Ron DiMenna, Founder of the Ron Jon Surf Shop Chain, Dies at 88

As the founder of a national chain, he was a key figure in surfing’s expansion into mainstream culture, with a life said to be “the stuff of folklore.”

Published Sept. 22, 2025 Updated Sept. 23, 2025, 2:54 p.m. ET


An undated image of Ron DiMenna, who gave few interviews and routinely declined to have his photo taken.via DiMenna family

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 Bottom 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.

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Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.