Tom Morey, 86, surfing legend and Boogie board inventor
Surfer, inventor and musician Tom Morey, known for creating the ubiquitous Boogie board, died on Oct 14. He was 86.
Morey’s squat foam board revolutionized the surfing industry in the 1970s, turning the tricky task of wave riding into an accessible sport for the beachgoing masses. Millions of boards based on his original design have been sold, creating one of the world’s most popular watersports and spawning professional competitions.
Morey’s bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and knowledge from several engineering and manufacturing jobs helped him invent a steady stream of unusual surfing-related items. None captured the public’s imagination quite like the Boogie.
Born in 1935, Morey moved with his family from Detroit to Laguna Beach, California. He quickly became an avid bodysurfer, riding waves on his father’s back at age 8 and winning second place in a paddleboard competition as a preteen.
After graduating from USC Dornsife in 1957 and following a string of manufacturing jobs, he returned to the surf world in 1964, moving to Ventura, California, to open Tom Morey Skeg Works. There he invented the first commercial interchangeable fin system, allowing surfers to swap out damaged fins.
Morey’s success allowed him to host the Tom Morey Invitational Nose Riding Championships at the famed California Street surf break in Ventura, generally recognized as the world’s first professional surfing contest.
Boogie board caps a lifetime of creativity
During a surf session at Doheny State Beach in the late ’60s, Morey spotted a surfer on a short homemade board crafted from wide foam logs. Although the shape struck Morey as unwieldy, the idea seemed neat.
Tinkering with surfboard shapes, and one day he sliced a 9-foot piece of polyethylene foam in half. He shaped the foam into a block approximately 2 feet by 4.5 feet with a rounded nose and square tail. The next day, he paddled out into windswept surf.
“I could actually feel the wave through the board,” he told Surfer magazine. “I was thinking, ‘It turns, it’s durable, it can be made cheaply, it’s lightweight, it’s sage. God, this could be a really big thing.’”
By 1971, he had trademarked the name Morey Boogie and started shaping boards in his backyard, selling them for $37 in honor of his age. Three years later, he was selling his invention out of a shop in Carlsbad, California, and the snub-nosed boards soon became a common sight on local beaches.
Demand began to outpace Morey’s ability to manufacture the popular item, and he sold the name and design to a San Francisco company, which later passed the product on to Mattel Toys and then Wham-O.
In 2005, he earned a star on the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, California, and he was inducted into the Surfing Hall of Fame.
A decade later, Morey was still at it, this time helping with a decades-long project to honor surfboard shapers by carving ancient sequoia wood into their trademark shapes. At age 81, he helped form those familiar contours and then, using a hot branding iron, charred his name into the fine-grained redwood, a stark symbol of his lasting imprint on the surfing world.