Morey, inventor of Boogie Board, has died
Tom Morey, whose creation of the small, flexible, lightweight Boogie Board introduced millions to the exquisite sensation of riding waves on their bellies instead of having to balance themselves upright atop bigger, heavier surfboards, died, Oct. 14, in a hospital in Laguna Hills. He was 86.
His son Sol said the cause was complications of a stroke.
“Tom Morey’s invention allowed more people to experience wave riding than any person in the history of surfing,” Jim Kempton, president of the California Surf Museum in Oceanside, said. “It didn’t create radical surfing performances, but it was a really fun and simple way for people to understand wave riding.”
By the time he created the Boogie Board, Morey had become an expert surfer, an engineer at Douglas Aircraft, a surf shop owner, a surfboard builder, the creator of interchangeable surfboard fins and the co-creator of a three-piece surfboard that could fold up into a suitcase.
In July 1971, while tinkering in his backyard on the main island of Hawaii, he cut a piece of polyethylene foam in half with an electric knife and shaped a rounded nose and square tail with the heat of an iron. (He used pages from the Honolulu Advertiser to seal the board during the ironing; images from the newspaper remained.)
To test this four-and-a-half-foot long, three-pound board, he took it to the west side of the island, paddled out on the water and then experienced the waves in a way he had never felt while standing or kneeling on a surfboard.
“I could actually feel the wave through the board,” he said in an interview on the surf museum’s website. “On a surfboard, you’re not feeling the nuance of the wave, but with my creation I could feel everything. I was thinking, ‘It turns, it’s durable, it can be made cheaply, it’s lightweight, it’s safe.’ ”
He added, “God, this could be a really big thing.”
He initially named it SNAKE for all the body parts (side, navel, arm, knee, elbow) that touch the board when someone lies on it. But he settled on “boogie,” for the “wiggle and jiggle” that he associated with swing music.
Morey began producing Boogie Boards in 1974, took on a partner, Germain Faivre, and opened a factory in Carlsbad. Demand surged. In 1977, the company sold 80,000 Boogie Boards, according to Morey’s website. Some reports at the time suggested that the sales had helped spark a marked increase in surfing in Southern California and that Boogie Boarding had, at least temporarily, become as popular as skateboarding.
“The movements you can put on the board are unlimited,” Debby McMahon, a 17-year-old surfer, told the Press-Tribune of Roseville in 1977, “just like the boogieing on the dance floor.”