The Grandfather of Snowboarding

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And if it's not worth it, it's not worth it. Yet, start an alfanta.com. Let's go back to the late 1980s. Some can use their memory, others imagination. You're on a ski trip in the Rockies.

It's a crisp sunny day. You've got a white ski bib on with neon stripes zigzagging across the breast. And neither you nor anyone else is wearing a helmet. So your hair is flapping in the wind as you make graceful, predictable turns down the mountain. After a full day of skiing, your thighs are burning, your lips are chapped.

So you reward yourself with an ice cold, coolers original and some chicken tenders. Life is good. Then, out of the corner of your eye, you notice something. It's a 16-year-old kid wearing baggy clothes. He can't hear the steely Dan playing on the patio of the restaurant,

because he's listening to earphones connected to a walkman he has stored in his Jansport backpack. Instead of ski boots, he's wearing what look like hiking boots except bulkier.

“And he's holding something, not familiar to you.”

It's not a pair of skis, but one solid board. You come to find out that what you're looking at is called a snowboarder. And over the next few years, these snowboarders multiply and numbers. There are hundreds of them, thousands. You and your alpine efficient autos are not happy.

You feel like your civilized ski town has been invaded by some vulgar cross between Jeff Spacoli and Evil Canevil. Not long after you first notice these snowboarders, your ski resort bans them from the mountain. But they keep coming. And the question on your mind and the mind of virtually every skier is, "Wherein, God's name to these people come from?"

The answer may surprise you. I'm Lloyd Lockridge. And this is family lore. You probably expect this story to begin in the mountains, somewhere in the Rockies are up in Vermont, maybe even the Alps are the Andes.

Well, it's none of the above. Instead, we're opening on the beaches of Muskegon, a small town about 40 miles northwest of Grand Rapids. In Muskegon, a few blocks from Lake Muskegon, an increasingly cramped house, lived to the pop in family.

My main growing up in Muskegon was on Beat Street, and we lived in a little cottage. I loved growing up there right on the beat. It was fun. This is Wendy Poppin, the oldest of the three poppin sisters. She's talking about her childhood in Muskegon,

“the type of childhood that's honestly kind of hard to come by in 2026.”

I think the term is unstructured. It was for me wonderful because I was free. I just had my bike and I'd ride it around and fly over to the water and play in it. And I remember in the wintertime jumping around on the icebergs.

And joining her is Julie, her little sister by 10 years. And then Julie, what's your story, Julie? Similar story. We grew up in a different time when, yeah, I mean, we really were off on our own all the time, which was so awesome.

We were really writing plays and performing them in the neighbor's garage, or we'd have skateboards or we'd tie ropes to things with wheels on them and spin them violently around. And some miracle we're even here today to tell the story to be honest. But in order to tell the story, we have to introduce Wendy and Julie's parents,

Sherman, who everyone called Sherman and his wife, Nancy. We had a pretty traditional set up, I would say. It's our dad, you know, went to work. You know, he'd put on his little wing tips and his suit and have breakfast

and my mom always there made breakfast, you know, so Sundays were always big.

We'd have, like, on the camera's burgers every Sunday. Every Sunday. Don't not sound the grill with ice cream and that. I do miss that. I miss that.

Don't wait. Don't have a fire and that's on the grill. So yeah. Like cake don't. That's really good.

All greasy. And you know, be and that's where that was the night. Like my mom, she, my mom did not drink very much, but that was her night of having maybe one or two martinis.

That was always a happy night.

But don't let these lazy Sundays of martinis and grilled donuts give you the wrong impression. Sunday may have been a day of rest for the poppins, but on the other six days, rest was hard to come by. We were very physically active family, frowned upon napping, you know, to this day.

Yeah, don't relax. Don't say just constant stuff and action and being doing things.

They swam, sailed, sled it.

And we did ski.

“I mean, I was on skis at about three years old because my dad was a big skier.”

And he realized that he couldn't just traips off. He had to take me along or my mom wouldn't be happy with him. So he drugged me around wherever he went. Now we're going to backtrack a little bit to the beginning of Julie's childhood. The very beginning, in fact.

In December of 1965, Nancy Poppin was about to give birth to Julie, who was the youngest of the three poppins sisters. The poppins were home, enjoying their Christmas break, or trying to at least. The problem was, with Nancy being so close to her due date, Sherman, Windy, and the middle sister Lori couldn't go on a ski trip

or do anything that stray too far from the house. So by the time Christmas day rolled around, the poppins were getting a little stir crazy. On top of that, Nancy was at the stage of pregnancy

where everything is uncomfortable and everybody is annoying.

And while the poppin family was growing, the poppin house was not. It was getting a little cramped, and Nancy needed some space. So Nancy ordered Sherman to get Windy and Lori out of the house. But where, too? Well, one of the closest and most accessible places to play

on a cold winter day in Muskegon, or the dunes. This may sound funny to those who aren't used to it, but in Michigan, it snows on the dunes, creating patches of rolling, snow-covered hills, and naturally you can sled down these things.

And that's exactly what Sherman Poppin decided to do with his daughters on that day. So he bundled this all up and we go outside and we got the sled and climbed up on the dunes, but there wasn't enough snow the runners of the sled went through the snow into the sand and made it pause, you know, it didn't work.

Thus far, Sherman was struggling and his efforts to entertain the girls and cute them out of the house. The tools at his disposal weren't working. So then he went into the shed and grabbed one of my skis, my little skis and tried to slide down the hill on that,

but my dad had giant feet, his feet were hanging off. And so then he got my other ski and then wedged two little pieces of wood at the tip and the tail to combine the two skis together so it was a bigger platform under his foot. I was furious.

I loved those skis more than anything. I mean, the skiing was my world at that point. And we had seeing him nail a nail into my skis, but he slid down the hill and then we saw that it was fun and started doing it too.

Instantly, the poppins felt like they had something unique. This wasn't a rope tied to a skateboard. This wasn't sledding on a trash can lid. This wasn't a jackass stunt. This was a novel piece of equipment in a new way

to go down a snowy hill.

“I remember my mom opening the back door and saying,”

"Oh, that looks fun." You should name that thing a snurfer. A snurfer. Surfing on the snow. Nancy Poppin coined the term.

And Sherman thought it had a nice ring to it. And maybe this little diversion for the kids was more than that. Had the poppins just invented something. If so, Sherman immediately saw room for improvement. And his time went on.

He got a water ski because those are wider, so then it kind of morphed into him just trying to evolve this thing. And just weeks after he and Wendy went down the hill on the snurfer, Sherman filed for a patent. The poppins were excited about their invention.

They wanted to share it with others. But Sherman couldn't make all these snurvers himself. So he partnered with a local manufacturing group. The Muskegon based runs with company, which specialized in bowling products.

But first, he would have to convince them that the product was worth making.

“And Sherman decided that a secret weapon was not the snurfer.”

It was Wendy. We're on this hill. And there's three guys and suits in my dad and me. And he had me just snurfed down the hill and then pull it up. Snurfed down the hill and pull it up.

And he kept going like this, like keep going. Keep going. And so he's talking business with these guys. And I'm going up and down, looking all happy. And like, wow, this is a miracle.

It's so fun. With Sherman's pitch and Wendy's demo, the Brunswick bowling company bought it. With Sherman's patent, they began producing and distributing snurfers. And at first, the snurfer was a popular toy around Michigan.

But before long, people all over the country were buying them. And I remember my dad, people pushing him to go further with it. And he said, "I want this to be a toy for kids that you can just pull somewhere, and you could go to the golf course and do it. You don't have to buy a lift ticket. You don't have to be rich."

It was a toy that anyone could have, almost like a buggy board. And once Snurfer's became fairly common, kids did what kids do when they have something to write on. They race. Starting in 1968, hundreds of folks would shrudge up to the top of Blockhouse Hill in Muskegon

These snurfing contests were insane. I mean, you'd start at the top of this super steep hill. There's trees on either side, and it was just straight. Whoever could still stand up at the end was the winner. So it was just balls to the wall, straight down.

And I always won, because I was good at it.

Well, she always won until she did. At one fateful snurfer competition, she got beat by this kid from Vermont named Jake. Jake's snurfer skills were impressive. But his vision for what the snurfer could become was revolutionary. We always recommend Shopify. It took us from an idea to a real business.

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So, before we get back to that pivotal snare for race, I want to wind up with some history. One of the peculiar things about this show is that the historical topics tend to be a little uncommon. But fortunately, the world is filled with talented historians. One of those historians will talk to probably wouldn't call himself one,

but he does know his history. Yeah, it means Justin Koski, I'm the executive director for the unit. It's state's ski and snowboard Hall of Fame. And believe it or not, like the pop and family, the ski and snowboard Hall of Fame is in Michigan.

It's swimming Michigan to be precise. A small town on the upper peninsula that dislocated part of the state that is, for some reason, not Wisconsin. The location of the Hall of Fame has nothing to do with Sherman Poppin, by the way.

“To my surprise, the cradle of snow sports in America is the great lake state.”

Certainly wouldn't be, and is not anybody's first guess.

The answer is pretty simple.

The ski team was started here in Ishbooming back in 1905. So up to 80 years ago, the ski team and all of its athletes lived and trained right here in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Kind of weird for us to think about that right now because, you know, you know, today you think of, you know, the mountains in Utah, but back from 1905 to 1932 Olympics, and even into World War II, ski jumping was really the only sport that we competed in in ski sport in the winter Olympics.

So up until the 30s, Alpine skiing wasn't really a thing. If you did it, you were a really hardcore. You were climbing up mountains with skis on your back, skiing down, and then climbing back up again. But then in 1936, Sun Valley Idaho installed something called a chair lift, and for all intents and purposes, recreational skiing was born.

And for the next 50 years, the only people riding on those chair lifts were skiers. So how and win to snowboarding come into the picture. And how does the snurfer fit into all of this? To answer those questions, I reached out to someone who would call herself a snowboarding historian. Professor Holly Thorpe has been researching and riding about snowboarding for 20 years.

She has published several books on the subject, including one called snowboarding, the ultimate guide. And I realized that there wasn't much research at that time on snowboarding, but I found a few articles on skateboarding culture and history of skateboarding, and I found a few articles at that time on surfing. And so I realized there were academics out there in the world who were studying these board sports,

but no one really had been looking at snowboarding yet. So Holly made snowboarding research her thing. She wound up getting a PhD, which focused on the global phenomenon of snowboarding. And she established herself as a major contributor to what we know about snowboarding history and culture. So given the story we're investigating, I asked her the obvious question.

What's the kind of the genesis of snowboarding? Where does it come from? How does it evolve? Yes, so it depends on your sources, but the sort of contemporary history of snowboarding that we currently have access to is as really dates back to Sherman Poppen in 1965 and Michigan. Well, that was fast. To be honest, I didn't expect her to go straight to the family we're talking about in this episode, but she did, and she knows the whole story.

He had a rope, this stability, and then ended up marketing the snurther across the U.S. Also the terrain belt.

“To Holly, it's the way the snurther was marketed, that dictated its destiny.”

And this was really kind of advertised in market. It was kind of like a child's toy, but a gimmick in the snow kind of like a full hope. So it was a fun kids toy as it was kind of marketed. It was marketed as a toy as opposed to a piece of outdoor sporting gear. But even in the early days, it was clear that people weren't strictly interested in using it as a toy.

They wanted to compete, and the Poppen knew that. They hosted the original competitions, and it was at those competitions that the snurther transformed.

That brings us back to that fateful competition in 1979, when Windy Poppen lost her first snurther race.

Jake from Vermont had showed up to be speaking for the race a year earlier, and came in second place. He was good, but Windy was better. But in 1979, he returned with an edge. He'd made a modification to his snurther. Windy Poppen remembers it well.

“I remember he came back the next year with a board that had bindings on it, and it was a big deal.”

They didn't want him to compete. It wasn't a snurther and blah, blah, blah. And my dad said, "No, this is great. It's cool that he did this. It's cool that he pushed it further."

I mean, it was a better board for the snow.

You could tell he put a lot of thought into how it would go along the ground. And yeah, he beat me that year. Sherman Poppen respected Jake's ingenuity. To him, this is what it was all about. Tinkering with stuff, making it better, making it more fun.

But Jake had business ambitions as well. Jake wanted to take his modified board and sell it back in Vermont. And he wanted to use the name Snurther. And my dad said, "Sure, I'll sell that to you, but I want royalties for everything that you make." And Jake said, "No, I'm not doing that."

So not wanting to pay royalties. Jake tweaked the product and essentially created a different product. And for that different product, he came up with a new name, the Snowboard. So then he named it Snowboard, which today, if my dad would have said, "Yes, it'd be snurfing." Snowboarding wouldn't even be a word.

He did regret that one. The reason Sherman Poppen regretted that one is because Jake's full name was Jake Burton Carpenter, founder and namesake of Burton Snowboards. If you're into Snowboarding, Jake Burton Carpenter, known to most as Jake Burton, needs no introduction. But for those who aren't, this guy is front and center on the Sports Mount Rushmore. ski mountains from steamboat to Japan are teeming with Burton Snowboards.

A company that was recently rumored to be worth $800 million. This missed opportunity for Sherman Poppen might make you crazy. It might seem like the one that got away. But his daughters don't see it like that.

He always said, "I mean, he made some money on this, but not a lot."

And that wasn't really the motivation. And he didn't really have aspirations to take it further or make it his life's work. I mean, he had his job with like welding, supply.

“And so I think he had a certain point like just watched what happened and enjoyed it.”

But the early days of Snowboarding weren't that enjoyable. By inventing the snurfer, Sherman Poppen set off a chain reaction that would lead to one of the deepest riffs in sporting history. I want to take you back to the period of time following Jake Burton's appearances at the snurfer competition. Jake was from Vermont, he wrote a snurfer, he loved it.

But he had bigger ambitions, the Snowboard. He wanted to make a board that you could take to traditional ski resorts, something more than a toy. But that was his dream. But for skiers, there was a nightmare. Well, I mean, they were looked at as a nuisance right away. They were looked at as intrusive, you know, they were just different.

Like anything different is often met with, you know, some sort of resistance, some sort of, you know, will pump the brakes here what's going on. This is Justin Koski again. As director of the skiing Snowboarding Hall of Fame, Justin is well acquainted with the long standing tension between skiers and snowboarders. It's an issue the sport has been dealing with since day one.

You know, snowboarders getting kicked off the slopes, skiers reporting that they were out there. People from the mountain coming and walking, people with their snowboards back to the parking lot. People, you know, climbing up the backside of the mountain and trying to get runs in because they knew snowboarding wasn't allowed at that particular resort. What is it about snowboarding that caused the controversy among sort of establishment skiers or all skiers?

Some skiers initially thought that the snowboards, you know, were pushing all the snow off the slopes.

They, you know, weren't making carve turns. You know, so it wasn't good for the natural conditions. You know, getting on and off lifts, them sitting at the top of the hill strapping their boards on being in precarious places. I mean, there's a ton of things that still remain. You know, you still hear skiers, you know, bitching and complaining.

“So, you know, it's a different perspective that I think people had that made it really hard there at the beginning.”

But when it comes to the riff between skiers and snowboarders, it wasn't just that they were in the way. There was an apparent tension around values. Pioneers of the sport like Jake Burton in a guy named Tom Sims were cultivating a style that offended skiers. Professor Holly Thorpe has done copious amounts of research into this aspect of snowboarding. Many of them drew upon kind of the ethos and the values and surfing and skateboarding and youth culture rather than say more than more traditional discipline controlled approach that might have been seen and skiing at the time.

Many skiers were shocked and outraged because it was a whole different vibe. And I think vibe is the right word here because it wasn't just their approach, it was their aesthetic. Snowboarders bothered skiers with their baggy clothes and reputation for smoking pot. They were derided as knuckle draggers. Undisciplined the slack-jawed bombs debasing the exalted art of skiing.

A proprietor of a small ski mountain was quoted saying, "It's an attitude thing. It's very easy to delineate them from skiers. They look like hobos." There was just a huge cultural divide between skiers and snowboarders and skiers were upset.

“They didn't want to share this load, so it's snowboarders. These young punks, you know, that's how they were perceived.”

They were disrupting their leisure time, so there were confrontations. There were stories of fights between skiers and snowboarders and it was, yeah, there were some clashes, some cultural clashes for sure. The clashes were intense, and many people thought something needed to be done. But you can't just kick somebody out because you don't like their style. You have to have a reason. Well, in 1990, a woman was skiing in Vale when a snowboarder collided with her.

The collision wrecked her knee, and she had to get reconstructive surgery. It was an accident, of course. But one which the victim felt was entirely avoidable. She decided to soon not only to snowboarder, but Vale itself. She argued that Vale bore responsibility for her injury by allowing the snowboarder to use the same runs as her. The lawsuit and others like it freaked out ski mountain ownership.

“And by the early 1990s, after years of poor treatment, snowboarders were made officially unwelcome.”

So, snowboarders were banned from ski resorts, and the snowboarders disrupted all of what they thought they were doing on the mountains.

And they also sometimes didn't feel safe because snowboarders were not always in full control in those early days,

or they were interpreting the slopes in really different ways. Unfortunately for skiers, banning snowboarders portraying them as bad boys, persona non-grata. It all played right into the identity that had coalesced around snowboarding. They took pride in being punks, rebels. They wanted to be unwanted. If skiing was stealing Dan, snowboarding was sublime,

it spoke directly and provocatively to kids, often to the shagrant of their parents. The ski establishment had essentially slapped a parental advisory sticker on all snowboards, and when you're a teenager in the '90s, there is simply nothing more badass than a parental advisory sticker. So, we saw a huge boom, and the '90s of people choosing particularly young people going to the mountains and wanting to snowboard. Young people who might not have ever been interested in the whole style of skiing, but snowboarding attracted them.

It was cool, right? And the '90s snowboarding was very cool, and the people who did it and were most visible were cool. In that cool factor that permeated snowboarding culture in the '90s, shattered whatever feeble barriers had been erected by the ski resort establishment. And that combined with the tireless efforts of snowboarding pioneers like Jake Burton and Tom Sims made snowboarding impossible to destroy or ignore. From 1990 to 1994, despite the bands, the snowboarding population doubled.

In that same period, the ski population declined by a million people.

In 55% of snowboarders were too young to vote. From an economic standpoint, there was no future without them. In a 1995, the sport would have its event horizon, its point of no return.

In the announcement, snowboarding is described as a hybrid sport that combines elements of surfing and skiing.

You can almost call it snurfing.

“And after acceptance into the Olympics, the domino is quickly fell, and snowboarding carved its way into the mainstream.”

Ironically, one of the last major snow sports figures to convert was none other than Sherman Poppin. He learned to snowboard in his '60s, and then he got super into it, and you know, that's all he did for years and years until he couldn't do it anymore. But he absolutely loved it. He was a lifelong skier, but he said snowboarding, there was nothing like it, even after a few fractured ribs. Windy and Julie Poppin, however, if they're not snurfing, they're skiing. We took up telemark skiing, and then Julie now is back on Alpine, so there's still time for me to pick up snowboarding.

Yeah, you can do it in your '60s. But they're big admirers of snowboarders, which can't be said for everyone. Even today, there are three mountains in the United States that still don't allow snowboarders. Dear valley in Utah, Alta, also in Utah, and Mad River Glen in Vermont. The number of mountains that do allow snowboarders, somewhere around 450.

Back in 2001, Aspen's most famous mountain, Ajax, finally gave in and opened its doors to snowboarders.

A skier who was interviewed for New York Times article lamented, "It stinks, but I haven't decided to sell my house yet." I looked this guy up, by the way, and he still owns his house in Aspen. At 80 years old, he became the oldest person to receive recognition from the Aspen skiing company for putting in at least 100 days on the slopes in one ski season. So, it seems like everybody eventually figured out how to co-exist on the slopes, except for those three mountains, of course. But maybe snowboarding could use a few more bands, because when you've got a counterculture brand, going mainstream has consequences.

“Did snowboarding retain its culture? If rebellion is kind of integral to snowboarding culture, then does acceptance undermine the identity snowboarding?”

Yes, so interesting. I mean, snowboarding is not growing anymore, right? It kind of peaked around 2019, 2011. I would suggest, and my research around snowboarding's inclusion in the Olympics, is that, as it's become more mainstream, you know, over a couple of decades, it's lost some of that cool factor. I know people are going to hate me for saying that. I mean, it's still incredibly joyous activity, but in terms of that growth, it's definitely plateaued. And a lot of people now turn to skiing, kids go, and they don't want to do what their parents are doing, their parents are snowboarding, and now the kids want to freestyle ski, because that's just as much or more fun.

And I guess that's just the way the world works. It's the natural life cycle of a trend, destined to have a resurgence with the next generation.

But no matter what sort of place to snowboard occupies in the cultural zeitgeist, its origins will always be the same.

It's been 60 years since the poppin's snurfed for the first time on Christmas Day. Because Sherman Poppin invented the predecessor to the snowboard, and is therefore one generation removed, he is known as the grandfather of snowboarding, as opposed to the father. And in 2019, it was announced that Sherman would be inducted to the ski in snowboarding Hall of Fame. Sadly, Sherman Poppin passed away prior to the induction ceremony. He was inducted after he had passed away, which was a shame. That was too bad, but I also don't think, I don't know, I never got the feeling like he was necessarily upset or anything that he wasn't being recognized in some formal way,

because the people in the snowboarding community, they knew about the snurfer, and they knew his story, and they included him in things, and he loved doing all that. I don't think he necessarily was like, oh, you know. But while Sherman's snowboarding status might not have been important to him. It was important to others. I asked our friend Justin Koski, director of the ski in snowboarding Hall of Fame, how Sherman is thought of among the more contemporary grades. And he brought up an Olympic gold medal winning snowboarder named Seth Westcott.

Westcott was in the same Hall of Fame induction class as Sherman.

“It really blew me away when I was talking to Seth, you know, who's this badass Olympic athlete, you know, younger guy, and when I told him Sherman Poppin was in his class, he was like, what? He's like, are you fucking serious right now?”

He's like, I'm being inducted alongside Sherman Poppin, and I'm like, yeah, dude, he's like dude, he's like, that's crazy. He's like, where I told him it was Bretton Woods, and he's from Maine. He's like, oh, get out of here. I'm like, yeah, the sisters are going to be there. He's like, can they bring some boards? So we all snurfed Bretton Woods dude, it was hilarious.

We're all trying them out. The sisters are there. They're going on their ass. The snurfers are flying down into the net at the bottom of the hill.

“But, you know, that's a testament of how important the guy was.”

So our story ends right where it began, snurfing down a hill with the poppin sisters. And I'm glad that it does. I'm glad that at the end of all the culture clashing the bitter divisions, the bands, bruises, and runaway boards, we have a group of adults, including Olympic athletes, playing on a hill.

While the snurfer changed into something else, and while Sherman Poppin is gone, and while skiers and snowboarders continue to feud,

in this moment, all is transcended by the original point of this thing. You know, it was sadly many of us forget to play and getting on to the mountain and snowboarding. Can and does evoke the joy of play and creativity, and obviously you've got gravity, and you've got speed, and you've got buzz, and you've got stoke associated with all of that, which makes you feel alive. I see people up on the mountains, you know, who are 60s, 70s, 80s, and they have huge smiles on their faces,

and it is joy and it is stoke, and it keeps you young at heart.

“That does take us back to Sherman Poppin, and the essence of this snurfer, I think that is still very much alive.”

As always, thank you for listening to Family Lore.

[Music] If you have stories you'd like to share about your family, please email me at [email protected]. That's Family Lore, [email protected]. Family Lore is an Odyssey Original Podcast.

“It is written and narrated by me, Lloyd Lockridge.”

Our executive producers are Leah Reese Dennis and I. Our lead producer and sound editor is Zach Clark. Our story editors are Maddie Sprung Kaiser and Katie Mingle. Additional sound editing mixing and mastering by Chris Basel, and production support by Sean Cherry. Special thanks to more occurring Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hillary Schuff, and Laura Barman.

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