Boogie Man By Wendy Hinman
Carlsbad’s Tom Morey and the History of His Boogie Board

The Boogie Board revolutionized wave riding. It brought surfing to the common man. If marijuana’s biggest crime is that it leads to other things, the same could be said of the Boogie Board. It can take otherwise normal kids and turn them into tanned, bleach-haired, wave-obsessed lovers of the ocean. And it caught parents off their guard in the early ‘70s. It seemed to appear on the market overnight, at least to the consumer. To the inventor, the architect, it was not such an easy ride.

In the ’60s and ’70s, soul-surfers were arguing with competitive surfers about whether surfing was an art or a sport, an expression or contest. It is what you make of it, I suppose. Carlsbad’s Tom Morey made it a science and a song. He had graduated from the University of Southern California in 1955 with a degree in Mathematics and a penchant for jazz. He worked as an aerospace engineer while also playing in various bands. Oh, and he surfed.

“Surfing is a dance, and he has a sensibility about that dance,” said Steve Pezman, the king of surf journalism and publisher of The Surfer’s Journal. “He is one of the best wave riders in the country,” Pezman said, and compared him to Mickey Dora and local legend Phil Edwards. He would always be respected by his peers for his ability in the curl, but he would become revered for his conceptualapplication to surf design.

It started with an idea in Hawaii. The idea followed him to Leucadia where he was living in a trailer park with his wife, Marchia, and looking for a home to buy. It followed them on a safari to Costa Rica where some friends told Morey he had to find a guy living there named Jermain Faivre. When he got there, the problem was Morey and Marchia were on one side of the Nicoya Gulf and Faivre lived on the other side, so the meeting didn’t happen.

The Moreys found a house in Carlsbad “on Chestnut. It was a one bedroom for twenty-four five,” according to Morey. There, he started experimenting with polyethylene foam: “I was always tracking foam into the house.” He was gluing skins of the foam together and cutting it with a saber saw. It was a rather messy, ugly affair. The glue was giving him rashes, and he’s sure the fumes were toxic.

Pezman said, “When I was a sophomore publisher at Surfer, Tom came in with this very ugly foam, plastic thing that looked like it had candle drippings all over it and asked me if I wanted to buy it for $35 dollars. I said ‘no’. Not long before that, a guy came in with an ugly, neoprene slap with parachute straps, and I sent him on his way too. (The sandal would become Beachcomber Bill’s, the first of sports sandals.) So I let a couple big ones get away.” But Pezman also said, “Morey is the Buckminster Fuller of the surfing world. He’s the futurist of our tribe.”

And he was persistent. A couple years had passed since Costa Rica, and when another friend heard about what Morey was monkeying with in his garage, he told him he had to meet a guy living on Maple Street, “Jermain ‘Jim’ Faivre.” Could it be? The man across the Gulf was now in Carlsbad? Morey walked a few streets over from Chestnut to meet Faivre. He smiles at the memory as anyone would recall a close friend. “I knocked on the door, and Jim hollered ‘C’mon in.’ He was sitting there with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. He was a nice guy, a smoking machine. He was a knife maker, born to make knives.” After a brief explanation, Faivre followed Morey back to Chestnut. He looked at the foam thing, unsheathed the knife on his belt and “made a cut as slick as snot.” A business partnership was born.

Morey the engineer and Faivre the carpenter “commandeered Marchia’s kitchen table,” added plywood and a stabilized knife, and had a contraption to shape the first Boogie Boards. This brought symmetry to the making of it. Morey described the process as “Knives, knives, knives, little wooden tools and knives.” That was the secret.

That and heat. About the same time, Morey had gone to get more foam. Pat Zarimba said to him, “There’s a guy in the back who uses a heat gun on this stuff.” Morey said, “My eyes rolled around because ‘this stuff’ (the foam) is glue. I went back to the house armed with this knowledge.” What we think of as the Boogie Board was beginning to take shape.

What to call his invention was only a minor hurdle. Morey called it the Snake Machine first. SNAKE, because your side, navel, arms, knees and elbows are all involved in its use. But then he heard the slang term being at that time in the ‘70s for going, vamoosing, bebopping, mobbing was to boogie. No doubt the jazz musician in him latched on to that phrase. So he called it a Boogie — “there’s no board in it” — but soon everyone was calling it the Boogie Board.

But marketing is always the problem. “It’s a myth selling an invention. I’ve never figured it out,” Morey said modestly. “It has to look right. It has to look like it costs four times what it costs you to make. It has to look like it’s worth something.” Morey and his wife cruised the beach “until we saw a good left (wave break) in La Jolla. I went out, and Marchia got a good picture (of Tom surfing a prototype).”

Then he went into the stacks of the San Diego Library and looked for “books on advertising that would jump out at me. If they didn’t jump out, then the writers weren’t good at advertising.” He picked up a few good ones and also got one on mail-order advertising. At this point, he said, “Our backs were to the wall. So I wrote a slice-and-dice ad describing the foam as a million bubbles . . .and I got Bob Mignogna (the publisher of Surfing Magazine) to give me a one-third vertical ad on credit.”

“I was 37 years old at the time,” Morey remembers. That seemed like a good number, so he priced the board at $37 and put a dotted line around the ad. “The first day possible for someone to have bought that issue of Surfing, see the ad, cut it out and mail the coupon, we got one order. The envelope had youthful handwriting in pencil. I don’t have that ad or the name of the first guy, but I wish I’d kept it. The next day we got five coupons, then two, then none, then none, then two.” Morey said, “We decided to run another ad, and we started gluing these puppies up in my garage.” They also tried to sell them to surf shops, but “that took a long time to get it going.”

The size of the Boogie Board is also a curious thing. Top body boarders, such as Mike Stewart and Ben Seversen, have sworn by the 42-inch size. Morey said, “They’ve adapted to it like a sax player adapts to an alto sax. Stewart is 6’2” and 200-plus pounds. Seversen is 5’7” and around 170, and yet they both use a 42-inch board. To this day, most body boards are 42 inches.”

That’s because the Boogie master designed it that way, no? “Back then,” Morey explained, “we had to go to the third-class post office in Bonsall. Carlsbad was a first-class post office and wouldn’t take anything that large. I figured out that if I made the boards 42 inches, I could wrap them and send three at a time.”

It wasn’t too long before the garage on Chestnut was not large enough for all the orders (some of which were for a Boogie kit, which included all the materials, but you had to do the gluing). So the operation moved to Oak Avenue and then to Roosevelt. They had also moved on from Marchia’s kitchen table. Morey described the new equipment with rollers and pipes and bicycle chains, and irons and curves and light and heat as only an engineer can. And then he elucidated the trial-and-error of the new mechanisms: “The first was not hot enough and the second . . . there were flames.”

Mike Doyle dropped by the Roosevelt shop with some surfboards he had made.
Morey said, “He threw them out of his truck onto the asphalt” without a thought about dings. He was using polyethylene foam, “but had fiberglass rods in them to make them stiff. He put a stringer in them from stem to stern.” That was the beginning of the Morey-Doyle soft surfboards most people now have learned on.

That first year, they put out 2,000 Boogies, 5,000 the next year, then 20,000, then 80,000. Greater production and bigger digs also meant hiring employees. Morey said, “I read the book Up Your Organization by the guy who started Avis Rental Cars. He said that you didn’t have to have genius just look around at your neighbors.” That’s what Morey did. Faivre had moved from Maple to Garfield, and Patty Serrano had bought Faivre’s house and went to work for Morey Boogie.

Debbie Colwell — who Morey described as one of the best body board shapers around — started in shrink wrapping and putting kits together. “The Boogie Board changed my life,” she said. What started as a summer job ended up as a career. She stayed with the company after it was sold to Kransco, then did some time at Scott Hawaii before starting Custom X in ’88.

A Hawaiian by the name of Bobby Szabad had bought a kit that went bad on him and contacted Morey who said Szabad’s Boogie was “taking on water and weighed about 25 pounds.” Szabad told Morey that even though it was heavy, “I like the way it gets you through the dead zone.” Morey liked his attitude and hired him. Then Morey laughed and said, “And all his relatives.” Szabad later started BZ body boards and Szabad International, which makes Surfboards.

Craig Lebuse came on for graphics and advertising. Rick Lawrence figured out how to add leashes to the Boogie and now has a body boarding company in New Zealand. Louise Hullihen was the factory mom. Morey tries not to leave anyone out in his remembrance: “We are a family of people who make these things. Now it’s the grandchildren.” Matt Norton, the French boys and the Paul brothers made up Morey’s first surf team. “Johnny Cash sold more Boogie boards than anyone in the world,” he states. Not the man in black, just another kid from the old Carlsbad neighborhood.

Morey Boogie Boards and most of its employees stayed in Carlsbad until Morey and Faivre sold the business to Kransco in the late ‘70s. Kransco moved it to Oceanside and then to Mexico. Morey said, “It was a big mistake to sell it, but it did give me the freedom I wanted.” That freedom included time to surf, of course. Morey still surfs whenever he can. He consulted for Kransco for a time, but then moved on to other things.

That little factory in Carlsbad, however, turned the surfing world on its head in its day. “Tom has had the most profound effect on surfing as any one individual with the exception of maybe Duke Kahanamoku,” Pezman said. “And mostly from the skunk works — the skunk works in Carlsbad,” he added.

He is still on the forefront of surfing design. His newest concepts are the Swizzle, the One and the Malibu. They all have polypropylene skins with the Boogie foam in between. The Swizzle has afterburners shaped like a Boogie, but rails like a regular surfboard. They are faster than fiberglass, easier to paddle and easier to turn. Morey described it as “a high-performance board that may hurt you, but will never maim you (like a fiberglass board).” The One does it all. It can be used as a Boogie, a skim board, a stand-up short board or a wake board. It even probably shreds in the snow.

And Morey will doubtless never get away from innovation. Pezman said, “Tom is a conceptual thinker. He solves conceptual problems. He’s brilliant, and sometimes he lowers himself to invent things like the Boogie Board.” Colwell said of Morey, “He’s really mellow, obviously smart and fascinating to listen to.”

After an affectionate reminiscence about the Boogie Board, Morey went on to describe his ponderings in electromagnetic flight, worship, fixing the tax code and motion through space. Though he lost me somewhere in the time/space continuum (not hard to do). . . he is rather dangerous with a pen and a napkin. By all rights, we should elect him Governor. Though he’d save the state, he’d probably find politics too tedious. As Pezman has said, “Tom’s all about lifestyle.”

But there is also a social responsibility about Morey. He said, “I know I’ve been given a window seat.” Not everyone can see as much as he has seen, and he feels a certain obligation to those sitting on the aisle. It is, he said, “understanding I have been gifted with a capability to believe, to sort things out. That’s the hand I got.” And with that hand — those concepts, his innovations — he has been kind and generous.

Morey’s dad probably never knew what he was getting the family name into when he taught Morey to body surf on a sunny day in Laguna. His dad told him, “Take our family name and run with it. I don’t care what you do out there, just be the best at it.” Surfing, jazz, inventing. . . Tom certainly has run. And that name? Yeah, half the planet recognizes it. •