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.
When Mr. DiMenna told his father that he wanted a more sophisticated fiberglass board that was made in California, his father, in an oft-told story, said to him, “Buy three, sell two at a profit and yours will be free.”
He began selling the boards, first out of his father’s grocery store and later out of the trunk of his car. He opened his first Ron Jon store at Ship Botton on Long Beach Island in 1961 in a meager cinder-block building. The name “Jon” was apparently meant to honor Mr. DiMenna’s son, who was born in 1959; he died in 2008.
In 1963, Mr. DiMenna moved to Cocoa Beach, Fla., where he opened Ron Jon’s flagship store. Today it fills 52,000 square feet and bills itself as the world’s largest surfing shop. It features a range of items including not just surfboards and skateboards but also T-shirts and beach-themed home décor like surfboard-shaped rugs and turtle-shaped pillows — items that Mr. DiMenna referred to as “needless wants.”
Duke Boyd, a founder, in 1960, of Hang Ten surf wear who helped create the modern surfing image with board shorts and other apparel, told ESPN in 2011 that Mr. DiMenna “got surfing out of its cool doldrums into the general population,” adding, “He saw very early on the broad vision of surfing, versus the minor one.”
The Ron Jon chain expanded along the East Coast to Ocean City, Md.; Myrtle Beach, S.C.; and numerous locations in Florida, employing a marketing strategy of including a free Ron Jon sticker with each purchase and relying heavily on roadside billboards. Mr. Kirschenbaum said in an interview that annual sales at the 12 Ron Jon stores exceed $50 million.
Mr. DiMenna’s arrival in Cocoa Beach in 1963 came at the confluence of a number of cultural moments. The 1959 movie “Gidget” — whose title character is sometimes called the original surfer girl — helped to broaden surfing’s appeal beyond California and Hawaii, as did the first “Beach Party” movie, in 1963, and, three years later, the documentary “Endless Summer.” The Beach Boys had begun their surfin’ safari. The space race was on at nearby Cape Canaveral (now the Kennedy Space Center). Construction would soon begin on Disney World, which opened in 1971 near Orlando.
Cocoa Beach became a surfing hot spot. And the Ron Jon store there became a kind of merchandising theme park. It stays open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily and draws nearly two million visitors a year, Mr. Kirschenbaum said, rivaling the Kennedy Space Center as an attraction.
“People came to Ron Jon’s, like they went to Disney World, to be part of surfing,” Jack Kirschenbaum, Malcolm’s brother as well as a surfer and longtime friend of Mr. DiMenna’s, said in an interview. “Everybody that saw ‘Gidget’ that would never get to surf now had an opportunity to be a surfer.”
Ronald Eugene DiMenna was born in Newark on Aug. 23, 1937. His father, Felix DiMenna, was a grocer, and his mother, Mildred (Perina) DiMenna, ran the household.
Mr. DiMenna was inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 1998. But he gave few interviews and routinely declined to have his photo taken, even for a book called “Legends of Surfing.” When he was interviewed by an Australian television station, only the back of his head was shown.
“That’s Ron,” Lloyd D. Levenson, a lawyer in Atlantic City who represented Mr. DiMenna, said in an interview. “He did what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it and how he wanted to do it.”
Sometimes his unconventionality roused the authorities. In the mid-1970s, Mr. DiMenna pleaded guilty to illegal possession of dynamite, which he acknowledged using to strap around the bases of pine trees in New Jersey and then blast the trees into the air, once reportedly almost hitting a small plane. He received four years’ probation.
“It didn’t hurt anyone and you got a neat sensation, seeing the landscape rearrange itself in front of you,” Mr. DiMenna told The Orlando Sentinel in 1987. “I know it sounds crazy, but you have to try it before you knock it.”
Also in 1987, he was arrested on drug and gun possession charges after a former Ron Jon employee died of an apparent drug overdose outside Mr. DiMenna’s mobile home in New Jersey. The charges were later dismissed.
Upset that his luxury motor home had been impounded in the case by police in Stafford Township, N.J., Mr. DiMenna bought an identical vehicle and drove it around the police station to fool the authorities into believing he had broken into the impound lot, Mr. Levenson said.
“He was an extremely good-natured person,” Mr. Levenson said. “But if you thought you could put one over on him, he’d try to put one over on you.”
Mr. DiMenna spent more than a year in prison in New Jersey in the 1970s after being convicted of drug possession. He faced several charges of driving under the influence in the early 2000s, and public records indicate that in 2013 he was charged with domestic battery. That case was dismissed after his wife asked prosecutors not to proceed; the couple underwent counseling.
“He was successful in his business,” Malcolm Kirschenbaum said. “He put his mind to it, and he made a success of his personal life.”
Mr. DiMenna is survived by his wife, whom he married in 1990; a daughter, Linda Phillips; and a grandson.
After his release from prison in 1977, Mr. DiMenna helped to fund antidrug programs like DARE in middle schools in Ocean County, N.J. He also provided antidrug messages on Ron Jon billboards and in radio advertising in New Jersey and Florida. In 1994, Mr. DiMenna was pardoned for his drug conviction by Gov. Jim Florio of New Jersey.
“What the pardon tells me, more than anything else,” Mr. DiMenna told the newspaper Florida Today in 1994, “is that surfing’s ‘bad boy’ image has been forgiven.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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