At some point in time, we've all heard - or rather, ignored -- a version of the "When I was a kid" lecture from our elders, squirming through some rambling nonsense about walking to school without shoes or life without video games. Well, if you were one of Jack O'Neill's children, founder of O'Neill Inc. and wetsuit inventor, you might very well listen as he told ice-cold horror stories that drove him to develop our trusty neoprene armor. Hell, you may end up helping with a few inventions of your own.

In 1952, Jack opened his first surf shop in a garage across the Great Highway in San Francisco, a sand dune away from his favorite bodysurfing break. There he sold his first wetsuits, a few vests he made from gluing together pieces of neoprene. From that very garage Jack expanded the average surfer's playground from Steamer Lane to J-Bay, Antarctica and those fun reefbreaks off the coast of Iceland. Thanks to Jack O'Neill, "It's always summer on the inside."

"Surfing in the 50s was great," says Jack. "You knew everybody and we all took turns on the waves." But surfing in the 1950s also meant short sessions due to the cold water temperatures, and surfers tried anything to stay warm. "I remember one guy that tried to keep warm with a navy jumper and he put Thompson's Water Seal on it," recalls Jack.

"He set out in an oil slick all by himself." Cold and sick of cutting his sessions short at Ocean Beach, Jack embarked on a mission to create the wetsuit. Jack soon became a regular at surplus stores collecting old WWII frogmen suits. "These suits consisted of a thin sheet of rubber, worn over something like long underwear," says Jack. "The air trapped in the underwear gave the insulation. But in the rough surf the suit would come apart at the waist entry, water would get in, displacing the air and making it hazardous."

Working with different types of flexible foam, his first success was with polyvinylchloride (PVC). While it had good insulating properties, it was prone to a lot of wear and tear so he glued a sheet of plastic to the PVC and made a vest. Voila! His first wetsuit. Yet, while PVC served its purpose, it was hard to work with and Jack went back to the drawing board.

Jack finally struck gold with neoprene, which he discovered carpeting the aisle of a DC-3 passenger plane.

It was a good insulator, buoyant and easy to bond. Soon after Jack developed designs for the shorty, long john and long-sleeved beaver-tailed jacket wetsuits. "I got a lot of laughs," remembers Jack. "Surfers would come up from down south and I remember one of them saying, 'Maybe you clowns up here need a suit but never us.' I was just trying to do more surfing, have some surfing friends and get a little income." Despite all the naysayers, the vests started to fly off the hangers and O'Neill was in business.

Since then, O'Neill has made countless improvements to the design and quality of the wetsuit, from the introduction of the zigzag stitch to the most recently patented Zipperless Entry Neck (Z.E.N.) design. But accomplishments are nothing new to the O'Neill family. Jack was always a man of firsts, responsible for creating the modern-day surf shop. While guys like Dale Velzy and Hobie Alter had shops down south, they only sold boards.

"Since I was making wetsuits and surfboards, I decided to call my place Surf Shop. And I was able to get a federal trademark registration on the name surf shop too," says Jack. He also pioneered the surfboard travel bag and was one of the first to start blowing foam blanks.

The inventor's gene seems to run in the family, too. His son Pat was a pioneer in developing the leash, affectionately known as the "kook cord" back then. Using materials such as nylon lines, suction cups and surgical tubing, Pat found ways to prevent his board from crashing into the cliffs and breaking in half.

"It was extremely hard to see the surgical tubing, and when I fell off my board, the board went into the wave and stretched the tubing out 22- to 23-feet," says Pat. "And then it came racing back like a speeding bullet. People had never seen anything like this. They thought it was a remote control or something."