Why snowboarders owe a debt to Sherman Poppen – and his Snurfing daughter Wendy

Christmas morning 1965 was hard work for Sherman and Nancy Poppen of Muskegon, Michigan. Nancy was due to give birth to their third child in a matter of days and was feeling unwell, and as a snowstorm raged outside their two daughters, Wendy, 10, and Laurie, five, were, as Laurie later described it, “bouncing off the walls.” Having been instructed by his wife to get the girls out of the house and into the snow, Poppen first tried to get them sledging, but the layer of snow on the sand dunes near their home was too thin and their sledge didn’t work as the runners kept sinking into the sand. Then he had an idea. Taking a pair of Wendy’s skis, he nailed them together using small wooded battens at the tips and the tails, creating a single board that could be ridden sideways like a surfboard and could float over the surface of the snow. It worked. “We just went crazy,” Wendy recalled in a recent interview. “We were taking turns sliding, laughing.”