Ron DiMenna, who as the founder of the Ron Jon Surf Shop retail chain helped expand a niche sport into mainstream lifestyle culture, died on Sept. 6 at his home on Merritt Island, Fla., near Cocoa Beach. He was 88.
Malcolm R. Kirschenbaum, the Ron Jon company’s chairman and a longtime friend, lawyer and business adviser for Mr. DiMenna, said he died of a heart ailment.
Mr. DiMenna was an enigmatic figure, flamboyant but private, an eccentric who did not like having his photo taken but splashed his company’s tiki-style logo on stickers so widely that, according to an obituary provided by Mr. Kirschenbaum, it was once photographed aboard the Russian space station Mir.
He could be transgressive, and he had a number of run-ins with the law, but he was also charitable. In 2008 he and his wife, Lynne (Klinger) DiMenna, founded a nonprofit, Surfing’s Evolution and Preservation Foundation, to help protect Florida’s beaches. His prepared obituary candidly described his reputation as often “controversial” and as “the stuff of folklore, some true, some exaggerated, but never dull and never ordinary.”
He rode the cresting wave of surfing’s popularity in the 1960s after growing up in Manahawkin, N.J., near Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore.
After being discharged from the Marines in the late 1950s, he was introduced to surfing by a neighbor, the Rev. Earl Comfort, pastor of the Manahawkin Baptist Church. The two began to make custom surfboards out of foam and fiberglass in the pastor’s garage.
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The post Ron DiMenna, Founder of Ron Jon Surf Shop, Dies at 88 appeared first on New York Times.
