"The Incredible Ron Jon Story! Thrills, Chills, Millionaires! Successful Surf Shop! Buckets of Money! Respect! Fantastic Fabulous Hidaway in the Wilds! Fierce Dobermans, Curious Rheas, Pet Pigs and Peacocks! Mystery, Intrigue, Incredible Rumors, Bizarre Truths! A Guaranteed Dynamite Tale!" by John McAleenan, ran in the July 25, 1987, issue of the Orlando Sentinel's Florida Magazine. This version has been slightly edited.

What we have bumped into here is the comic-book-like story of how the son of a New Jersey grocer worked real hard to become an eccentric, reclusive millionaire who (1) gets his kicks by blowing up trees, (2) thinks Mickey Mouse can save the world, and (3) drives everyone bananas by orchestrating his $10 million-a-year business while hiding out in a wandering motorhome.

You like that? How about this: There is no Jon at Ron Jon's. (In fact, the place should be called Ron Bob's. More about that later.)

There would be no Ron, either, if Ron had his way about this stuff. He would much prefer, instead, to present a mythical figure on some mysterious odyssey, the fruits of which will have everybody in the whole world trucking through his store and going home with at least a Ron Jon T-shirt.

 We thought a little story about Ron Jon's might be entertaining.

 That would be okay. But don't use my last name. I don't want anyone to know who I am.

And so it is that under special agreement, Ronald Eugene DiMenna's full name will be mentioned only once (that was it), and henceforth we'll get folksy and just call him Ron.

Ron, noting that he has never told his story before, is not sure where to begin. We'll start for him.

Hard by the Atlantic Ocean in Cocoa Beach is a place known as Ron Jon's Surf Shop, where, for your convenience, the telephone number has not changed since it was first installed in 1963. But if you called today, you'd be talking to a bunch of different people, sitting in a much different place, selling stuff both in quality and quantity that wasn't dreamed of nearly a quarter-century ago.

In that time, Ron Jon's has grown from a closet-like store with old orange crates for display racks to a 37,000-square-foot, high-tech shopping mall complete with some glitzy Disney animation, two waterfalls, a glass elevator, polished oak floors and, for artwork, a stunning blue neon wave. The recent renovation and expansion mixes much of the old store with the two-story addition, a blending of wide-spaced fancy with elbow-room-only folksy.

Back in the winter season of 1962-63, Ron was selling a few surfboards a week, a couple of T-shirts every day and a mess of iron crosses -- then considered the required surfer decoration. He stuck $25 a week in his pocket for himself and paid his part-time sales clerk, a 13-year-old local surfer named Bob Baugher, $1.50 an hour.

Today there are more than 100 Ron Jon employees with a weekly payroll topping $30,000; a track record of 30 percent sales growth per year over the past decade; and projections that before another decade has passed, Ron Jon's will be a $100 million-a-year business -- even larger than the largest surf shop in the whole wide world -- which is what it calls itself now.

And Baugher? Please meet the president of Ron Jon's. His salary, presuming an unlikely 40-hour week, now works out to $240.38 an hour. That's $500,000 a year.

Now. You should ask who is this mysterious retailing genius who doesn't want anyone to know his last name. And how did he take a dinky little surf shop, just like all the other dinky little surf shops that open and close like Venetian blinds every summer, how did he take his hole-in-the-wall and turn it into a full-fledged, multimillion-dollar T-shirt empire?

Little by little we will find out about the man. As to the business, well, Ron himself doesn't know for sure how it all happened. All he knows is that one long-ago summer, when he was in his early 20s, living in the New Jersey resort community of Manahawkin, he was approached by a youthful Baptist minister. The conversation went like this:

 Ron, church won't do you any good. How about making me a surfboard?

And by God, that's how it started. Ron, once he determined what a surfboard looked like, made one. He recalls that the first effort looked very much like a bad mistake in plastics. That experience, however, caused him to become curious.

"I later ran across an ad in an old surfing magazine. Surfboards were selling for $100. I was married then, had two kids and was making $100 a week as a meat salesman for Swift & Co. I had just gotten out of the Marines, my education had stopped when I couldn't deal with the 12th grade -- and I sure didn't have any loose hundred-dollar bills sitting around."

His father, Felix, a street-sharp Italian grocer, offered a $300 loan. "Buy three boards," his father said. "Sell two of them and your profit will be almost enough to pay for the third board." This was done.

Ron recalls the boards (marked up to $145 each) were on display in his father's Manahawkin grocery for less than a half hour. "A few minutes after I sold the first board, a guy came in and wanted one for himself and one for his son. I told him I couldn't do that. One of those boards was mine. The guy was insistent. 'I can't go back to the car without a board for my son, too.' My dad intervened. 'Sell him both boards,' he said. 'You'll have almost enough to buy five more.' So that's what I did. Pretty soon I was buying -- and selling -- five or more boards a week. That first year in New Jersey I netted $27,000. And it's never stopped since then."

Ron, in those days, had no idea where this entrepreneurial journey would take him -- he knew only that it had begun. He certainly could not imagine how complex a business he would spawn -- nor the price he would pay for its success.

In Cocoa Beach and neighboring communities, there is no end of conjecture as to why Ron Jon's is not just another surf shop or just another T-shirt store or just another one of those post-card-and-plastic-alligator gift shops that are clumped for miles along A1A.

Was Ron simply in the right place at the right time with the right idea? Some think it is as simple as that. Cocoa Beach, circa 1963-64, was getting ready for a vicarious spaceship ride. It was a ripe place for an adventurous merchant.

Did Ron somehow capture an elusive "image" -- a freewheeling spirit from those times that even now is pumped out of the store's air-conditioning system every day . . . an odorless, colorless essence that customers experience as they shuffle through 100 yards of T-shirts? Some think it is as exotic as that.

Joe Twombley, a mid-'60s Cocoa Beach High graduate and a top-ranked surfer in his teen years, felt strongly the gravitational pull toward Ron Jon's. "From the beginning, it was always the place to hang out . . . even when it was his first little shop on Third Street. It was the place to talk about waves, girls and rock 'n' roll." It also stands out in the memories of many that it was the place where you could bump into someone who knew something about the quality, quantity and price of marijuana that might be floating around.

Twombley, now 37, has a highly visible success of his own with a booming custom furniture business on Cocoa Beach. He has not bumped into Ron in several years. "Ron, once he showed everyone he knew what surfing was all about, played the straight-ahead businessman role. Though he was always a little hyper, always a little spacey, he never closed his doors to go surfing. And he was good with people. As kids, we could always borrow $5 or so from Ron in a pinch. I know of many times he bailed surfers -- and other surf shops -- out of one jam or another."

Twombley is convinced Ron's deep-seated business philosophy -- to focus everything on one super location -- is a strategy that has had much to do with his success. "I travel around the country a little and I know there's nothing quite like Ron Jon's anywhere . . . not in California, not in Hawaii. The truth is, Ron has a machine. He puts the advertising in one end -- and a bunch of money comes out the other. Sometimes it seems as simple as that."

Kenny Cohen came upon the scene in the early '60s as a surfer, running with the Cocoa Beach High School crowd. Surfing eventually gave way to music and Kenny evolved into a gifted musician, bandleader and premier jazz saxophonist. He sees Ron Jon's fitting perfectly into the incredible commotion that spanned the last half of the '60s.

"Think about Cocoa Beach when Ron pulled into town in his old white camper. It was a frontier. A fantastic armada of people had arrived in a tremendous rush. The beach was only a few miles from where we would send men to the moon. Grand adventures seemed to happen every day -- hell, almost every hour. Everyone seemed caught up in this explosive high-energy ride."

Cohen says surfing and the corner surf shop mystique were born and grew up amid all this. Adding to the rich stew at the time were new directions in music: the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Cream. In time, surfing became a culture unto itself. Cliques were formed. If you weren't from Cocoa Beach, you surfed near the pier there at some risk. You surfed a place called Shark Pit south of Melbourne Beach because sometimes that's where the waves were breaking best. The sharks would have to move.

On mornings when the ocean swell was four-feet and building and the winds were offshore, half of Cocoa Beach High emptied. The cops would stand on the dunes, waving entire classes back to school -- but nobody ever paddled ashore. "Ron, of adventurous mind himself, grooved right into that whole scene," says Cohen. "He had found a home. Besides, he could be flamboyant himself in a bizarre way sometimes. I think Ron looked at all this and had the insight to take that spirit of adventure, the excitement, the sometimes off-the-wall attitude . . . he took all that and called it Ron Jon's Surf Shop. And that's what got him started. And guess what? Many things have changed, but Ron Jon's is still cooking along with all that leftover mystique. He's preserved it. Amazing, isn't it?"

Actually, the naming of Ron Jon's, the lettering and the particular shade of red in the logo, all that was done as Ron was putting together the foundation of the business at the oceanside community of Ship Bottom, N.J., not far from his Manahawkin home.

"With the beginning of a store in place, I sat down one night to think about a name. I was with two college kids, both art students, and we were sitting around sipping from a quart of Fleischmann's. As the night grew older we got a little sillier and began running through words that might rhyme with Ron. We all thought Ron Jon had a certain cadence to it, besides which, I had a friend named Jon and my son's name is Jon.

"The kids helping me fiddled with some designs and lettering for a while, then I said just make it look like it sounds, and they did, giving it a bamboo character. Then we put something around it and I had the company nameplate. It's been the same ever since."

The name and design may not have changed, but everything else has.

In late 1962, Ron, heeding his father's advice, loaded up his Ford pickup-camper with boards, T-shirts and a few other items and headed south to see what he might run into. "If you're selling stuff, keep going," his father told him.

"When I got to Florida, I did the whole coastline," Ron recalls, "but Cocoa Beach attracted me because then it looked very much like Long Beach Island, the beach community near Ship Bottom. So I rented a cubbyhole store for $200 a month, put up a little Ron Jon's Surf Shop sign, cooked on a hot plate in the hallway, bathed in the ocean and washed off with sulfur water.

"At the time, I could deliver these factory-produced pop-out surfboards in only a few days. If the kids wanted a custom-shaped board, and most of these then were being made in California, it sometimes took three or four weeks. So I definitely had a merchandising advantage. In all, those early Cocoa Beach days had a special touch to them. Fact is, I didn't get back to New Jersey for a year-and-a-half. I was only supposed to be gone for a couple of weeks."

In that 18 months, Ron made some lasting impressions on a group of kids then tinkering with the surfing lifestyle. Among them, Gary Propper, now a successful manager-promoter in California for comedian Leo Gallagher, the rock group Genesis and veteran rocker Bob Seger. Propper was among a handful of teens at Cocoa Beach High School in the early 1960s who thought surfing was considerably more significant than plowing through something like, say, T

Convinced from the beginning that there was a career to be made from this new sport, Propper orbited Ron like a satellite. Primarily, there was the enticing thought that Ron might get around to paying Gary to surf, wearing the RJ colors, riding an RJ board, showing up at RJ-sponsored surf movies, taking the RJ name to California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico . . . wherever the waves were. For Gary, and for many surfers, that would have been the ultimate job. This didn't work out, but Gary hung around with Ron and his father for several years, both at Ship Bottom and in Cocoa Beach.

"In 1966, the Ron I knew was a straight-ahead business person, tight with his wife and kids, very close with his father. At first, it seemed he wanted what any small-business man was looking for -- a little place that would support his family."

Propper says Ron picked up on the young, free-spirited feeling that was marching across the country in the mid- and late-1960s.

"He wanted to somehow capture that in merchandise, and thought if he could, people would buy it. If he liked something, or thought it would catch on, he'd buy as much as he could. Never four or five things to see if it would work, but 100 or 1,000, or all the supplier had. He'd buy the cheapest stuff that way and also the most expensive. Ron had the capital to take that kind of risk.

"If somebody was trying out an idea, a design, a fashion or a new kind of surfboard, and caught Ron in the same frame of mind, Ron would run with it. He gave people like Ocean Pacific and Sundek their first big breaks with huge advance orders. So he was always way ahead of the smaller surf shops that were springing up around the Cocoa Beach area."

In other words, Propper says, Ron decided he could have it both ways. The surfer mystique and the successful business.

(Voice from back of the room: Hey, wait a minute. Did Ron ever surf? Did he even get on a board? Propper: "He was an absolute animal on a surfboard. He tore the waves apart. He was totally macho about it.")

Well, that was then and this is now and Propper doesn't bump into Ron any longer -- in the water or on land. On purpose. The man he much admired has become, in Propper's words, a "space cadet." Propper says that at different times over the past decade his attempts at communicating with Ron have become increasingly bizarre.

"Right away you run into mysterious messages and phone calls, coded names, a whole bunch of strangeness. Not long ago I tried to talk with him about some promotions I was working on, but he was so guarded, so flaky, I finally said to hell with it."

In talking about Ron, there is a certain sadness in Propper's voice. He feels that despite all the trappings of success, what we have here is a very unhappy man. "Ron very quickly seemed to outgrow his family life and began to have different visions of what his lifestyle should be like."

Propper also sensed a vacuum. "As the years went by, nothing ever seemed quite good enough for Ron. He never seemed satisfied with just being a successful businessman. That was too slow a reward. He wanted instant rush -- all the time. It's sad, but now I think he's run out of things that make him happy. Some people, people like Ron, they lead the kind of lives where after a while they don't get off on anything. I think his next move will be to get God . . . find religion. That's what usually happens to people like Ron."

Ron, just a few weeks ago, encamped in his new beige 38-foot Holiday Rambler motorhome in a tree-shaded parking lot within jogging distance of Walt Disney World, had nothing to say about God -- good or bad.

He did seem kind of excited, though, about Fat Fannies, Windsocks, Pharts and Fly Shooters -- a whole line of gimmicky new lawn toys he is having great success with at the much smaller and much different New Jersey Ron Jon's. Selling Fat Fannies may not sound like high adventure to you, but it makes Ron happy -- because in the past year, Fat Fannies helped boost gross sales at the New Jersey roadside store from $180,000 to $500,000.

There were a few cryptic telephone calls before Ron scheduled this parking lot rendezvous. He spoke guardedly over his cellular phone and talked of "circling" the Orlando-Disney area, landing at some indeterminate day or hour. Eventually, there were hurried directions to the parking lot meeting -- with Ron insisting no one else connected with his business know of this assignation.

In the name of privacy, there was much worry over the use of his last name, though it is fairly well known in the Cocoa Beach business community. And photographs? According to Ron, the last picture of him was taken 20 or so years ago. One must presume it was a truly awful photo, because none have been allowed since then. And none will be allowed now.

Life does tend to get confusing . . . even to the point of deciding where Ron should be at any given week or month. Never mind where he may actually be. Since his pay is drawn from Ron Jon's Cocoa Beach account, he's supposed to be in Florida most of the time. In fact, he's mostly where he wants to be -- which lately has been at the New Jersey outlet. When he is in Florida, he doesn't want anyone to know it. When he isn't in Florida . . . well, he doesn't want anyone to know that, either.

No one knows for sure when he last toured his Cocoa Beach store, but the best guess is sometime around midnight in mid-1985. The just-completed $1.7 million Ron Jon expansion? He's never seen that, at least in person. The Ron Jon folks sent him video updates as the construction progressed.

The motorhome itself, meanwhile, is . . . disappointing. You expect nothing less than a bus decorated with electric blue lightning bolts on the outside, and black-light, soft-velvet, overhead, mirrored luxury on the inside. Phooey. There ain't even a surfboard in the joint. Both inside and out, it looks exactly like a 1987 assembly line Holiday Rambler, no more, no less.

There is even a certain "office" feel about it, even though it is also where he lives. The coffee table is crowded with pencils, pocket calculators, business correspondence and sales graphs. (Don't be put off by the dull-looking motorhome, friends say. Ron calls it his Ferrari -- and drives it like one.)

On this sunny day, a gregarious Ron greets his guests dressed in a black knit T-shirt (not from Ron Jon's), black cotton pants and scuffed-up running shoes. A rough-hewn man here, maybe 6 feet 3 inches, a belly beginning to show on an otherwise gangling frame that carries probably 220 pounds.

The tanned face seems one of inquiring good humor. A few small cross-hatched scars give it the sort of elan that goes with the myths and stories. Then the eyes sneak right up on you. My God, the man has Jack Nicholson Eyes. A keen sense of craftiness behind the humor, a flash of devilishness, a certain slyness, the hint of a man who would push adventures to the outer limits. Ron noted his 50th birthday recently, about the same time he noted his dark brown hair beginning to thin and gray. With all that, a handsome man, young in spirit.

It is somehow sad to speak of this, but Ron does not surf any longer. Instead, he gets up early, tumbles out of his motorhome, and runs for a few miles. Sometimes more than a few miles.

At the moment, Ron classifies himself as a runaway -- again. "I've run away a few times. Right now I've been a runaway for about a year. I just got crazy with all the people tugging at me, calling me, pulling in different directions. I looked around one day and counted three phones, all of them ringing, all with calls waiting, two beepers. It became too much. I began to think I was just a computer. That's why I live a secluded life.

"I used to enjoy working the store, but I don't any longer. I'm not after big bucks anyway. What difference does it make if we grow only 30 percent a year instead of 80 percent? What are we gonna do with more money? Buy some Ron Jon T-shirts?"

He laughs a dry laugh at the thought and lights up another cigarette. (Flash: Ron smokes lots of cigarettes. Flash No. 2: Ron cracks his knuckles an awful lot. Flash No. 3: Ron has, for the moment, left the running of his $10 million-a-year business to three people who dislike talking to one another.)

Actually, Ron finds a large measure of both serenity and inspiration at the Disney World-Epcot complex. The bad-ass surfer image (his and the store's) is now but a memory. In addition to T-shirts, bikinis, Sex Wax (for your surfboard) and about a zillion other items, he wants to sell health, happiness and the Disney image at Ron Jon's. In fact, he would almost do something silly, like allow his picture to be taken, if somehow he could transport the entire Disney aura lock, stock and barrel to his Cocoa Beach store.

Over the past decade, platoons of Ron Jon employees have been given paid time off and all expenses to attend one- and two-day seminars at Disney, in order to pick up on positive attitudes and fine-tune the art of customer relations. All Ron wanted in return was a letter from each employee saying what he or she had learned that would make Ron Jon's a better place to shop. A place just like Disney World.

Well, he got lots of letters—but one letter stood out because it suggests the single thing that Ron will probably never do. That letter reads: "Ron, you asked us to tell you what the store needs. I thought Disney had lots of great ideas, but what the store really needs is you. Everybody wants to know who and where Ron Jon is. If you won't come, then at least give us a few stories we can use."

Hoo, boy. If nothing else, Ron certainly has a few stories. For openers, how about that dynamite story? How about two dynamite stories?

Now Dynamite Story One is what the hip folk along Cocoa Beach hear when they inquire politely into rumors that Ron once had a fondness for dabbling in uh . . . well, dynamite therapy.

Dynamite Story Two is what really happened. And shoot, honey, there's not all that much difference.

Story One has it that Ron, upon learning that dynamite blows up trees, and lots of dynamite blows up lots of trees, was wandering in the pinelands of southern New Jersey in the summers of 1973 and 1974 with a case or two of the stuff. He'd wrap five or six sticks of dynamite around the base of a young pine, attach a fuse, light it and watch gleefully as the tree cartwheeled 50 or 60 feet into the air.

One afternoon, as Ron is decorating the New Jersey skies with pine trees, along comes a small plane, preparing to land at a nearby airport. The pilot, presumably sober, is somewhat shaken by the sight of pine trees flying past his window. He lands to report this strangeness. The cops find Ron and speak to him severely about trying to shoot planes with pine trees.

Ron laughs and says that's a pretty good story, but that ain't what happened. Dynamite Story Two goes like this: Ron was in the southern New Jersey pinelands with his father, Felix, showing him how trees fly if enough dynamite is applied. A clump of young pines is strapped with dynamite. A fuse is lit. A small plane appears on the horizon, skimming along the tops of the trees in a meandering, joy-ride fashion.

"Holy Sugarcakes," says Ron, or something like that. "That little plane is headed right in our direction. We're gonna skewer it with pine trees, Pop. I better put out the fuse." Dad, noting the distance between them and the burning fuse, vetoes this plan and suggests a collective crossing of the fingers. The dynamite blows, the trees fly dangerously close to the plane, but avoid spearing it in mid-air. The shaken pilot returns home, decides no one will believe him and vows to give up flying over what appears to be an undeclared war zone.

The denouement should have been that lots of New Jersey pilots got together and organized a bombing raid on Ron Jon's. The truth is, Ron probably still would be out there launching pine trees, but agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, tracking reports of unauthorized signatures on purchases of large quantities of dynamite, linked Ron with the purchases and charged him with illegal possession of the stuff. He pleaded guilty and was given four years probation.

Guilty he may have been. Contrite he is not.

The memory of those fun-filled dynamite days causes Ron's brown eyes to light up pretty good -- he gets that Jack Nicholson look. "Those were good times. It didn't hurt anybody. You get a neat sensation, pushing the button on a detonator or lighting a fuse and watching the whole landscape rearrange itself in front of you. I know it sounds crazy, but you gotta try it before you knock it."

As it turned out, it was nice that Ron loaded up on a couple of summers of dynamite good times. The next few years, late 1975 through early 1978, were painful. Many it was bound to come, given a lifestyle that had few, if any, restraints.

Truth is, growing almost in step with Ron Jon's success was a staggering collection of drug-oriented rumors tied to the store -- and many to Ron himself. Some were mildly humorous. Some were very ominous. Let's go for something light first, which we'll title: The Day Ron Jon's Was Busted in 1967.

What happened was apparently somebody at the store was making regular Miami-Cocoa Beach drug deals, utilizing the pay phone outside and arranging delivery of a few pounds of marijuana to be safely packed under a gross of T-shirts or something.

That was too easy to last long -- and it didn't. The Brevard County Sheriff's Department was tipped to the drug deliveries and had the pay phone tapped. Then the cops planned to intercept a consignment.

On a lovely Saturday in June, a delivery truck arrived with a box of clothing from Miami. Once it was inside and signed for, the raid was on. Cops appeared everywhere, guarding all the entrances and exits.

When the box was found packed with something a little more than T-shirts, there was some initial confusion about whom, if anybody, to arrest. Certainly nobody working at Ron Jon's had ordered any of that evil weed. So for a very confusing half hour, everybody was technically in custody, including 100 or so mothers, fathers and wandering tourists who happened to be shopping in Ron Jon's that busy summer morning.

Eventually, the place was cleared out, but not before everyone had to give police names, addresses and telephone numbers. In fact, there is no memory of anyone going to jail for that particular drug shipment, but the word went out along the beach. No wonder everyone is so laid back at Ron Jon's. The place is a drug house in disguise. Everyone in the back room is smoking dope.

This is a reputation, deserved or not, that dogs the store even 20 years later.

A more ominous story concerns the 18 months Ron served in New Jersey state prisons after being found guilty in 1975 of attempting to purchase a large quantity of Quaaludes. Once again, a phone tap got him in trouble. He had been sentenced to a three-to-five-year term. Close friends say that, at the time, Ron was dealing with a crippling Quaalude habit.

Ron, shifting in his seat uneasily when the talk turns to this chapter in his life, obviously is still distressed at it all. There is a reflexive and total denial. "I don't do drugs."

"THE INCREDIBLE RON JON STORY! THRILL, CHILLS, MILLIONAIRES!" RON DIMENNA PROFILE BY JOHN MCALEENAN (1987)

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