Assignment #1: What do you want to be known for?

Jack O’Neill, Surfer Who Made the Wetsuit Famous, Dies at 94

By SAM ROBERTSJUNE 5, 2017

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Jack O’Neill before windsurfing off Santa Cruz, Calif., in 1982. He revolutionized the surfing industry through the sale of wetsuits.CreditDan Coyro/The Santa Cruz Sentinel, via Associated Press

Jack O’Neill, who popularized the neoprene wetsuits that defied the cold, the calendar and the continents to create an endless summer for surfers around the world, died on Friday at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 94.

His death was announced by his company, O’Neill Inc., which he started in 1952 in a converted garage in that city. He coined and trademarked the name Surf Shop and transformed it into the most successful maker of surfing wetsuits. It still sells them through an O’Neill Surf Shop in Santa Cruz and globally under the O’Neill name.

O’Neill Inc. delivered on the company’s maxim about wetsuits with a universal appeal: “It’s always summer on the inside.”

In pursuing surfing off the Northern California coast, Mr. O’Neill — rakishly bushy-bearded and typecast by a piratical eye patch — found respite from his claustrophobic jobs as a draftsman, taxi driver and fire extinguisher salesman in San Francisco. At that point he was an outlier; surfing was only beginning to spread across the Pacific from Hawaii.

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“When you get all screwed up, and you jump in the ocean,” he was quoted as saying on surfline.com, “everything’s all right again.”

Not everything, exactly. Mr. O’Neill was innovative and entrepreneurial, but necessity was the mother of this invention. He was turning blue from ocean temperatures that even on balmy summer afternoons might barely flirt with 60 degrees.

Like every successful product, the wetsuit had multiple fathers.

Hugh Bradner, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Manhattan Project physicist, originated a synthetic rubber version in 1951 as insulation for deep-sea and scuba diving.

Bill and Bob Meistrell began making wetsuits in Southern California around 1952, about the same time Mr. O’Neill launched his label. The Meistrells’ company still markets them under the Body Glove brand.

But “The Encyclopedia of Surfing” (2005), among other sources, credits Mr. O’Neill as the wetsuit’s commercial pioneer.

His technical innovations, marketing acumen and swashbuckling mien transformed his business from a humble store into the international leader in wetsuit sales.

He also helped turn Santa Cruz into Surf City (though in a trademark dispute it later lost the official title of Surf City U.S.A. to Huntington Beach, Calif.); upgrade the image of surfers from drug-addled wastrels to serious athletes; and establish the Central and Northern California coasts as a year-round surfers’ haven — all while remaking himself into an industry spokesman and surfing legend.

Mr. O’Neill was born on March 27, 1923, in Denver and moved with his family to Long Beach, Calif., where he began his love affair with the sea.

He served as a Navy pilot during World War II and received a degree in business from the University of Portland in Oregon.  After marrying the former Marjorie Bennett, the couple moved to Ocean Beach in San Francisco and then about 75 miles south to Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz. (It is here, in 1972, where he began wearing a patch over his left eye. A surfboard struck him there while he was riding a wave at The Hook.)

Newsletter Sign UpAfterAfter marrying the former Marjorie Bennett, the couple moved to Ocean Beach in San Francisco and then about 75 miles south to Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz. (It is here, in 1972, where he began wearing a patch over his left eye. A surfboard struck him there while he was riding a wave at The Hook.)

His wife died in 1972. He is survived by his second wife, Noriko; his daughters, Cathi, Bridget and Shawne; his sons, Pat, Tim and Jack Jr.; and six grandchildren. Another son, Mike, died in 2012.

Before the advent of the wetsuit, Mr. O’Neill and his fellow surfers had been braving the frigid Pacific by wearing long underwear or sweaters coated with oily sealant, or by stuffing flexible polyvinyl chloride into their swim trunks.

Then, by one account, a friend, Harry Hind, told him about a compound that had been developed by DuPont about two decades earlier for foam rubber life vests. By another account, Mr. O’Neill said a light went off when he examined the rubber undercoating on the carpet of a DC-3 commercial airliner.

Whatever the inspiration, he began developing suits for surfing and bodysurfing, originally covering just the torso. They were not waterproof, however. Rather, the suit trapped a thin layer of water, warmed by body heat, between the neoprene and the skin.

By 1960 Mr. O’Neill was laminating an elastic nylon jersey lining to the neoprene foam to prevent it from tearing, and to make it easier to put on. He made his first full-length model within a decade.

“All my friends said, ‘O’Neill, you will sell to five friends on the beach and then you will be out of business,’” he recalled. Instead, he rode a wave of surfing fever that reached an unforeseen following in colder climes; he even experimented with a version in Antarctica.

To promote his wetsuits and eventually beach sportswear, Mr. O’Neill recruited surfers to model his apparel and devised seductive advertisements. At trade shows, he would dress his children in wetsuits and dunk them in ice baths. Several would grow up to join the company as executives.

In 1996 he established O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a marine and environmental education program that transported students on his catamaran to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. An avid outdoorsman, he was also an aviator and a hot-air balloonist and invented a sailing craft that could travel over sand on wheels.

Mr. O’Neill had a stroke in 2005 and had not surfed in years before his death, but his feet were still more comfortable on the beaches of the nation’s unofficial surf city than its sidewalks. In 2002, when he received an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, he arrived wearing a tuxedo and flip-flops.

Nobody blanched. After all, this was Santa Cruz and, as surfline.com wrote, the honoree was a man for all seasons, a trendsetter “perhaps most responsible for surfing’s endless summer.”

Respond to the following questions:

1.  What did you think about Mr. O’Neill’s contributions to the world? 





2.  Would you like to create something similar that others could benefit from after you die? Why?







3.  What would you like your obituary to say about you, and why?






4.  What lasting legacy would you like to leave behind? Explain your answer.