Murray McCory, who founded the outdoor equipment company JanSport while still in college and whose signature innovation, a lightweight backpack, revolutionized school life for millions of students, died on Oct. 7 in Seattle. He was 80.
His daughter, Heidi Van Brost, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of congestive heart failure.
Like Starbucks coffee and Nike running shoes, JanSport backpacks grew out of the heady, creative days of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture in the Pacific Northwest.
Mr. McCory, who until the early 1980s had the surname Pletz, was a student at the University of Washington when he entered a national competition to design a new product using aluminum, an event sponsored by Alcoa, a maker of the metal.
An avid outdoorsman, he had long chafed under the stiff, one-size-fits-all wooden frames of traditional hiking backpacks. He developed a new frame using adjustable, lightweight aluminum, along with a nylon pack complete with a pocket for a water bottle. He took first place.
With seed money from his father, Mr. McCory and his girlfriend, Jan Lewis, decided to bring his creation to market. He handled the designs and metal fabrication; she planned patterns and did all the sewing. They founded JanSport, named for Ms. Lewis, in 1967 and married two years later.
Soon they were making a host of products: snow shoes, a frame backpack for dogs, mummy-style sleeping bags. The market for outdoor gear was still small, and most of their output came from necessity.
“When we needed something, we made it,” Ms. Lewis said in a text message. “We couldn’t afford much in the way of equipment while we were in college. The gear we had was heavy — cumbersome to haul on backpacking trips.”
Eventually they brought on Mr. McCory’s cousin Skip Yowell to handle sales and marketing. By the mid-1970s JanSport was making more than $1 million a year in revenue (close to $6 million in today’s dollars), thanks in part to a new product with a very different application: what they called the University Bookstore Rucksack.
Mr. McCory and Ms. Lewis had met as students at the University of Washington, and, like many of their classmates, they grew frustrated lugging a loose stack of books from class to class, sometimes tied together with straps.
Mr. McCory took an existing product, a lightweight, frameless pack used for short hikes, and added a reinforced bottom, nylon zippers and other tweaks to make it campus-friendly. He decided to leave the leather swatch, originally used for lashing poles to the bag, on its back panel — someone might want to attach an umbrella, he figured. Today, the patch, though rarely used, is a signature element of the JanSport look.
The original bag, the precursor to JanSport’s iconic SuperBreak backpack, became a hit at the University of Washington’s campus bookstore; soon it was for sale at colleges around the country.
By the mid-1980s JanSport bags were ubiquitous in high schools as well. Other companies joined in — L.L. Bean was quick to follow — but for millions of students, JanSport was synonymous with school.
Murray John Pletz was born on July 15, 1944, in Shoreline, Wash., a suburb of Seattle. His father, Norman, ran a transmission repair shop and later helped fabricate the aluminum frames on JanSport backpacks. His mother, Mabel (Murray) Pletz, became the company’s first bookkeeper.
Murray graduated from the University of Washington in 1967 with a degree in industrial design, not long after founding JanSport.
For the first several years, the three founders — Mr. McCory, Mr. Yowell and Ms. Lewis — operated out of a spare room above Norm Peltz’s auto shop. To save money, Mr. McCory and Ms. Lewis lived with her parents, and Mr. Yowell slept on a foldaway cot in the JanSport workshop.
They worked constantly, taking time off only for the occasional camping trip. They would hang a sign in their workshop window that read “Closed: In the Mountains Product Testing,” and then go off for a few days to try out their latest creations.
The backpack was far from Mr. McCory’s only innovation. Frustrated with bulky A-frame tents, he researched the history of shelter-making and found inspiration in Mongolian yurts. He fashioned a dome-shaped frame that was both lightweight and strong enough to resist the wind. Within a few years dome tents were everywhere.
JanSport also became known for its quirky advertising.
Mr. Yowell doctored historical photos of 19th-century explorers, miners and backcountry ramblers to make it look like they were wearing JanSport gear. If he couldn’t find a good picture, he would stage one, drawing inspiration from a favorite movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969).
The trio sold the company to the K2 Corporation, a ski maker, in 1972. It is now owned by the VF Corporation, which also owns the North Face and other outdoors brands.
Mr. McCory and Ms. Lewis divorced in 1979. He married Becky Morris in 1989; they divorced in 1999.
Along with his daughter, he is survived by a son, Jeremy; a stepson, Neal Bishop; and five grandchildren.
Mr. McCory was known as Murray Pletz until he left the company in 1982, around the time he changed his surname. His daughter said he had long found Pletz disagreeable and had made up McCory as an alternative.
Mr. McCory spent the next decade designing equipment for a series of outdoor companies. In the early 1990s, he returned to his love of the outdoors by moving to a sparsely populated patch of eastern Washington, where he worked on recycling programs and oversaw a rails-to-trails project under a state grant. It was, in a way, what he’d wanted to do the whole time.
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