This article, by Robert Suhay, ran in the August 6, 1989, issue of the Asbury Park Press. This version has been slightly edited.

No sooner did Ron Jon’s Surf Shop open in Ship Bottom this summer than its logo of crimson bamboo lettering was seen on T-shirts up and down Long Beach Island. The 26-year-old landmark surf shop was boarded up in October when owners decided to shut down rather than fight some 30 zoning violations issued against the store for displaying merchandise on the highway right of way and failing to have an approved site plan.

But days before the summer’s July 4 kickoff, signs heralded the opening of a new Ron Jon’s in a complex just across the street on Central Avenue. The former shop, now a barren edifice, serves as temporary storage for the volume of goods that will pass through the new store.

Owner Ronald E DiMenna will not likely be seen watching his success from behind the racks of T-shirts, the stacks of boards or the aisles of wet suits.

Although Ship Bottom was home to the first Ron Jon’s, the old store, a small whitewashed cinder block building, is a minor piece in the business conglomerate DiMenna built. Today, that conglomerate includes advertising, real estate, construction, and citrus farms.

DiMenna spends most of his time in Merritt Island, Florida, a short distance from the main Ron Jon's Surf Shop, a two-level retail outlet that dominates a full city block in Cocoa Beach.

It's a place where Ron DiMenna's name is the stuff of legend.

Stafford Township and Ship Bottom residents who have followed his career liken him to a barometer of cult fashion tastes. They view DiMenna, now 52 years old, as a businessman who can spot a trend and make it pay.

In the 1960s, it was surfboards; in the '70s, hatch cover furniture; in the ’80s, T-shirts, beachwear, knickknacks, and boogie boards.

DiMenna's lifestyle, and his inaccessibility, add to the legend.

DiMenna could not be reached for comment and did not return several messages left on an answering machine at his Surf City house. According to associates who asked not to be identified, DiMenna is in Australia researching property in Queensland.

Consider that the DiMenna ’’mansion" is a 36-foot Holiday Rambler mobile home. It drives often and it keeps the public, and sometimes his business subordinates, guessing where he is.

Ron Jon’s legends hold that peacocks, pigs, Australian animals, and vicious dogs inhabit his 150-acre citrus grove hideaway on Merritt Island, dubbed “Rubber Ranch of the MF Incorporated.," an allusion to the psychiatric ward of a prison and a locker-room epithet.

Stafford Township police said the ranch also may be the source of hollowed surfboards and hollowed citrus fruit used to transport drug caches.

Records in Superior Court, Toms River, show DiMenna led a life on the edge of the law during the 1960s and ‘70s. In 1974, he pleaded guilty to possession of dynamite and was placed on probation for four years. Police sources said investigators in the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were tipped off to DiMenna by a pilot. The pilot was flying low over the Pinelands west of Tuckerton, New Jersey, when the treetops suddenly rose 50 feet into the air toward him, police sources said. Shaken and a bit incredulous, the pilot landed and reported the incident to authorities. In a 1987 

 story, DiMenna was quoted as saying the dynamiting was exciting and fun.

In 1975, DiMenna pleaded guilty to possession of methamphetamine, LSD and marijuana in connection with a raid on his Otis Avenue house in Tuckerton. Tuckerton police, assisted by the Ocean County prosecutor’s office and state police, reported they had to break into the house through the rear door and get past a vicious dog because DiMenna had closed off all other entrances with steel bars. He was sentenced to three to five years in the former Leesburg State Prison, in Cumberland County.

Now, the Ocean County prosecutor's office is pursuing charges of weapon and drug possession against DiMenna, his sister, Gaye Hendricks, and a friend, Lynn Klinger.

Charges were lodged by the prosecutor’s office on Aug. 7, after police searched DiMenna's mobile home in connection with the drug overdose death of one-time DiMenna associate Franklin Yuhas. of Beach Haven and Vermont.

According to Stafford police, DiMenna, his sister, Ms. Klinger, and Yuhas were having a party on Cedar Bonnet Island during which they launched helium-filled weather balloons.

Police said DiMenna called to report Yuhas had been electrocuted when a line secured to a ballon touched a nearby suspended wire.

Police found DiMenna's mobile home at the scene.

[Note: an Asbury Park Press article dated July 28, 1992, reports that police found $55,000 cash in DiMenna's mobile home, along with two shotguns, "narcotics and narcotics paraphernalia." State charges were eventually dropped, but as part of a plea deal on federal charges the $55,000 was forfeited, while DiMenna's confiscated mobile home, valued at $100,000, was sold at a government auction.]

A month ago, while the new store was still a hollow shell, Robert Baugher, president of Ron Jon’s, was supervising a maelstrom of hammering, painting and wiring.

But like DiMenna, Baugher prefers to let Ron Jon’s shop speak for itself

“I don’t talk to the press,” he said. “I haven’t seen DiMenna in four years, honestly,” he added.

John Allen, a Stafford Township resident and a friend of DiMenna's, said DiMenna has not involved himself in day-to-day operations of DiMenna's retail businesses in several years, leaving it instead to Baugher.

DiMenna communicates with Baugher through his sister, Gaye, or by letter, Allen said.

[Note: Baugher filed a $12 million breach of contract suit again DiMenna in 1997, claiming, another other thing, that DiMenna did not "physically appear at any Ron Jon properties from 1987 to 1995." The suit was settled for an unknown sum in 1999.]

All of this is part of the mystique spun by DiMenna over the years.

Ron Jon Surf Shop had a simple start, of which Ronald DiMenna is only half. The “Jon" in Ron Jon’s is Stafford Township resident John Spodofora. In 1963, when Spodofora was 16 and attending high school, he lived next door to the DiMenna family on Route 9. The two became friends.

As Spodofora tells it, DiMenna was 26 years old and working as a butcher in his father’s grocery store at Bay Avenue and Route 9 in Manahawkin.

DiMenna was just out of the Marines, married with two children, when he met a preacher, the Rev. Earl Comfort, who would change his life. Comfort, then pastor of the Manahawkin Baptist Church, did not turn DiMenna to God. Instead, he introduced him to the wild, wild surf.

“Earl took us out and taught us to surf," Spodofora said. “That is how it all started."

Comfort, now preaching at the Jacksonville Chapel in Lincoln Park, Moms County, declined an interview for this story.

“It was Ron's idea to build a board," Spodofora said. "We did it in the kitchen of his house. We just bought blocks of (plastic foam) and fiberglass and went to work. I remember as we tried to shape the foam, it wound up all over the place."

The homemade boards aroused a lot of interest on the beach and a few orders came in, Spodofora said.

"Ron then looked into a board warehouse in California and ordered pop-out boards from the place," Spodofora said. "We sold them for $50, and the hand-made custom boards sold for $90. We would put them up in the window of Felix’s store, and they would sell as fast as we could make them." 

[Note: Felix Dimenna, Ron's father, owned a grocery story and encouraged his son to go into the boardmaking business.]

The following summer, the two men rented a trailer and set up shop on the causeway in Ship Bottom. “It just caught on from there,” Spodofora said. “The place was always busy.”

Spodofora left the business in 1964, two years after he helped start it, to attend college and hasn’t seen his former partner since. “We just drifted apart and went our separate ways,” Spodofora said. “Some people say we had a blowup. We never had a fight. I went away to do my thing. I couldn’t picture just sitting in a surf shop for the rest of my life ”

Spodofora now works as an environmental researcher and serves on the Stafford Township Council. 

[Note: In 2012, Spodofora was elected Mayor of Stafford Township; he was later at the center of a "stolen valor" scandal in which he lied about fighting in Vietnam.]

By the time Spodofora left the business, however. DiMenna had already decided to open a second shop in Cocoa Beach—the rising star of East Coast surfing.

Picking up the story here is Manahawkin resident Kenneth J. Smith, a real estate and insurance agent who worked at DiMcnna's store in the late 1960s and ‘70s.

“Ron was successful because he could pick out trends before anybody else,” Smith said. “And once he decided to do something, he would do it all the way. He would buy up whole inventories and put them out.

“He hit it big twice,” Smith continued. “First with the surfboards, then with the hatch cover tables.”

But Smith also remembers one of DiMcnna’s failures: the Ron Jon Surf Burger

“We had a sign out front that said ‘Happiness is a 19-cent Surf Burger.’ ” Smith said. “They never caught on I don't think he ever made money on the Surf Burgers.”

Smith’s wife, Pat, also worked for DiMenna. She believes DiMenna’s successes, as well as his failures, arc a byproduct of his philosophy.

“He was a partier,” Mrs. Smith said. “But that was only part of it. He was also a hard worker. Work time was work lime. You partied on your own time."

“Ron believes in living life to its fullest," Mrs. Smith continued. “He wants to get everything out of life he can. in taking everything to its limit He doesn't care what anybody else thinks.”

"A LEGEND OR JUST ELUSIVE? RON DIMENNA IS THE 'RON' IN RON JON'S" (1989)

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