Tom Morey, surfer who invented the Boogie Board
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, Calif. 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 in a phone interview. “It didn’t create radical surfing performances, but it was a really fun and simple way for people to understand wave riding.”
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, and images from the newspaper remained.)
To test this 4K -foot long, 3-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, Calif. 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, Calif., in 1977, “just like the boogieing on the dance floor.”
But Morey did not get rich from the Boogie Board. He sold his company in 1977 or 1978 to Kransco, a toy manufacturer, for an undetermined moderate sum and received no royalties.
Morey was philosophical about his lost windfall.
“Say I had sold this for a billion dollars,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “l’m still going to be sitting here in my bathing suit.”
Thomas Hugh Morey was born Aug. 15, 1935, in Detroit to Howard and Grace Morey. His father was a real estate agent, his mother a homemaker. A family move to Laguna Beach, Calif., when Morey was young introduced him to the Pacific Ocean and surfboarding.
Enrolling at the University of Southern California, he started as a music major but earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1957. While still in college, he and a classmate, Bob Tierney, created the Fantopper, a shapeable, honeycomb paper hat. They sold 100,000 of them (some to Joan Collins and Red Skelton), and the hat was featured in a cover story in Parade magazine that posed the question, “Will paper hats become a fad?”
Morey joined Douglas Aircraft in the late 1950s after a stint in the Army. At Douglas he specialized in composite materials (which he already knew about from his early surfboard making) but left several years later to open a surf shop and build custom surfboards in Ventura, Calif.
After the sale of his Boogie Board business, Morey continued to work on surfboard innovations while playing drums with a band at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on Hawaii’s big island. In 1985, needing money, he moved to Washington state, where he took a job with Boeing and returned to working with composite materials.
He moved back to Southern California in 1992 and resumed making surfboards.
He continued to surf into his 70s.