Board-maker makes a splash

Raymond C.Rude's face never will grace the cover of Newsweek or Forbes, so you probably don't know he's been manufacturing the world's best diving boards and stands since 1970 in a plant 25 miles east of Reno, at the Tracy-Clark Station off Interstate 80.

Every Summer Olympics and major international diving competition since 1960 has featured Ray's Duraflex or its successor, the Maxiflex.

He is the only non-athlete and non-coach to be inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame, recognizing his contributions to the sport.

Greg Louganis and the other great springboard divers wouldn't have set their spectacular records without Ray Rude's engineering genius.

Rude's Duraflex International Corp., a 12-employee firm that Rude runs as a hands-on president, has produced 63,000 boards as well as thousands of Durafirm diving stands for institutional or competition- diving pools.

Along the way, the solidly profitable company routinely posts annual revenues of several million dollars.

Companies in France, Russia and China have attempted to replicate Rude's boards, but competitive divers notice the performance differences, and the current Maxiflex model B remains superior to foreign copies.

Rude's story is an inspiration to all who would succeed as entrepreneurs on their own terms.

Rude was born in 1916 in tiny Stanley, N.D.

Although he was a mediocre student in school, his talent for working with his hands was evident early.

On his way to school he'd deliver milk from the family farm to customers.

As a 6-year-old firstgrader, he raided a trash pile and found a broken miniature steam engine.

He repaired it without assistance.Ray also made small irrigation pipelines for his mother's garden out of little tubes from Model T Ford rear-wheel bearings he scavenged from a auto dealership's junkyard.

In the depths of the Great Depression, Rude dropped out of the 10th grade and hitchhiked to California.

In 1936 he landed a 32-cents-an-hourjob with Lockheed Aircraft, shoveling sand in the foundry and carrying ladles of molten metal to pour into molds for tool dies.

He rose during World War II to become an aeronautical tool engineer at Lockheed, overseeing 30 men and serving as the go-to guy for solving seemingly impossible tooling problems.

In 1947, disenchanted with the prospect of working with unions at Lockheed, Rude went into business as a subcontractor for aircraft companies.

Although the soft-spoken Rude maintains a low profile, he once told a writer about the genesis of his revolutionary diving board, in 1948.

It was a rainy Saturday morning in Pasadena.

Backyard pool culture was all the rage in postwar southern California.

Women donned fancy bathing suits, men fired up barbecues; pitchers of martinis probably made the water more hazardous.

Rude was alone in his shop, trouble- shooting a rejected aluminum wing panel that would fasten beneath the wing of a new airplane.

He heard shouts of, "Damn the rain!" coming from the other side of the wall where Rude's wealthy landlord, Don Leslie, had a shop.

Rude walked over.

"Look at it!" Leslie said, pointing to a long piece of wood, shiny with varnish, resting on sawhorses.

It was a diving board.

Leslie had removed the cocoa matting and sanded and varnished the board, but the humidity had kept the wood moist.

Rude walked around the board.

It was 2 inches thick at the tip, 3 at the end.

He couldn't imagine it bending.

It would be like jumping off a plank.

"I'm having a party tonight," Leslie said.

He'd hired two University of Southern California divers to perform for his 100 guests.

"Can't you get another board?" Rude asked.

"It's Saturday.

I don't think I can," Leslie said.

Rude returned to his shop.

"There, in front of me," he recalled, "was the beautiful, gleaming wing panel, about the same length of Leslie's board, and even the same width within an inch or so."

Rude knew how elastic the aircraft aluminum was.

The panel was expendable, because a machinist had erred and would cut a new one.

Before long, Rude and Leslie had applied bathtub nonskid strips the length of the panel, drilled holes in the wing panel and loaded it into Leslie's truck.

On Monday, Leslie said: "Lucky for you those two kids were gymnasts."

The first college diver had nearly ended up in the shallow end of the 40- foot pool.

He wasn't used to a board with such spring.

He and his partner adjusted, and the party was a smash.

Rude started refining his invention in his spare time.

After years of toil, trial and error of meager sales, and disinterest from those who ruled diving his Duraflex was recognized as the best board by far, and his sideline replaced his aircraft subcontracting.

The rest is sports history.

Rude relocated his plant to Nevada in 1970 to escape southern California and take advantage of northern Nevada's favorable business environment.

He was a pioneering manufacturer in Storey County - a region then known for casinos, warehousing and the industry peculiar to rural Nevada - and many locals wondered what Rude's true business was.

But it really was making diving boards and stands.

In 1972, his company earned Nevada's first "E" standing for excellence in exports from the U.S.

Department o Commerce.

By this time, Duraflex was shipping to 30 nations.

Today, Duraflex International Corp.'s products are sold in more than 100 nations.

Rude's remains intensely committed to perfection and stalwart adherence to incorruptible business ethics .

He steadfastly resists pressures from Olympic hosts to make free donations of boards, and withstands foreign attempts to copy his highly developed.

Rude constantly works at improving his products, driven by his personal pursuit of perfection.

The boards, machined from aluminum extrusions, are tapered for flexibility in the back and at the tip, with an arc of deflection from the tip to the anchor bolts.

The boards maintain their strength through an integrally stiffened skin and eight ribs underneath.

Ever the patriot and loyal native son Rude yearns for U.S.

Olympic glory in diving, and has made philanthropic contributions to the U.S.

Diving Foundation He has donated equipment to the University of Nevada, Reno, in his adopted hometown.

In 1993, the state of North Dakota bestowed upon its native son its Entrepreneur of the Year award.

In spring 2002, the University of North Dakota awarded Rude an honorary doctorate.

Not bad for a guy who didn't finish the 10th grade.