In a few months, Jetty will be eyeballing the 25-year mark – a vision launched on an East Coast snowboard trip that came to life in a hot garage between surf sessions and bartending shifts. There was no blueprint for a surf brand to come out of New Jersey where generations of folks over many decades embodied our Draw Your Own Line ethos.
The Napoliello family (Napp for short) are a fantastic example. As the original founders, builders, and owners of Raceway Park in Englishtown, they created a New Jersey landmark and used it as a means for their other passions. Jetty Ambassador Rick Napoliello III was born into this life. We thought that Father’s Day was a great opportunity to tell this story.
His great grandfather had one of the first homes in South Bay Head. His grandfather and great uncles their first business, The Napp-Grecco Company, which is still owned and operated by other members of the family to this day, laid much of the gas pipelines in North Jersey in the 1940s. His grandfather and great uncle were passionate boaters and gearheads who built the racetrack and brought drag racing from California to New Jersey. His father, Richie, was born into the family of racing, events, construction, and boats. The family also had an incredible knack for documenting everything on photo and video.
Richie Napp was only 16 years old when his family hosted the Marshall Tucker Band, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and the Grateful Dead for what has become a legendary festival with some estimated 150,000 attendants at the track. He recalls the impact of mingling with the historic jam bands at such a young age.
The family had several seacraft – the Sisbro, the Snapper, the Napp Time, and Lil’ Satan. The stories tell like folklore – boat trips down to Florida, solo striper missions, spectacular crashes, and showing up the yacht club types.
Richie would also follow a new passion when he found a used surfboard with a broken nose at a yard sale at the age of 12 in 1973. He, his brothers, and cousins dubbed it “the toenail” and learned to surf it in Bay Head. He ran and worked the food concession at the park to fund boards and trips.
“Everything was earned, not given,” he recalls.
Richie would run his own events at the racetrack in the summer, including stand up jet ski races in the lake, dug by his grandfather to land his seaplane in for his commute from Bay Head. He traveled to Acapulco to surf in the winter. He knew how to pull, catch, and release fish from every lake pond in Colt’s Neck. He took photos. He crafted his own boats and fished for striped bass in the fall. He built his own cars and wrote a movie. He raised his own children to follow their passions.
“I always thought that New Jersey and California had a cool connection. I could see it in drag racing and surfing. That was the epicenter, but we could do these things here, in our own way,” he explains.
All of this – the surfing, creativity, fishing, love of the ocean, and passing it down sounds so similar to what Jetty is built on. He embodied Draw Your Own Line the way that Rick Jr. does today.
“Recently celebrating 50 years of surfing, I’ve come to learn he can predict waves better than Surfline, be my spotter when I’m out in the water, and he is an excellent surf photographer. A natural born fisherman, he has stories of hooking up three or four stripers at the same time on wire, by himself, and landing them all. I’ve personally seen him catch a 40 incher in minutes off the beach in early summer with an old pole, borrowed bare leader, and a freshly dug sand crab, all while handfuls of fisherman with the latest fancy gear and lures looked on, skunked, with amazement. In that same spirit as Jetty, his roots are in New Jersey, and the two major facets of his life, the beach and the racetrack, have shaped him into quite literally one of the most interesting people I know,” says Rick.
Rick’s best friend since he was 15, Justin Mulroy of Sea Girt, is making a documentary on their collaboration building a fiberglass 1932 Ford Roadster completely from scratch and the passing on of the families most prized possession, Rick’s grandfather’s first car. That car got Rick into drag racing and is one of the reasons that Raceway Park exists. The heavily customized 1955 Ford Thunderbird powered by a 400 cubic inch Pontiac racing engine makes for an emotional moment for both of them. Justin is using the family’s decades of archival footage.
“The primary thing I learned from my parents,” said Richie, “that I wanted to pass onto my own children, was the importance of being a good person.”
