Gunnar Guddal invented "survival suit"

One by one, the fishermen came to say their few words of thanks.

The way they saw it, Gunnar Guddal had saved their lives. Without the bright orange "survival suit" he had invented, the ice-cold water would have killed them.

Mr. Guddal would sit with the men in his Ballard home, listening to their stories, a smile spreading across his face.

"He'd get all excited," recalled Elsie Guddal, his wife of 47 years. "He was proud of himself."

Mr. Guddal, the inventor, family man, world traveler and storyteller, lived long enough to see the Coast Guard in 1991 make his survival suit, or immersion suit, mandatory for all fishing vessels.

He died Thursday (May 11) of congestive heart failure. He also had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He was 77.

The son of Norwegian farmers, Mr. Guddal came to the United States with his brother when he was 26. He worked as a farmhand in North Dakota and fought forest fires in Alaska before settling in Seattle and starting a business importing marine electronics and fishing gear.

He met his wife at a dance at the Norselander restaurant in Ballard. Elsie Guddal, a nurse, saw the sweetness in him right away.

Together they built the business, eventually called Imperial International. He tinkered around with inventing, testing materials in ice-cold conditions to see whether they would crack.

"I'd open the freezer and think: 'What's this?' " recalled his daughter, Kari Guddal, 44, who is now the president of the company.

He developed his thermal suit in the late 1960s, his work inspired by the death of his grandfather, a fisherman, at sea.

As a child, Kari Guddal modeled the suit at trade shows, floating in a wading pool. Mr. Guddal would give the suits to fishermen to try out. At one point, she said, the suits saved several crab fishermen from hypothermia.

That should have been the turning point, said Tom Reed, a department manager at Seattle Marine and Fishing Supply in Seattle. But some fishermen still believed that it would be better to die quickly from hypothermia than spend days in the water waiting for help and starving.

"Old dogs and new tricks is what that was mostly about," Reed said.

The fishing industry finally came around in the early '80s, when the Coast Guard approved the suit, Reed said. Other manufacturers make them now, but it was Mr. Guddal's model, Reed said, that "revolutionized" the fishing industry.

When he was not working, Mr. Guddal told tales from his childhood in Norway, and from his travels around the world. His granddaughter, Sydney Record, now 19, said she learned something basic from him: how life should be lived.

"It's one of my pet peeves, when people say, 'I can't,' " Record said. "Look at what he did."

Other survivors include his brothers Torgeir "Ted" Guddal of Camano Island and Hans Guddal of Norway; and a sister, Marta Daniell of Moses Lake.

A memorial service is set for 11 a.m. Thursday at Our Redeemer's Lutheran Church, 2400 N.W. 85th St. in Ballard. Donations may be made to the Seattle Fishermen's Memorial, P.O. Box 17356, Seattle, 98127 or to the Alzheimer's Association at 12721 30th Ave. N.E., Suite 101, Seattle, WA 98125-4312.