Tom Glenn

Tom Glenn was born in Inglewood and raised in Manhattan Beach. After attending Long Beach State and the University of Hawaii Tom left the states in 1969 to surf in North Africa and Europe. From Morocco he traveled to London. In Sept. of 1970 he met Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm of Woodstock fame who were in London to finish a film called “The Medicine Ball Caravan”. That year a tsunami had hit East Pakistan and killed more than 500,000 people. Since we had several doctors and quite a bit of medicine from the movie trip so we decided to go to East Pakistan to do what we could with our doctors and medical supplies. If nothing else maybe we could embarrass some large countries to help the victims of the tsunami. Driving from London through Central Asia we arrived in West Pakistan and the embassy officers told us that a civil war broke out in East Pakistan and that it was unsafe to go there. At that point we decided to go to Kathmandu Nepal. We arrived in March of 1971. In 1972 I started working with the Tibetan refugees to preserve their traditional crafts of tent making and carpet manufacturing. I started my own handicraft factory and with a group of 28 workers. I would design the tents and carpets and the men did the tent making and the woman did the weaving for the carpets. I had been a Vietnam draft evader so in 1975 I came back to California because of the amnesty program to get my case dismissed. I had my Tibetan girlfriend with me so we got married in Hawaii on our way back to Nepal. On returning we moved our factory to a larger location and had about 45 employees. Our products were exported all over the world and in 1977 I opened a store in Seattle with my family to sell our products there. In 1979 I was part of a group from our bus trip from London that included Wavy Gravy and Dr. Larry Brilliant and a team of Dr.’s from the W.H.O. in India to create Seva Foundation. The goal was to eradicate preventable blindness starting in the remote villages in Nepal. As of last year Seva has restored the site of more than 3 million people in about 12 countries around the world. In 1982 our children were school age so we returned to California so they could get a better education. In 1984 we moved to Oceanside and I started T.G.Graphics Productions a screen printing and graphic design company. In 1991 I sold the printing company and started the Waterman Surf Art Gallery, the first gallery of it kind featuring only surf related art work.

Also in 1991 I joined the staff of the California Surf Museum and served on the Board of Directors and from 1992 to 1995 and as of today I am still a staff member and serve as a Curator and Associate of the Museum. In 1994 we closed the physical gallery and moved everything online to SurfArt.com and started a company designing and hosting web pages for a variety of clients. We also created an on demand large format printing service to manage the sales for SurfArt.com. At that time we represented more than 40 artists and published the art for about 30 of our artists.

In 1995 I met Diamond at my office in Carlsbad. He told me about his project Endorse Peace and I told him I would like to work with him to get his project up and running. I created to logo and web site and I did all the video’s of the interviews, did the post production, and hosted them on Endorse Peace.com. We continued working together until 1997 when I had to focus all my attention on my SurfArt.com site and the large format printing Service. In 2000 His Holiness the Dalai Lama was invited to do a 4 day teaching program at the L.A. Sports Arena and I was asked to do the exterior and interior designs to look like the entrance of a Tibetan Monastery. I also was responsible for designing and producing all the merchandise for the event. Later that year I was asked to create a History of Surfing in San Diego exhibit for the Hall of Champions at Balboa Park in San Diego. In 2005 I worked with the Pierside Hotel at Disneyland to decorate all of the hotels suites with surf themed art and created 2 costume shaped antique surfboards for the hotels lobby. Later that same year I was hired by the California State Fair to create a surf themed exhibit for that years fair. We created the largest surf exhibit in the world, and attendance to that exhibit was the highest in the Fair’s history. In 2008 I was involved with several board members of the California Surf Museum to create the interior design for the museum’s brand new 6,000 square foot location in downtown Oceanside. In 2009 I created the opening exhibit, 100 Years of Surfing in California to celebrate the grand opening of our new location. The surf museum brings more than 20,000 visitors a year to downtown Oceanside. In 2011 I designed a new line of T shirts that features the historic surf spots of Coast Highway 101 that is still in the design process. My goal for Endorse Peace is to be the Curator of Exhibitions that will be located in store fronts in communities that Endorse Peace will be working with throughout Southern California.