But Mr. Morey did not get rich from the Boogie Board. He sold his company sometime in 1977 or 1978 to Kransco, a toy manufacturer, for an undetermined moderate sum and received no royalties.
Mr. Morey was philosophical about his lost windfall.
“Say I had sold this for a billion dollars,†he told The Los Angeles Times in 2003. “l’m still going to be sitting here in my bathing suit. I’m not going to eat any more than I’m eating.â€
Thomas Hugh Morey was born on Aug. 15, 1935, in Detroit, to Howard and Grace Morey. His father was a real estate agent, his mother a homemaker. A family move to Laguna Beach, Calif., when Tom was young introduced him to the Pacific Ocean and surfboarding.
Enrolling at the University of Southern California, he started as a music major but earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1957. While still in college, he and a classmate, Bob Tierney, created the Fantopper, a shapeable, honeycomb paper hat. They sold 100,000 of them (some to Joan Collins and Red Skelton), and the hat was featured in a cover story in Parade magazine that posed the question, “Will paper hats become a fad?â€
Mr. Morey joined Douglas Aircraft in the late 1950s after a stint in the Army. At Douglas he specialized in composite materials (which he already knew about from his early surfboard making) but left several years later to open a surf shop and build custom surfboards in Ventura, Calif. He organized the Tom Morey Invitational surfing tournament in Ventura in 1965; it’s believed to be the sport’s first prize-money competition.
After the sale of his Boogie Board business, Mr. Morey continued to work on surfboard innovations while playing drums with a band at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on Hawaii’s big island. In 1985, needing money, he moved to Washington State, where he took a job with Boeing and returned to working with composite materials.