O’Neill founder dies
05/06/2017
Mr O’Neill was born in Denver and moved with his family to Long Beach. He acquired a love for the beach early in his youth in Southern California. He attended the University of Portland in Oregon, where he received a degree in business.
Following service in the US Navy during World War II, he married Marjorie Bennett and they moved in the early 1950s to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. He immediately began experimenting on his kitchen table with various materials designed to protect against the frigid ocean water in northern California. He said: “I just wanted to surf longer.”
By the 1950s he had invented the first surfing and bodysurfing wetsuits and opened his first surf shop near Ocean Beach. Inspired by the growing surf scene, he moved with his growing family 75 miles south to Santa Cruz, and opened his next surf shop there. Shortly thereafter he began making surfboards and producing wetsuits for an expanding population of surfers throughout California.
The surfing craze soon expanded beyond California, and Jack O’Neill rode that wave “better and longer than almost anyone in the surf industry”, the company said.
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