seen some of ya guys use his face as an avatar. figured ya'll should know. i edited this out to ease on the I'shttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/business/jack-oneill-dead-popularized-the-wet-suit.html?_r=0 "Jack O’Neill, who popularized the neoprene wetsuits that defied the cold, the calendar and the continents to create an endless summer for surfers around the world, died on Friday at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 94. His death was announced by his company, O’Neill Inc., which he started in 1952 in a converted garage in that city. He coined and patented the name Surf Shop and transformed it into the most successful maker of surfing wetsuits. It still sells them through an O’Neill Surf Shop in Santa Cruz and globally under the O’Neill name. O’Neill Inc. delivered on the company’s maxim about wetsuits with a universal appeal: “It’s always summer on the inside.” “When you get all screwed up, and you jump in the ocean,” he was quoted as saying, “everything’s all right again.” He also helped turn Santa Cruz into Surf City (though in a trademark dispute it later lost the official title of Surf City U.S.A. to Huntington Beach, Calif.); upgrade the image of surfers from drug-addled wastrels to serious athletes; and establish the Central and Northern California coasts as a year-round surfers’ haven — all while remaking himself into an industry spokesman and surfing legend. Before the advent of the wetsuit, Mr. O’Neill and his fellow surfers had been braving the frigid Pacific by wearing long underwear or sweaters coated with oily sealant, or by stuffing flexible polyvinyl chloride into their swim trunks. Then, by one account, a friend, Harry Hind, told him about a compound that had been developed by DuPont about two decades earlier for foam rubber life vests. By another account, Mr. O’Neill said a light went off when he examined the rubber undercoating on the carpet of a DC-3 commercial airliner. Whatever the inspiration, he began developing suits for surfing and bodysurfing, originally covering just the torso. They were not waterproof, however. Rather, the suit trapped a thin layer of water, warmed by body heat, between the neoprene and the skin."
Clownface posting this 3 days ago guys... https://www.swellinfo.com/forum/showthread.php?31581-RIP-Jack-O-neill
Someone from Santa Cruz was relating to me the story on the back & forth between ST and Huntington over the "Surf City" moniker. Long story short, the mayor (or someone) of HB ended the argument with the comment, "...because nobody ever called it the 'Santa Cruz hop'." Endd of argument. RIP Jack. Without rubber suits and goon cords, probably*zero* of us would be here to argue over Climate Change.
