The inventor who wanted people to go ‘snurfing’

Sherm Poppen didn’t set out to invent a new sport—he simply wanted to give his pregnant wife some peace and quiet. It was Christmas 1965 and a huge snowstorm had enveloped his family home on the shores of Lake Michigan. To entertain his two energetic daughters, Wendy, 10, and Laurie, 5, Poppen pulled out a sled, but its blades sliced through the fresh snow and got stuck in the sand dune below. Wondering if it would be possible to surf the dune like a wave, Poppen braced a pair of child-size skis together with wooden crossbars, creating the predecessor of the modern snowboard. Poppen’s kids and their friends in Muskegon, Mich., loved his creation— which his wife named the Snurfer—and he got to work making it into a commercial product. “I spent the next week in Goodwill and everywhere else,” he said, “buying up every water ski I could find.” When he wasn’t at his day job at a welding supply firm, which he came to own, Poppen was busy tinkering with Snurfer prototypes. After a patent for his invention was granted in 1968, said The New York Times, Poppen licensed the manufacturing rights to the Brunswick Corp., a bowling equipment maker that was expanding into consumer products. “By Christmas, Brunswick was selling Snurfers made of the same laminated wood it used for bowling alleys.” But the firm’s marketing campaign—“Snurf’s the word!”—“was such a failure it inspired a Harvard Business School case study,” said The Washington Post. Sales only took off after the firm was licensed in 1973 to JEM Corp., which promoted it to young adults with an annual Snurfing championship.

In 1979, a teenager turned up at the contest with a board that looked like a Snurfer with foot bindings, said NPR.org. That teenager was Jake Burton Carpenter, and he used his tricked-out creation to found Burton Snowboards, “now one of the biggest snowboarding companies in the world.” Poppen never got rich from his invention, but didn’t begrudge Burton his success. “He saw a future that frankly I dreamed about but didn’t think was possible,” said Poppen. He had only one regret: that he’d turned down Burton’s offer to buy the rights to the name Snurfer. “If he had sold it,” said daughter Wendy, “now it would be called snurfing, not snowboarding.”

Born in Casablanca, Belolo began his career as a club

DJ, playing local records “alongside American party tracks,” said The Guardian (U.K.). After a stint producing pop albums in France, he headed to the U.S. in 1973 and founded a record label with Morali, a fellow FrenchMoroccan. The pair’s first success was the Ritchie Family, an all-female disco act that had a hit with 1975’s “Brazil.”

Next came the Village People, a worldwide sensation that sold 65 million records. Eager to capitalize on the group’s popularity, the U.S. Navy “even laid on warships and aircraft” for the music video for “In the Navy” (1979), said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The hits dried up in the early 1980s with disco’s decline, but Belolo remained fiercely proud of the Village People. It’s part “of American heritage,” he said. “And people are often surprised to discover that two French guys were behind it.”