"The world is an old-fashioned place to me. Everything I see can be improved."
One of surfing’s great gifts to the world, the inventor Tom Morey, has died a couple of months after his eighty-sixth birthday.
Ol Tom wasn’t in the best shape. He was blind and broke, pretty much, despite the outrageous success of the boogie board, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this July.
A fundraiser was created a few years ago to help him and his wife Marchia get through the tough times brought on by the usual catastrophic medical bills and so forth; a hundred gees giving a little comfort in his final years on earth.
Morey, whose $1500 Tom Morey Invitational was the first surfing event to throw its competitors a little cash, invented the 4’6”, 23” wide foam boog in 1971; it was more than a toy for kids to hold onto in shorebreaks, he explained, this was a profound shift in waveriding.
“For anybody to become a graduate of this planet,” Morey who would sell out of his Boogie biz four years later thereby missing the rivers of gold said, “it is essential that they learn to enjoy this activity.”
That same year, Morey wrote a piece in Surfer magazine called Space Boards, a widely futuristic take on what surfing is and what surfboards could be.
“I am a spaceman. I am the spirits of Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Bob Simmons, taken possession, temporarily, of the innocent body known here on earth as Tom Morey,” he wrote. “I (we, really) am looking at your surfboards of today and thinking they are junk.”
In 1999, Morey changed his name to Y explaining in a press release that it’s “easy to say and hear” and “the symmetric look of ‘Y’ is quite pleasing.”
When I asked Pipe shredder and nine-time bodyboard world champ Mike Stewart if he’d heard Tom had died he wrote,
“Took his last breath today and now paddling into perfection.”