“Bobby and Billy created a successful business. But it came from their passion for surfing and diving, not their love of money.” — Surfboard maker and big wave rider Greg Noll
Even before their deaths, Meistrell twins Bob and Bill had achieved legendary status for their diving, submarines and surfing adventures.
That legend found a poetic ending last Father’s Day when Bob Meistrell died of a heart attack at Catalina Island at age 85, while working on the engines of his 72-foot boat Disappearance. He was readying the boat to escort a Catalina Channel paddleboard race, a role he and Bill had performed annually for nearly three decades. Bill Meistrell died from Parkinson’s disease in 2006.
Though best known as makers of the first popular wetsuits and founders of the international brand Body Glove, one of twins greatest gifts was storytelling.
The problem was their stories frequently bordered on the unbelievable.
They claimed their interest in diving was sparked by Life magazine accounts of World War II Navy hard hat divers sinking German ships. While just 13, and living on a farm in Boonville, Missouri, they said, they built a dive helmet out of a five-gallon vegetable oil can. They used street tar to seal the glass faceplate and a bike pump and hose to deliver air to whichever twin was traipsing across the bottoms of Boonville’s many ponds.
The story challenged credibility. Finally, last summer, decades after first hearing the story, I worked up the nerve to ask Bob Meistrell, “Is that story about the dive helmet true ?”
That may have been the only time I ever saw his ever bright eyes darken. “Of course it’s true. We dreamed of diving, finding sunken treasures and owning a submarine. And we did all of those things?” he answered.
The dive helmet story, as well as other, equally extraordinary nautical tales, are convincingly recounted in Fits Like A Glove: The Bill and Bob Meistrell Story by Frank Gromling. Gromling is a widely published author of ocean-themed books, including the beautifully written Jean Michel Cousteau biography My Father the Captain.
Fits like a Glove is equal parts biography, oral history and photo scrapbook.
Many of the stories have been previously reported. Gromling’s contribution is explaining the origins of the twins’ relentless work ethic and uncompromising integrity, a rare combination among the successful entrepreneurs of Southern California’s golden, post war years.
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Their California successes, Gromling recounts, were rooted in challenging boyhoods, helping their single mom raise her four sons and three daughters after their father was shot to death by his business partner and their mother’s second husband lost the farm and family to alcoholism.
Among the twins favorite stories were tales of teaching Hollywood actors to dive.
“Sea Hunt’s” Lloyd Bridges asked them for dive lessons so he wouldn’t have to make up excuses for refusing dive club invitations.
Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan all wore Body Glove wetsuits in their “James Bond” films. Other film stars who wore Body Glove wetsuits included Charlton Heston (“The Wreck of the Mary Deare”), Raquel Welch (“Fantastic Voyage”), Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin (“Midnight Run”) and the stars of “Baywatch.”
Gromling traces the trust Hollywood placed in the twins to one day in 1956 when Gary Cooper’s wife called to make a sizeable dive gear purchase from the twins’ struggling Dive N’ Surf store.
Bob Meistrell told her he wouldn’t sell to her because she wasn’t a certified diver and wouldn’t be safe in the water. When he refused to budge, she asked him to give her and her husband SCUBA instruction in the pool of their Bel Air home. After the weekly lessons, Bob and his wife Patty would join the Coopers for dinner.
Fits Like A Glove: The Bill & Bob Meistrell Story by Frank Gromling. 200 pages. Ocean Publishers. $24.95.
