influenced by the Kivlin technique, myself included," Miki Dora said in 1969. "However, none will ever be able to come close to this genius of style."

Kivlin was born (1929) in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Santa Monica. He began surfing in 1943, when lifeguard and four-time Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships winner Pete Peterson took the 14-year-old with him on a day trip to Palos Verdes Cove. Two years later, Kivlin and future big-wave rider Buzzy Trent began hitching rides to Malibu; they would sometimes get a lift with the Kohner family, whose youngest daughter Kathy would later show up at Malibu, where she was nicknamed "Gidget."

Kivlin visited Hawaii for the first time in 1947, and was impressed by the agile close-to-the-curl riding style of Waikiki surfer Rabbit Kekai. Back at Malibu, Kivlin, along with surfer-boardmaker Joe Quigg, started designing and riding modified versions of Kekai's board—narrower, thinner, and lighter than what the Malibu surfers had been riding—and began to emulate Kekai's turns and footwork. By the end of the decade, the 6'3" Kivlin had developed his own method, active but smooth, which would be directly copied by the next generation of Malibu locals, including surf style icon Mickey Dora.

As a boardmaker, Kivlin is best remembered as a co-creator, in the late '40s, of the "girl boards"—pared-down all-balsa equipment made for a handful of high school girls who were taking to the water at Malibu. These easy-turning boards were then appropriated by the guys. The girl boards were the forerunner of the "Malibu chip" design. Kivlin and Quigg also developed the first narrow-based raked-back surfboard fin, a design idea that inexplicably went ignored until the mid-'60s.

Kivlin had a brief boardmaking partnership with eccentric California surfer-designer Bob Simmons in the late '40s, and just as briefly had a board-laminating shop with Quigg. While Simmons and Quigg have received most of the credit for design breakthroughs in the late '40s and early '50s, Kivlin had the highest production rate. "When you're talking about Malibu boards of that time," Dave Rochlen, a Kivlin contemporary, said in 1998, "you're probably talking about Matt's boards." The handsome dark-haired Kivlin was also Malibu's social leader, driving carloads of people to beachfront luaus at which he cooked, poured drinks, and played records.

Kivlin quit surfing in 1962, and in 1971 opened Matt Kivlin AIA, a successful Santa Monica-based architecture firm. He never entered a surfing contest, went virtually unnoticed by the early surf media, and became a largely forgotten name in surfing. "But if you had to name the most important people of [mid- 20th-century surfing] on five fingers," Joe Quigg said in 1998, "Kivlin would be in there."

Kivlin died in 2014, at 85, of complications from heart disease. He'd been married twice, and had four children.

Kivlin, Matt

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