When you get all screwed up, and you jump in the ocean, everything’s all right again.
The first time I saw the Pacific Ocean, I couldn't wait to jump in. I ran the breadth of the sand by Prospect Street in Newport Beach and leapt, with board in hand, into the waves.
I immediately regretted it. Dang, that water's cold.
(For those who have never been, the Pacific is cold in California, Washington, Oahu, Maui, and New South Wales, Australia. Man, that beast is chilly.)
While I had packed a wetsuit, it had been a thinner, "shorty" model. I had figured that early October in southern California would be no worse than south Jersey in late May and I was spectacularly wrong.
So, off I went a few miles north to buy a more reasonable wetsuit. In the shop, the very young woman behind the counter pointed towards a variety of highly colored suits with dramatic names. I looked at her in skepticism until another clerk, much closer to my age and with wind and sun- chiseled features, stepped in and said, "The O'Neill's are over here" . Yes, he grokked. If you're surfing the Pacific, or anywhere else, really, it's best to wear an O'Neill. As it says in the interior of every O'Neill suit, "It's always summer on the inside."
[An important note: We are not paid by O'Neill to hawk their products or are in any other way contracted to them. I wish. Like all true watermen, we are opinionated about valuable equipment.]
Jack O'Neill, born in Denver in 1923, is one of those guys who sounds like he's from a Kris Kristofferson song: "He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction....". Like true watermen of any generation, he had a tendency to dive into things and figure out, after much discomfort and no small amount of danger, how to manipulate the circumstances to his advantage.
While still a child, O'Neill's family moved to Long Beach, California where the formerly land-locked kid, like stout Cortez, saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I remember being a kid from Ohio and seeing the Atlantic for the first time and knowing that it was about to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between that vast body of wild water and me. It appears it was the same for O'Neill.
He attended the University of Portland on a G.I. Bill after serving as a Navy pilot during World War II, earning a degree in business. Although there was no such thing at the time, he may as well have earned a degree in marketing, too, as he was a natural. He was married, held a collection of jobs and, after moving to the Ocean Beach section of San Francisco, went surfing every day there were waves worthy of riding.
However, as we have noted, the Pacific is cold. If it's cold in southern California, a scant hour or two from the Mexican border, it is really cold in northern Cali. So that he could surf more days and much later into the less accommodating season, O'Neill began to experiment with a variety of methods of keeping himself warm while in the water.
He would begin his experiments on his kitchen table, taking wool or cotton long underwear and slicking it down with lanolin to provide insulation. When that proved inadequate, he would then fill coveralls with foam packing material. When that was too heavy he would cannibalize a surplus rubber life raft and sew it into a suit. Or maybe the lining of a airliner's cabin carpeting would work? None of these attempts really answered, until he had that moment of discovery.
Contrary to popular belief, O'Neill did not create the wetsuit. The material had already been developed by a physicist at Berkeley to line deep-sea, hard-hat diving suits. The genius of O'Neill was to take the material and shape it in such a manner that one can wear it without a canvas outer layer and move in it with the fluidity required on a surfboard. Also, one has to give such a product an attitude, and that's where O'Neill's natural sense of marketing took over.
[If we may pause for a moment to comment on the nature of the wetsuit, especially as not everyone has worn one. Wetsuits are not waterproof [those are called dry suits]; wetsuits are designed to let a small amount of water permeate the material and rest between the inner layer of the suit and the wearer's flesh. The heat from the human body then warms this circulating micro-thin layer of water, keeping the wearer's body temperature at a safe level.]
While his acquaintances were skeptical, O'Neill was a surfer and knew beyond a doubt that once it was discovered that there was a magic suit that could make cold days manageable and the summer a little closer to endless, other surfers would sell, borrow, or steal whatever they could in order to claim this bit of fashion. Originally selling them out of a converted shack, and them moving the whole business to Santa Cruz nearer the middle of the state in order to be closer to the burgeoning surf crew, O'Neill coined a term familiar to those in search of an oasis in the midst of the beaches of both coasts. He called his place a "surf shop". The O'Neill wetsuit was born and, with it, a whole new industry.
O'Neill would go to trade show after trade show, bringing along his children not just for their company or so that they could learn the family business, but so that he could fit them into their own wetsuits and toss them in a tank of ice water to prove how well the suits worked. In the frigid tank, the kids would paddle on small boards, dive under the surface, and otherwise comport themselves like children in the water. Nowadays, that would get O'Neill at least a stern talking-to by the authorities; back then, it sold wetsuits. Lots of them. He even hired real surfers to serve as the models for his inventory, lifting many of them out of obscurity and near-poverty.
Wearing a full, lush beard in the days before they became common, and sporting an eye patch that was necessitated when he got whacked in the face with a surfboard [it happens; I had a $4000 dental bill from just such a calamity], O'Neill sought to become the literal face of his company, presenting something counter-cultural and piratical about surfing. With his new-found wealth, O'Neill sponsored surf competitions that encouraged professionalism and athleticism, and permitted surfing's growth into a legitimate, competitive sport.
O'Neill was a ubiquitous character in California culture and in the ads for his own company. He flew planes and balloons, shaped surfboards, and engaged in various adventures. Opening stores on four continents, and creating a line of apres surf clothing and accessories bearing his name, he became particularly involved in efforts to combat ocean pollution, creating the O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a marine and environmental education program, in 1996. In moments of late life reflection, O'Neill regarded the OSO as the best thing he had ever done.
Jack O'Neill, born in Denver in 1923, is one of those guys who sounds like he's from a Kris Kristofferson song: "He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction....". Like true watermen of any generation, he had a tendency to dive into things and figure out, after much discomfort and no small amount of danger, how to manipulate the circumstances to his advantage.
While still a child, O'Neill's family moved to Long Beach, California where the formerly land-locked kid, like stout Cortez, saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I remember being a kid from Ohio and seeing the Atlantic for the first time and knowing that it was about to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between that vast body of wild water and me. It appears it was the same for O'Neill.
He attended the University of Portland on a G.I. Bill after serving as a Navy pilot during World War II, earning a degree in business. Although there was no such thing at the time, he may as well have earned a degree in marketing, too, as he was a natural. He was married, held a collection of jobs and, after moving to the Ocean Beach section of San Francisco, went surfing every day there were waves worthy of riding.
However, as we have noted, the Pacific is cold. If it's cold in southern California, a scant hour or two from the Mexican border, it is really cold in northern Cali. So that he could surf more days and much later into the less accommodating season, O'Neill began to experiment with a variety of methods of keeping himself warm while in the water.
He would begin his experiments on his kitchen table, taking wool or cotton long underwear and slicking it down with lanolin to provide insulation. When that proved inadequate, he would then fill coveralls with foam packing material. When that was too heavy he would cannibalize a surplus rubber life raft and sew it into a suit. Or maybe the lining of a airliner's cabin carpeting would work? None of these attempts really answered, until he had that moment of discovery.
 |
| The young O'Neill and the even younger, original wetsuit |
Contrary to popular belief, O'Neill did not create the wetsuit. The material had already been developed by a physicist at Berkeley to line deep-sea, hard-hat diving suits. The genius of O'Neill was to take the material and shape it in such a manner that one can wear it without a canvas outer layer and move in it with the fluidity required on a surfboard. Also, one has to give such a product an attitude, and that's where O'Neill's natural sense of marketing took over.
[If we may pause for a moment to comment on the nature of the wetsuit, especially as not everyone has worn one. Wetsuits are not waterproof [those are called dry suits]; wetsuits are designed to let a small amount of water permeate the material and rest between the inner layer of the suit and the wearer's flesh. The heat from the human body then warms this circulating micro-thin layer of water, keeping the wearer's body temperature at a safe level.]
While his acquaintances were skeptical, O'Neill was a surfer and knew beyond a doubt that once it was discovered that there was a magic suit that could make cold days manageable and the summer a little closer to endless, other surfers would sell, borrow, or steal whatever they could in order to claim this bit of fashion. Originally selling them out of a converted shack, and them moving the whole business to Santa Cruz nearer the middle of the state in order to be closer to the burgeoning surf crew, O'Neill coined a term familiar to those in search of an oasis in the midst of the beaches of both coasts. He called his place a "surf shop". The O'Neill wetsuit was born and, with it, a whole new industry.
O'Neill would go to trade show after trade show, bringing along his children not just for their company or so that they could learn the family business, but so that he could fit them into their own wetsuits and toss them in a tank of ice water to prove how well the suits worked. In the frigid tank, the kids would paddle on small boards, dive under the surface, and otherwise comport themselves like children in the water. Nowadays, that would get O'Neill at least a stern talking-to by the authorities; back then, it sold wetsuits. Lots of them. He even hired real surfers to serve as the models for his inventory, lifting many of them out of obscurity and near-poverty.
Wearing a full, lush beard in the days before they became common, and sporting an eye patch that was necessitated when he got whacked in the face with a surfboard [it happens; I had a $4000 dental bill from just such a calamity], O'Neill sought to become the literal face of his company, presenting something counter-cultural and piratical about surfing. With his new-found wealth, O'Neill sponsored surf competitions that encouraged professionalism and athleticism, and permitted surfing's growth into a legitimate, competitive sport.
O'Neill was a ubiquitous character in California culture and in the ads for his own company. He flew planes and balloons, shaped surfboards, and engaged in various adventures. Opening stores on four continents, and creating a line of apres surf clothing and accessories bearing his name, he became particularly involved in efforts to combat ocean pollution, creating the O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a marine and environmental education program, in 1996. In moments of late life reflection, O'Neill regarded the OSO as the best thing he had ever done.
O'Neill died a couple of months ago at the age of 94, having lived an enviable life. Although, speaking for the army of desk-bound occasional surfers, even if he had never developed the wetsuit or contributed to the sport and culture of surfing, if he had just been that lone character living in a glorified shack in Santa Cruz, he still would have served as an icon just for a philosophy such as this: “The three most important things in life: Surf, surf and surf.”
