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The guy who invented the Snurfer and had Jake Burton Carpenter later develop a better one, has died.
Rocky Mountain News
From NY Times:
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It was Christmas Day 1965, and he was at home in Muskegon when his pregnant wife, Nancy, implored him to go outside and entertain their rambunctious daughters, Wendy, 10, and Laurie, 5.
“You can imagine — it’s Christmas, and my wife is pretty uptight, and she said, ‘Sherman, you’ve got to take these kids out of the house,’ ” he recalled in 2009 in an interview with Steamboat Pilot & Today, a newspaper in Steamboat Springs, Col. “And we were having a huge snowstorm on the shores of Lake Michigan.”
He first took out a sled, but its blades cut through the snow and got stuck in the sand beneath.
Then he spotted Wendy’s child-size skis. Envisioning the dunes as surfable waves, he created a surfable board by bracing the skis with wooden cross bars.
His daughters caught on quickly, and soon so did their friends, who wanted to try it themselves. His wife — who gave birth to a third daughter, Julie, three days after Christmas — thought up a name for the board: the Snurfer, a contraction of “snow” and “surfer.”
...
The enthusiastic reception the board received prompted him to make improvements. He made a second version from a single water ski that had foot grips, then added a tether to the nose of the board to help the rider steer it.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/sports/sherm-poppen-dead.html
Rocky Mountain News
From NY Times:
—————-
It was Christmas Day 1965, and he was at home in Muskegon when his pregnant wife, Nancy, implored him to go outside and entertain their rambunctious daughters, Wendy, 10, and Laurie, 5.
“You can imagine — it’s Christmas, and my wife is pretty uptight, and she said, ‘Sherman, you’ve got to take these kids out of the house,’ ” he recalled in 2009 in an interview with Steamboat Pilot & Today, a newspaper in Steamboat Springs, Col. “And we were having a huge snowstorm on the shores of Lake Michigan.”
He first took out a sled, but its blades cut through the snow and got stuck in the sand beneath.
Then he spotted Wendy’s child-size skis. Envisioning the dunes as surfable waves, he created a surfable board by bracing the skis with wooden cross bars.
His daughters caught on quickly, and soon so did their friends, who wanted to try it themselves. His wife — who gave birth to a third daughter, Julie, three days after Christmas — thought up a name for the board: the Snurfer, a contraction of “snow” and “surfer.”
...
The enthusiastic reception the board received prompted him to make improvements. He made a second version from a single water ski that had foot grips, then added a tether to the nose of the board to help the rider steer it.
—————-
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/sports/sherm-poppen-dead.html
) I remember building a ramp and jumping off it (probably 2 feet of air LOL) and in a ice storm ended up getting knocked out on a bad landing. My mom took my surfers away. I still want one to hang on a wall. For some reason I have a deep love for that thing. Sherman lived here in steamboat for some time. 