Rugged surfing giant a wetsuit pioneer
Jack O’Neill, a giant in the surfing industry and the man credited with inventing the surfer’s wetsuit, died Friday at his home near Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz. He was 94.
The death of the eyepatched, bearded and rugged man, who lived out his last years in a house perched on the eroding cliffs along Monterey Bay, was confirmed by a spokesman for the company he founded in San Francisco in 1952. Mr. O’Neill died of natural causes surrounded by family.
Mr. O’Neill devoted his life to the sport and the ever-improving quality of surfboards, and his shop in Santa Cruz thrived over the decades, but he forever will be known as, in the words of local surfer Peter Mel, as “the man who brought comfort to cold-water surfing.”
After serving as a pilot in the Naval Air Corps in the 1940s, Mr. O’Neill moved to San Francisco in 1949 and joined a hardy bunch of bodysurfers who braved the chilly waters of Ocean Beach, wearing sweaters and other makeshift gear before retreating to the warmth of
bonfires on the beach. He took on a number of jobs — taxi driver, lifeguard, longshoreman, traveling salesman — before he began experimenting with wetsuit materials and opened his first surf shop along San Francisco’s Great Highway in 1952.
The use of neoprene, a staple to this day, already had been implemented in the U.S. Navy based on a design by University of California physicist Hugh Bradner, said surfing historian Matt Warshaw.
But it was Mr. O’Neill who began investigating surplus stores to see if the innovation might be applied to surfing. His original models were pieces of neoprene sewn into vests, protecting only the upper body, but they developed into full-body suits that, in essence, changed everything in the sport.
“When I was about 20 years old and just beginning to make surfboards, Jack drove up in an old Jaguar to see how I was doing,” said Bob Wise, who opened his first shop on Wawona Street, “right around the corner from Jack’s first shop,” in 1968. “So I’ve got a bunch of boards around, and he says, ‘You know, you’ll never make any money making surfboards. You should start selling my wetsuits.’ I wasn’t interested at all. Little did I know how wrong I was.”
Wise remembered one of his shop employees, Ralph Ehni, wearing an early O’Neill model for an Ocean Beach surf session in the early ’70s. “Guys were just ridiculing him, like ‘Be a man’ and all that,” Wise said. “Well, he paddled out there and surfed for two hours before he came back in. Everybody else was frozen. Couple of days later, all these guys are asking me, ‘Can you get a couple more of those?’ and it just took off from there.”
In 1972, Mr. O’Neill lost the sight of his left eye in the process of testing one of the early surf leashes — cords attached to the body so boards wouldn’t wash to shore after a surfer wiped out. “The first leashes were made of surgical tubing, about 6-8 feet long, and they were attached to your wrist,” Wise recalled. “Somebody thought that was a great idea. You’d lose your board, and all of a sudden, with that elastic quality, it comes shooting back at you like a torpedo. That’s what happened to Jack.”
Mel, who grew up in Santa Cruz and became one of the best surfers at Mavericks, remembered Mr. O’Neill as “an amazing guy. An innovator, with contributions as significant as anyone in our industry. Not just in surfing, but sailing and throughout water sports. He was very private, and precise in his work. He was always in his workshop making stuff, just the mad scientist in there, and he’d never come out until it was perfect — a product that would be one of the best out there. He had a great distinctive voice. And of course, the eye patch. He wore it well.”
Warshaw recounted one surfing contest when everyone was gathered on the beach watching the competition, and then came Mr. O’Neill from the other direction, lofting over the sand in a hot-air balloon, flying a banner advertising his products.
“These guys always seemed to be in the shadow of Jack, because he was the wetsuit figurehead,” Warshaw said of Mr. O’Neill’s early competitors. “There could only be one, and it was going to be him.”
After decades at the helm of the business, Mr. O’Neill ceded the CEO position to his son Pat in 1985. Mr. O’Neill stayed active well into his later years, and he often was seen toting a surfboard under his arm. He suffered a stroke in 2005, after which he took on a reduced role at the company.
As an internationally known figure, Mr. O’Neill preferred to spend most of his time in Santa Cruz, where he had lived since 1959, dressed casually and looking for that next swell. He and his wife, Marjorie, raised six children before she died in 1973.
“I’m not much into business, I’m into the ocean,” he told The Chronicle in 2012. “I’ve always believed in its healing powers. It has proved therapeutic for people with physical and mental disabilities, for veterans returning from war, for everyone. I think in the next 30 years, we’ll see the potential of that power become fully realized.”