Tom Morey

Tom Hugh Morey (15 August 1935 to 14 October 2021), who later went by the single letter Y, was an American musician, engineer, surfboard shaper and surfer whose inventions shaped modern surfing equipment. Born in Detroit, he grew up in Laguna Beach, California, trained as a mathematics graduate of the University of Southern California and worked as a composites process engineer at Douglas Aircraft before leaving corporate work in 1964 to build companies serving surfers. He began board surfing in 1952 and was a sponsored surfer from 1955 to 1963. His ideas included the concave nose pocket, a polypropylene fin and an interchangeable fin system, and in 1965 he created the Tom Morey Invitational Nose Riding Championships, the first professional surfing contest held at Ventura Point. In 1971 he invented the bodyboard, called the Boogie Board, and by 1977 his company was making 80,000 boards a year. From 1999 to 2007 he made soft surfboards by hand in Carlsbad, California, including the Swizzle longboard.