Gidget the All-Powerful

The Rebel Next Door

Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

Summer on the Inside

Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted

Surfing the Newsstand

Process of Elimination

Oil City Showdown

The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards

Technicolor Surf Boom

Heroes and Villains

Blackball Blues

Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

Flight of the Larrikin

Bob Evans Means Business

Midget Wins It All

But Will it Play in New York?

Houses of the Holy

We Own the Sidewalks

Beautiful from any Angle

Duke's Big Contest

Can You Handle the Penetrator?

Girls, Don't Panic!

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

An Invincible Summer

Ten-Year Boom

Polyurethane foam reinvented surfboard manufacturing, but it wasn’t the sport’s greatest midcentury technological development. The world’s best board, after all, wasn’t much good to a surfer standing on a winter beach palsied with cold. On a lot of days, in a lot of places, this was the inevitable coda to each and every wave-riding session. Yes, polyurethane foam was a modern wonder. But the surfing wetsuit? That was a godsend.

In yet another case of better surfing through war-related petrochemistry, MIT-trained physicist Hugh Bradner, working from his San Francisco Bay Area university lab, began piecing together the first wetsuit in 1951. It was a two-piece full-body suit made from neoprene—a spongy, vulcanized, polymer-based synthetic rubber invented and trademarked by DuPont. Bradner wanted to improve on the outfits used by the military’s underwater demolition teams. US Navy and Marine Corps designers had already produced a baggy but watertight zip-up head-to-ankle latex sheath—later known as a “dry suit”—which military divers wore over thermal underwear. For camouflaging, the suits were made in a dark amphibian-green, which is how the term “frogman” originated.

Bradner’s new idea was that the user didn’t need to stay completely dry in order to keep warm. A nice, snug layer of insulation would be fine, Bradner reasoned, even allowing for some water seepage. Neoprene—made up primarily of tiny closed-cell air bubbles—looked to be the best human-insulating material. The dry suit depended on watertight seals at every opening, which made it hard to engineer and difficult to fit properly. Yet the wetsuit seemed totally counterintuitive. If you’re trying to stay warm, isn’t the whole point to keep water out? The wetsuit was going to be a hard sell.

When his first suit was completed, Bradner drove to Lake Tahoe, in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, crunched his way over some nearshore ice, and immersed himself in the water. It wasn’t pleasant. Still, he was chilly, not hypothermic. He stayed in for a few minutes and didn’t get any colder.

A classified report on the wetsuit’s design, construction, and performance was duly sent off to the Pentagon, but the military rejected it, deciding to stay with the dry suit. Once the report was declassified, Bradner founded Edco, a short-lived wetsuit manufacturing company. Amazingly, he chose not to patent his design. (“I didn’t think there was a good market for them,” the eighty-nine-year-old Bradner said with a shrug in 2005, remarkably sanguine given that the industry built on his invention was by that time worth over a half-billion dollars in annual revenue.)

Meanwhile, scuba equipment had recently hit the market, and a few Southern California surfers, rigged out with all the necessary gear, were now harvesting the local reefs for abalone, lobster, and black sea bass. Bev Morgan of Manhattan Beach, one of the surfer-divers, was visiting San Diego’s Scripps Institution in 1952 when a librarian handed him a copy of Bradner’s just-declassified report on wetsuits. Morgan was astounded. Everything was in there: patterns, assembly instructions, even material suppliers. Just weeks later, he and boardmaker Hap Jacobs decided to open a surfing and diving shop in Redondo Beach—named Dive N' Surf, appropriately enough—with Morgan himself, using heavy-duty nylon thread and sheets of black quarter-inch-thick neoprene, cutting and stitching together the prototypes, including a farmer john model and a front-zip jacket.

There were problems. Unlined neoprene had a slightly gummy texture, and didn’t slide well over skin; before pulling on a wetsuit, the user had to first coat himself in talcum powder. Rashes and chafing, especially under the arms, were a given. The suits weren’t flimsy, but they weren’t durable either, particularly the jackets, which only came on or off with a lot of tugging and pulling. Split seams were common, as were jagged tears in the paneling. Ultimately, these were minor drawbacks compared to what was gained. Cold water wasn’t defeated by the wetsuit—but no longer did it have the upper hand.

Response to the wetsuit was mixed. Divers took to the new product immediately. Surfers balked. The guy who paddled out in a wetsuit, as Morgan later recalled, “was put down endlessly as being a pussy,” and such was the tyranny of surf fashion that for the next eight years nearly everyone in the sport continued to ride bare-chested and shivering.

Outside of Hawaii, cold water had always been surfing’s biggest problem. In Sydney, the ocean temperature is 62 degrees or below for three months out of the year. Los Angeles-area water is that cold for six months a year. Each person’s particular cold tolerance aside, the low 60s is where a trunks-only surfer will get really uncomfortable after an hour or so, especially with a sea breeze or cloud cover. Anything below 56 degrees—the 

 it gets in Santa Cruz—is cold enough to end a session after just one full-body immersion.

Earlier generations of surfers, to their credit, battled the cold with less concern for appearances than surfers of the '50s. Some wore rubber swimming caps pulled low and tight over the ears to protect against the short but near-paralyzing “ice cream headache” that came with a head-dunking. Others wore a long-underwear top, or a woolen jersey, or a tight-fitting thrift store cashmere sweater, all of which worked fine until the surfer wiped out, or pushed through a wave while paddling out, at which point the ocean-soaked material draped and sagged like a molting pelt. The experienced cold-water surfer also learned to paddle defensively, sitting up with his feet on the deck. It was slow-going compared to prone- or knee-paddling, almost dainty, and it only worked in the calm perimeter zone around the lineup. But apart from the surfer’s hands, everything was high and dry.

A secondary front of the surfer’s cold war, however, was fought on land, as everyone retreated to shore, usually sooner rather than later, and did whatever was necessary to ready themselves for the next charge into the breach. A fire was lit and tended, anything combustible was tossed on—driftwood, crates and pallets, magazines and newspapers, old car tires—and those fresh from the surf crowded the flames and ignored the smell of singing body hair. Other means were deployed: a heavy jacket, running in place, lots of cigarettes, coffee from a thermos, sandwiches—the calorie burn was phenomenal, and hunger was as much a constant for the winter surfer as the cold—and maybe a long pull from a gallon jug of red wine.

Surfing had taken root in the San Francisco Bay Area during the prewar years, and riding at Steamer Lane or Pedro Point during winter, when water temperatures occasionally dropped to the upper 40s, nearly required a genetic mutation. Longtime bodysurfer Jack O’Neill suffered along with all the other Bay Area wave-riders, but he thought cold water was a problem that could be alleviated, if not solved outright. A liberal arts student and lifeguard, O’Neill served in the Navy Air Corps after college, then spent five years bouncing from one short-lived job to the next, including longshoreman, fisherman, parking meter salesmen, and bike messenger. Putting his pilot’s license to use, on sunny weekend afternoons O’Neill would fire up a biplane and pull car dealership banners back and forth over outdoor public events.

In 1952, O’Neill opened Surf Shop, a tiny boardmaking operation, on the beachfront about a mile south of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. By then, he’d already sewn a vest made from spongy unicellular foam rubber, and tried bodysurfing in a two-piece Navy surplus dry suit. Neither did much good. The vest was little better than a T-shirt; the dry suit was great for floating or even gentle swimming, but it failed completely during a wipeout, as water poured in through the waist cuff.

O’Neill first got his hands on some neoprene rubber at about the same time as Bev Morgan in Redondo Beach, and he immediately began to make a line of wetsuit vests. But even in the always-chilly Bay Area, most surfers viewed the wetsuit as an affront to their skin-baring panache. In 1959, O’Neill opened a second Surf Shop outlet in Santa Cruz. He’d added a front-zip jacket and long john to his neoprene vests, and was now making appearances at the local boat expo, where his favorite promo stunt was to fill a tank with water and have his three wetsuit-clad preadolescent children play on a huge block of ice. Still, the market was almost all divers, not surfers.

It was Bev Morgan who finally convinced surfers to come in from the cold. Morgan had sold Dive N' Surf to Bill and Bob Meistrell, twin brothers from Manhattan Beach who, like Morgan, were big into diving and surfing. After sailing the South Pacific for two years, Morgan returned to Los Angeles and in 1962 decided to get back into the wetsuit business—except this time he would aim his product directly at surfers. Morgan contacted Southern California’s leading boardmakers and offered a deal. He’d give them each ten free short john wetsuits, all accented with the surfboard company’s logo on the breast. In return, the boardmaker had to pass the suits on to their best team riders and insist they be used. Amazingly, everybody followed orders—renowned Santa Monica surfer Mickey Munoz even chipped in with an immortal plug, “It’s better to be warm than cold.” The rank and file took notice, and by early spring Morgan's wetsuit order list hit 2,500.

Morgan loved to creat the product and do promo work, but he hated manufacturing. Once again, he sold everything to the Meistrell brothers, who used Morgan’s short john prototype to launch a surfers-only wetsuit line they eventually spun off to become Body Glove. Jack O’Neill’s wetsuit line meanwhile shot through the roof as Santa Cruz wave-riders followed the trend. Soon, Body Glove and O’Neill were the wetsuit industry leaders, with another dozen new companies scampering in their neoprene-scented wake.

Competition spurred more research and development. A thin nylon lining was added to the neoprene, which strengthened the rubber itself as well as the seam joints, and eliminated the talc-filled drama of getting into the suit. For better-made suits, flexible rubber tape was glued to the seams to prevent leaking. Colors were introduced: in 1961, custom-fitted “surfing suits” from La Jolla Divers Supply came in aqua, yellow, or red, as well as standard tuxedo black. The short john was the most popular suit, followed by the front-zip jacket—better known as a “beavertail.” At some early stage in the wetsuit’s development, a designer added an hourglass-shaped length of material to the jacket’s back hem, which was pulled like a codpiece between the legs and double-snapped to the front hem. Divers took advantage of this completely sensible warming feature. Fashion-conscious surfers did not. But instead of cutting off the extra neoprene, it was left to dangle, and during a fast ride it whipped and snapped around the surfer’s rear end like a banner.

Time and again in the years to come, Jack O’Neill would prove himself a masterful surf-world innovator and marketer. He stamped the company logo on a bright yellow hot-air balloon, and at big surfing competitions he would glide majestically down from the skies to a nearby beach. He famously ran a full-page color ad showing a bare-breasted model demurely pulling on an O’Neill short john, and disarmed most critics by pairing the shot with surfing’s first and only perfect slogan: “It’s Always Summer on the Inside.” In 1970, O’Neill introduced the one-piece fullsuit, which covered everything but the surfer’s feet, hands, and head, which was a huge improvement over the old long john/beavertail “layered” outfit. Corporate advantage was found even when O’Neill lost an eye in a surfing accident—as his bearded and eye-patched Long John Silver face was rendered into a company logo.

Neoprene not only brought comfort to the surfing masses, it warmed up the market as well. Manufacturers and retailers loved the wetsuit: it was easier to make, warehouse, and ship than the surfboard, and the unit markup was a lot higher. The vest and short john were both fairly durable, but other designs would tear or corrode after a year’s hard use and had to be replaced—an easy buying decision for any cold-water surfer. Once scorned, now essential, rubber became the surfer’s new best friend. In the midsixties, wetsuits passed boards to become the surf world’s top-selling commodity.

Yes, the polyurethane foam board was a modern wonder. But the surfing wetsuit? That was a godsend.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Summer on the Inside

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