According to an article from The Minot Daily News published Dec. 17, 2004, Rude was the son of Blaisdell grocers, and left North Dakota for California as a teenager. It was while working as a tool engineer for aircraft company Lockheed in 1948 that Rude stumbled upon his claim to fame, when he invented an aluminum diving board from a discarded airplane wing panel.

Rude perfected the design of his diving board, dubbed the Duraflex diving board, which would go on to achieve prominence at Olympic diving events beginning in the 1960s. Rude’s creation became ubiquitous at major international diving meets and as well as a common addition to most universities and high schools.

Rude was president of Arcadia Air Products Co. near Reno, Nevada, which is now known as Duraflex International. Rude was named to the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1992, and was named North Dakota Entrepreneur of the Year in 1993.

While his creation and business interests took him around the world for many Olympic and diving competitions, he eventually moved to Stanley in the fall of 2002. Rude became a generous benefactor in the Stanley community and beyond after returning, giving an estimated $10 million to various projects including: $2 million for an indoor aquatics center in Stanley named after his wife Ina Mae, and $1 million to support the construction of the Mountrail County Medical Center.

The old Ray Rude Public Pool, named after the Duraflex diving board inventor, provided countless hours of fun for Stanley residents for sixty years.

Rude donated a diving board to the outdoor pool in Stanley, which was named after him, but the name of the new facility constructed in 2023 and opened to the public in the summer of 2024 is still being determined. The new pool replaced the 60-year-old former facility which bore Rude’s name, and offers a splash pad in addition to a vortex slide.

Before his death at the age of 88 in 2004, Rude made additional donations to a myriad of projects in the region, including an arts center in Stanley, a Parshall dairy, as well as scholarships and technology updates at the Stanley school.

Whether it was by visiting the aquatics center or checking in at the school, those quoted in the Dec. 17, 2004, article in Tthe Minot Daily News recalled Rude enjoyed seeing the community appreciating and using the fruits of his donations. Stanley attorney Wade Enget said Rude’s generosity stemmed from the connection he felt to the community, and his own appreciation for how the community helped develop his character as a youth. Enget related in the article a visit Rude made to the school to observe the fifth grade students at the time demonstrate their skills creating PowerPoint presentations on the laptops he paid for.

“He was just beaming from ear to ear,” Enget said. “He said that just made his day that day, just to see how it was enhancing their learning.”