The odyssey of wetsuit inventor Jack O’Neill. Plus: A living legend’s legacy tour.
Jack O’Neill, the founder of the first and most successful surfing wet-suit company in the world, has long had the financial means to live anywhere he wants.
Yet the well-traveled inventor, entrepreneur and surfer has chosen to remain in Santa Cruz since moving here in 1959. So why has he stayed all these years?
“Santa Cruz has great surf,” says O’Neill. “It’s the right latitude. It’s too cold up there (pointing toward San Francisco) and too cold down south (pointing to Monterey). It’s perfect.”
It certainly appears that way as I sit next to O’Neill on a couch in his Pleasure Point home, gazing out through expansive windows at a mesmerizingly beautiful Pacific Ocean. It’s so close that it seems to envelop us. The conditions couldn’t be better — the bright, blue water is smooth and the sky is clear, with Monterey easily visible across the bay. But O’Neill’s focus is more immediate: He’s checking out the surf.
It’s been a long time since O’Neill was out in the water, but old age (he’s 92) and health problems (he suffered a stroke in 2005) can’t keep him from surfing the waves with his mind. The ever-present gleam in his one good eye — the other was lost in a surfing accident in 1972, leading to the use of his iconic patch — and constant grin on his face make it obvious: O’Neill is still stoked on surfing.
Though it was the surf and weather that drew O’Neill to Santa Cruz, leaving San Francisco, where he lived previously, was also a business decision. It may have been a remote, rural town back in 1959, with little in the way of commerce relative to San Francisco, but Santa Cruz had more of something the enterprising O’Neill needed if his wet suit- and surfboard-making business was going to flourish: surfers.
Early surfing in S.F.
In the 1940s, when O’Neill was bodysurfing and surfing San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, only a handful of hardy souls joined him in the frigid water. The surfing wet suit did not exist at the time. The only means this crew had of dealing with the cold was a post-surf bonfire. While the strong currents and powerful waves also deterred people from plunging in, there was an even more obvious factor keeping the number of surfers to a bare minimum: Swimming, much less surfing, was not allowed at Ocean Beach. At least that was O’Neill’s understanding. He says surfing was only permitted at Kelly’s Cove, at the far northern end of the beach, right under the Cliff House.
“There was a guy named Julius, who was a mounted policeman, and that was his territory: Ocean Beach, San Francisco,” says O’Neill. “And when he’d see us in the water, except at Kelly’s, he would say, ‘You better get out or I’m gonna take you in.’ ”
Though O’Neill bodysurfed regularly, often braving huge surf — “We would go out on any day” — he never acclimated to the cold water; nobody really did. Unlike his fellow water men, however, he set out to do something about it. He knew he needed to create some kind of flexible insulation, one that performed better than the wool sweaters that some surfers wore.
O’Neill experimented with various materials, putting his expertise as a journeyman draftsman to good use. “It started out with some uni-sided foam,” says O’Neill of the first vest he fashioned. “I knew from my physics classes that air was a good insulator. It worked good, except it didn’t have tensile strength, so I had to take it and put plastic on the outside.”
The real breakthrough came in 1952, when pharmacist friend and fellow Kelly’s Cove bodysurfer, Harry Hind, turned him on to an elastic compound originally developed by DuPont in 1930. Explains O’Neill, “He saw what I was trying to do with the plastic foam, and he says, ‘Hey, try this neoprene.’ He had used it in his lab. It really worked well.”
O’Neill knew he had the right material and began to construct vests, initially making them for his friends to test. Then, a few months later, he began to sell them in his newly opened surf shop on the Great Highway near Wawona Street.
At the time, though, surfboard building was the focus of O’Neill’s business, not wet suits. Despite their obvious utility, wet suits were hardly flying off the shelf. Indeed, one of O’Neill’s friends encouraged him to give up on the invention. “Charlie Grimm was one of the hard-core surfers out there,” recalls O’Neill, “and when he saw what I was doing he said, ‘O’Neill, you’re going to sell to five guys on the beach and you’re out.’ Because there were very few surfers out there in those days.”
Though he didn’t agree with him at the time, O’Neill now acknowledges that Grimm did have a point. The availability of a neoprene vest could hardly turn San Francisco into a surf mecca. Santa Cruz was different. The water wasn’t much warmer, but the waves were far more forgiving and accessible, and according to O’Neill, “the surf was much better than San Francisco.” He’d learned this on a number of surf trips to Santa Cruz. On one such occasion, he brought his whole family, including his wife, Marjorie, and five children; they camped out on the bluff above Pleasure Point — not far from his current home.
Move to Santa Cruz
In 1959, when the O’Neill family moved to Santa Cruz, the seven of them initially stayed in a motel on East Cliff Drive, also right above the ocean. Soon, O’Neill got a house on Chanticleer Avenue, fairly far from the beach, though still on the east side of town. To give you an idea of how rural Santa Cruz was at the time, their neighbor raised sheep.
The Chanticleer property included some sheds that O’Neill was able to use for surfboard and wet-suit production. Once his business outgrew these spaces, he rented a 5,000square-foot barn. Initially, 90 percent of that business was the shaping of balsa-wood surfboards. Eventually, he got out of the surfboard-making business altogether, focusing on wet-suit production.
Says O’Neill, “It was hard to make money with surfboards; it was easier with wet suits.” He explains that this was mostly because of competition between numerous surfboard makers. With wet suits, he was more or less going it alone.
O’Neill’s first dedicated Santa Cruz surf shop overlooked Cowell Beach, then and now the most popular (or at least the most beginner-friendly) surf spot in the city. An old real estate office, the little shack wasn’t great, but the location was ideal.
“When I first came to Santa Cruz, surfing was a dirty word. They thought they were a bunch of druggies, that we didn’t work.” Jack O’Neill, founder of O’Neill company
The O’Neill Surf Shop quickly became the main hub of Santa Cruz surfing activity. A few years after its 1959 opening, however, the shop had to be moved to make way for the construction of the Santa Cruz Dream Inn, which remains there today.
A legend — now
“The mayor had it picked up with a crane and put it in the parking lot,” says O’Neill. “He took out a couple of parking meters and let us operate there for about a year.” A plaque commemorating the original surf shop’s location was installed in 2013. Santa Cruz takes its surf history seriously, and treats O’Neill as a local legend. At least it does now. The city as a whole took a dim view of surfers and surfing back in the 1960s. “When I first came to Santa Cruz, surfing was a dirty word,” explains O’Neill. “They thought they were a bunch of druggies, that we didn’t work.” He says it was hard initially to be taken seriously as a businessman. “There was this one banker,” says O’Neill, “his kid surfed, so he wanted to be friends. He’d take me downtown and try to make something out of me; he’d introduce me to business guys. He’d say, ‘He’s got the surf shop,’ and they’d go, ‘Oh.’ ”
Eventually, the city warmed up to surfers, taking on the mantle of “Surf City USA.” O’Neill had a big role in this process. He played against type by becoming an upstanding citizen and a trusted member of the community. O’Neill downplays his role as a civic leader, though, jokingly saying, “I didn’t steal or drink much.”
O’Neill is certainly an integral part of Santa Cruz’s Pleasure Point neighborhood. After graduating from the rented barn, he moved his wet-suit manufacturing to a building on 41st Avenue in 1960. After getting kicked out of Cowell Beach, he moved his retail shop to 41st Avenue, as well; it’s still there today.
O’Neill bought his current Pleasure Point home in 1973. And he’s been “changing things around” ever since. The first priority was removing thick posts in the living room that obstructed his view of the ocean. With contractors loath to perform the tricky task, it took O’Neill’s fierce determination to get the job done. What else did he do? “I tore out the stairs and put in a trampoline,” says O’Neill with a sly smile.
But the quirkiness doesn’t stop there. He dug out the basement to make room for a shower with a sauna. It is accessed, right from the cliff above the surf zone, through a World War II-era submarine door. The nautical theme extends to the basement’s authentic porthole windows, upon which sea spray sometimes lashes. O’Neill’s service as a pilot in the Naval Air Corps explains some of this eccentricity, but definitely not all of it.
But if you want eccentric, how about buying a 65-foot catamaran for use as, to use O’Neill’s words, an “aircraft carrier”? In addition to surfing and sailing, O’Neill is passionate about hot-air ballooning. He loved to pilot these craft, but he also saw the promotional value of using a balloon as a huge placard — which is where the idea of landing a balloon on a huge catamaran was born. However, once the novelty of this stunt wore off, the boat lay idle in the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor.
Lessons on the ocean
Then, in 1996, O’Neill came up with an even better idea: Why not use the vessel to take schoolchildren out on the ocean to learn about sailing and marine ecology? Thus was born Sea Odyssey, a free program that, as of 2014, has had 75,000 enrollees — fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders from all over California.
“Teaching kids about the ocean — that it needs to be taken care of — that really works,” he says. O’Neill has received hundreds of letters from grateful participants, some of which adorn the walls of his house. “That is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he says of Sea Odyssey. Given his numerous accomplishments, this says a lot.
O’Neill’s son Tim skippers the catamaran and runs the Sea Odyssey operation, as well as O’Neill Yacht Charters (see story, Page 5). From way back in the San Francisco days, O’Neill’s family has been an integral part of his surfing business — from appearing in promotional material as children to running the show as adults. His son Pat has served as O’Neill CEO since 1987. “They’re all surfers working in the business,” he says proudly of his offspring, which eventually grew in number to seven. According to O’Neill, “It has worked out extremely well.” And indeed it has. As I look over at O’Neill, sitting there on the couch, smiling at the ocean, I’m struck by the deep contentedness of this man. He is exactly where he wants to be. Appearing unencumbered by the walker he is forced to use and showing no dismay at being physically unable to surf, O’Neill seems to have transcended obstacles that mire others. But O’Neill is not merely existing in some kind of blissful state of reverie; his mind is still actively engaged in the same pursuit that launched his business in 1952: keeping surfers warm.
As I was wrapping up the interview and preparing to leave, O’Neill told me, “I’ve got an idea for a new wet suit.”