Jack O’Neill obituary

With an eye patch and bushy beard, the face of Jack O’Neill, who has died aged 94, was known around the world as a logo for the company that bore his name. O’Neill was celebrated as a pioneer, if not inventor, of the wetsuit, which opened up colder waters to surfers, and the company that grew out of his tiny surf shop went on to sell sportswear that captured the imagination of surfers and skateboarders, eventually becoming a sought-after fashion brand.

O’Neill developed the wetsuit out of necessity: “I just wanted to surf longer,” he explained. Surfing San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, O’Neill and his fellow surfers tried to cope with the icy waters of northern California by soaking sweaters in oily water sealants. But it was the realisation that you do not need to stay dry in order to stay warm (hence the term “wet” suit) that prompted his move to the use of neoprene, in 1951. He had first tried stuffing PVC into swimming bodysuits, but as it absorbed water, it added too much weight to allow surfing.

The question of invention, or where the idea for neoprene came from, is a moot point. O’Neill originally claimed to have discovered neoprene in aeroplane carpets, but the flammable substance was never used for that. He later attributed it to a tip from a pharmacy student at San Francisco State University, Harry Hind.

Competing claims came from Bob Meistrell, who with his brother started Body Glove in Redondo Beach, south of Los Angeles. Meistrell and O’Neill traded threats of legal action for years until the Meistrells’ top surfer, Bev Morgan, revealed he had suggested neoprene to them after reading a paper by a University of California scientist, Hugh Bradner, who had successfully tested neoprene diving suits in 1950 but had never marketed his invention outside the technical world. O’Neill may not have been first, but it was his melding of a nylon interior to the neoprene shell that made the wetsuit suitable for the sport of surfers.

O’Neill was born in Denver, Colorado, but his family moved to Long Beach, California, in which he became an avid body surfer. After the second world war, where he served as a US Navy flyer, he moved to Oregon to study business at Portland University and first encountered colder waters. After graduating in 1949, O’Neill settled in Ocean Beach, working as a lifeguard, longshoreman, fisherman, taxi driver and salesman.

He continued to surf, and recalled being fired from one job when he expelled salt water from his nose during a sales meeting. In 1952, he and his wife, the former Marjorie Bennett, opened what he called the Surf Shop in a garage on the Great Highway next to Ocean Beach. “All my friends said, ‘Jack, you’ll sell to five friends on the beach and then you’ll be out of business’,” he recalled.

In 1959 the family moved 75 miles south, to Cowell Beach in Santa Cruz, where he opened another shop. Although he trademarked the name Surf Shop, he never enforced his exclusivity against any of the hundreds of others using the same title. The O’Neill wetsuit, sold with the slogan “It’s Always Summer Inside”, a take on the classic surfing documentary The Endless Summer, led to a rapid growth in sales and expansion into other products. In 1971, O’Neill lost an eye while testing the now-common surf leash, developed by his son, Pat. In typical fashion, he turned the eyepatch into a symbol of his company.

O’Neill invented the sand sailer, a sailing boat on wheels for use at beaches, and continued to fly, primarily in hot air balloons, decorated in O’Neill colours, in which he would drop in to surfing competitions. By the 1980s, when his was the largest-selling wetsuit in the world, the company’s surf brand became a fashion accessory. Eventually the firm became part of an international conglomerate, though Pat still runs the business.

But in 1964, Jack had set up his O’Neill Surf Team, which provided new boards for kids in the Santa Cruz area, and in 1996 he set up O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a marine environmental education programme that has taken about 100,000 children on its catamaran around Monterey Bay national marine sanctuary. His own home, on Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz, overlooked what is now designated officially a world surfing reserve. “The ocean is alive,” he said, “and we’ve got to take care of it.”

O’Neill is survived by his second wife, Noriko, his sons, Pat, Tim and Jack, and daughters, Cathi, Bridget and Shawne. Another son, Michael, died in 2012.