Linda Sumpton met Laurie March on the beach at Merewether when she was 11. He was five years older, a strapping young surf champion in the making and the brother of one of her school friends.
"I turned to my friends and said, 'I want to marry someone like Laurie March one day,'" Linda recalls.
The pair started dating four years later and were married when she was "20 and a half" and he was 25 at St Augustine's church in Llewellyn Street.
The beach where they met was the centre of their life for more than six decades.
"He was a gentle man but a strong man and very assertive," Linda says. "There was never anybody else, in my eyes. We did everything together, as long as there was a beach involved."
I remember as a kid, probably 10 years old, sitting at his feet in the surfboat at the state titles at Merewether and it'd be a solid five- or six-feet surf.
Brad March
Laurie had a harsh upbringing. He and his brothers would trap and shoot rabbits at Merewether Heights when he was a kid and raid local orchards to put food on the table.
At a dairy farm in Curry Street, they would steal "rejected" Weet-Bix from the cows.
"They had to time it from when the farmer put the Weet-Bix in the troughs to get there before the cows but wait long enough for the farmer not to see them," Laurie's son, Brad, says.
"They'd load their T-shirts up and take them home. He said they'd live on Weet-Bix for three days."
The family home in Mitchell Street had a dirt floor until the early 70s. Laurie would deliver ice and shovel horse manure into barrels "at a very young age" to make ends meet.
Brad says his grandfather was an unemployed "drunk" who made life hard for the family.
"They did things pretty tough."
But Laurie was a resilient character, and he thrived in the coastal community and at the surf club, where he quickly made a name for himself as a gifted waterman.
Brad says his father would swim 1000 metres every morning and evening at the ocean baths, almost unheard of in those days.
"Lightning", as he was known, was part of Merewether's winning state and national junior surf teams in 1949-50, his second season at the club.
He was club champion in each of his first three years in the senior ranks, became chief instructor, took over as Merewether surfboat captain for seven years and was granted life membership in 1962. Four years later, the club named a boat after him.
Laurie died on February 21 at the age 88, having lived all his life in Merewether.
His family and friends held a memorial service on Sunday, the last day of summer, where they shared stories of his extraordinary exploits in the waters off Newcastle.
The most famous of these was when he and mate Stewart Hughes braved an enormous swell in the city's first jet rescue boat to help in the Sygna salvage operation off Stockton beach in 1974.
Newcastle harbour engineer Noel Harper rang Laurie, then surf lifesaving's emergency services director, to ask if he could transport the captain, first mate and engineer from the beach to the stricken bulk carrier so they could shut down its engines.
Harbour master Ken Hopper warned them what they would face.
''He had a vertical graph measuring the wave heights on a table inside his office," Laurie told the Newcastle Herald in 2014, on the 40th anniversary of the mission.
"He said, 'See that peak there? That's 14.8 metres.' That was the largest swell ever recorded in Newcastle history and still is.''
Laurie and Stewart were undaunted. They took the small jet boat, powered by a six-cylinder Ford car engine, several kilometres out to sea before turning landward, timing the massive swells and motoring onto the sand between two monster waves.
It was a moment of typical verve for Laurie, who famously destroyed two boats in big surf during his time as Merewether captain, including at the national championships the club hosted in 1960.
"They took out a fairly new boat they'd got, and as they were coming back in it just split down the middle along the keel," long-time friend and former Merewether club president Peter Alcock says.
Peter remembers crewing for Laurie with Bob Balks in the jet boat during a daring rescue of surf carnival competitors near the rocks next to the ocean baths in 1973.
"All the guys who were in the belt swimming out got taken by this terrible rip down around behind the old ladies' baths," he says.
"Laurie was the driver standing up the front. We saw this huge set coming and he yelled out a profanity and put his foot flat to the floor.
"We were going up and up this huge wave and I'm sitting on the back thinking, 'We're going to go over backwards and that'll be the end of the lot of us.'
"The wave kind of lipped at the top and we hadn't quite got through it and he bent down to hang on under the steering wheel. I think it was that transfer of his weight that just got us through.
"He had confidence in his abilities. I don't think he had a lot of fear, but not reckless. He had tremendous surf knowledge and skills and commanded respect."
Brad remembers a father who always backed him and his sister, Suzanne, to succeed and threw them, sometimes literally, in the deep end.
"He always gave me a chance at everything," he says.
"He was a thoroughly decent human being. There was no nonsense about him. If I deserved a kick up the arse, I got an almighty kick up the arse."
He remembers, at 14, Laurie taking him out in the jet boat off Merewether after the 1974 "cyclone" when the conditions were "frickin' huge".
"He was at one with the water. Whenever you were in the boat you felt completely at ease.
"He was an adventurous person. I was there the day the Sygna tore in half when they were trying to pull it off the beach. It would have been 20 foot high and I was in the jet boat with him.
"We were taking the crew out and none of them could swim. They were s---ing themselves.
"I remember as a kid, probably 10 years old, sitting at his feet in the surfboat at the state titles at Merewether and it'd be a solid five- or six-feet surf.
"None of this wrapping us in cotton wool. It was just like, 'Get out there and have a crack at it, son.'"
Laurie was also involved in the 1955 Maitland flood rescue with Merewether's top surfboat crew and was involved in setting up the Hunter's Westpac rescue helicopter service in the mid-70s.
His company, M&W Building, built the Civic Playhouse, the cardiac surgery wing at Lake Macquarie Private Hospital and dozens of private houses, including many for the city's doctors on referral from prominent designers Suters Architects Snell.
Brad says many of the clients ended up close friends.
Laurie, a trained carpenter, also built hundreds of boards, one of which hangs over the bar at the surf club, to pay for a deposit on the family's first house.
Granddaughter Rachel says she and Laurie were "really, really close".
"He would take me down to the beach three times a week to swim kilometres and kilometres," she says.
"That was the thing about Pop: he just believed in us all. He was always in the pool with us teaching us things. He was hero Mr Merewether to everyone else, but to us he was just our pop.
"He was the most inspiring person I've ever met. He would have given anyone the shirt off his back. If anyone needed help, he was there. He never wanted any kind of recognition."
Like others in Laurie's life, Rachel knew her grandfather as a forceful character.
"He was always invested in our boyfriends, like, 'No, not good enough. Dump him.' My partner was the first boyfriend he liked.
"I remember Mum and Dad were away one weekend and I had a party. He came over at 3am and had all the boys by the throat yelling at them.
"I was just running down the street because I knew I was in so much trouble from him. But, again, he just held my head when I vomited in the sink, and never told my parents."
Hunter Surf Life Saving chief executive Rhonda Scruton knew Laurie for 30 years and remembers him fondly as "a lifesaver through and through and a gentleman".
"He's a loss to our movement. It was an honour to know him."
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