He had wandered the world, selling butter in czarist Siberia, fighting in France during World War I, walking the Appalachian Trail with his dog -- and strolling down Colorado Boulevard, unofficially bringing up the rear of the Rose Parade one year.
But when he got to Laguna Beach, Eiler Larsen was so captivated by it that he stayed and welcomed the rest of the world there.
Laguna Beach returned the salute, naming him its official greeter. In good weather and bad, Larsen would stand on South Coast Highway waving to drivers and pedestrians and booming out a big hello.
A block-long lane bears his name, and two life-size statues on South Coast Highway -- where he called out greetings for 33 years -- honor the bearded, wild-haired fixture of the quirky, artsy seaside town.
"They may think I'm crazy," Larsen once said, "but when a motorist comes to town, tired and weary of the traffic, and smiles when he leaves, does it matter what they think?"
Laguna's greeting tradition dates to the 1880s, when Old Joe Lucas, a Portuguese fisherman and shipwreck survivor, greeted stagecoaches en route to Santa Ana or El Toro. Like the Roman sea god Neptune, he carried a trident; and he swore like, well, a sailor.
Lucas died in 1908. Three decades later, Larsen, then 48, arrived. A hulk of a man, Larsen worked part time as a gardener before he donned his red sport jacket to greet passersby.
Larsen was born in Aarhus, Denmark, in 1890. At 19, he traveled to Siberia, where he sold Danish butter. He soon immigrated to the United States and attended college in Minnesota. But wanderlust caught him, and he hopped a freighter to South America, according to Times articles.
During World War I, he returned to the U.S. and enlisted in the Army to fight in France, where his right leg was wounded by artillery fire. He walked with a cane the rest of his life.
During the 1920s boom, Larsen worked as a bank messenger on Wall Street. He later walked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia with his dog, Happy, according to The Times' archives. Early in the Depression, he caught the "greeting bug" and began hailing visitors in Washington, D.C. As Larsen stood waving near the White House, President Hoover, from the back of his limousine, "waved to me when he saw me," Larsen said.
