i love stories like these💛✨ Posted @withrepost • @californialocos Jack O’Neill began body surfing in the late 1930s and was a Navy pilot during WWII. In 1949, he moved to San Francisco to attend SF State University. In 1952, he founded the O’Neill brand while opening one of California’s first surf shops in a garage on the Greay Highway in SF, close to his favorite bodysurfing break at the time. O’Neill popularized the neoprene wetsuit, creating an endless summer for surfers around the world. By 1960, he was laminating an elastic nylon jersey lining to the neoprene foam to prevent it from tearing and to make it easier to put on. O’Neill made his first full-length model within a decade. His technical innovations and marketing acumen transformed his business from a humble store into the international leader in wetsuit sales. In 1996, O’Neill established O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a marine and enviornmental education program that provides students with hands-on lessons in marine biology and that teaches the relationship between the oceans and the environment. It has hosted about 100,000 children since it started. An avid outdoorsman, O’Neill was also an aviator and a hot-air balloonist and invented a sailing craft that could travel over sand on wheels. In 2002, O’Neill received an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which he accepted wearing a tuxedo and flip-flops. — @oneillusa #CaliforniaLocos https://www.instagram.com/p/CinHA1mKFGYTMnB42VajmUDhWEGbBXO76G4xLU0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=