In Their Wake -- Sixty Years Ago, Some Seattle Snow Skiers Decided To Jump In The Lake

IT IS A BRIGHT SPRING day at Campbell Lake near Anacortes. Several bald eagles in search of a meal gently soar above the calm waters. At the edge of the small lake just north of Deception Pass and Whidbey Island, Dr. Lew West grunts and puffs like a locomotive pulling out of the station. The source of his discomfort is a $500 water ski.

He can't slide his foot into the rubber bootie firmly attached to space-age materials.

"Sometimes, you need a little of this," he says, grabbing a bottle of biodegradable soap and shooting a few squirts into the bootie.

The fit is impossibly tight. Four notches on a ski boot. A cork in a bottle. But the foot goes in, the soap quickly dissolving in Campbell Lake.

Zipping the sleeveless black neoprene wetsuit takes longer.

Don G. Ibsen patiently waits at the wheel of his 140-horsepower Sea Ray speed boat.

"Hit it," West finally yells.

Ibsen gently pushes the throttle and the boat lunges forward, pulling the 75-foot polypropylene rope with West at the other end. West rolls back and forth until the rope tightens. Then, he pops out of the water, kicks off one ski and begins to skim across the boat's wake on a single board.

A breathing pendulum without a worry in the world.

His titanium-and-steel hip replacement and the cane he sometimes uses for support are forgotten when West takes to the water. Despite his aging body - he is about to turn 75 and another hip replacement is due soon - West has all the exuberance of a teenager who has just gotten his driver's license.

Water skiing was still in its infancy when West strapped on his first pair of skis - rough cedar boards with black canvas tennis shoes nailed on top - and went out for a spin on Lake Washington.

West never came back from that ride.

WEST WAS HOOKED for life by a sport that owes its roots to Lake Washington as much as snowboarding owes its young past to Mount Baker.

And West wasn't alone. The 1940s and '50s were the golden years of water skiing in the Northwest, when a few men and women skied in wild abandon and everybody else watched from the shoreline.

"Bill, Bill, is that you?" Jannette Johnson shouts at Bill Schumacher while pointing at a video screen. Schumacher isn't paying attention to the home movie. He is listening to West's exaggerated water ski stories.

"I could ski behind a B-29 with my eyes closed!"

"Sure, Lew. Whatever you say."

All three stand in the middle of a small room in the Clise Mansion Museum in Marymoor Park. The walls are covered with ski memorabilia. A rope hangs from a pair of nails. The word "hemp" on the explanatory note has been scratched out and replaced with "manila rope." There's a picture of several women water skiing in Seattle's Memorial Stadium during the opening ceremonies of the 1962 World's Fair.

The photos, letters, video clips and skis on display are part of a summer exhibit that celebrates more than 60 years of water skiing history in the Northwest.

Schumacher stops listening to West and turns around just in time to see a tall, barrel-chested man shooting across the small and silent TV screen. The man's legs are slightly bent at the knees. The back straight as a two-by-four. Underneath him, the skis trudge heavily through the water. Up above, a man stands on his shoulders. And above him, a woman completes the human tower.

Schumacher watches his former self in silence. He stoops slightly forward, closer to the screen, closer to his youth. His 82-year-old legs are supported by steel knees, the original hardware damaged by years of wear and tear.

His friends call him Baker Bill. He has baked for a living nearly his entire life. His giant cinnamon rolls are gone as soon as they come out of the oven of a Magnolia neighborhood bakery.

"You were a pretty good skier," Johnson tells him. Schumacher's wrinkles fade into a smile. A hot-dog smile that simply says, "I was pretty good."

That's not to say Johnson was a slouch.

She learned to ski on water in less than 10 minutes, or so the story goes. But what would you expect from a member of the 1952 U.S. Olympic snow team?

Snow. Water. Heck, the only difference is a few degrees. Lean back instead of forward. A 180-degree turn is no big deal. One lesson later, Johnson is skiing backward, a natural, a ballerina on water.

Her friends were impressed, until they discovered it didn't matter which way she was facing. Johnson couldn't see beyond her nose without her glasses. Once, she mistook a sailing boat for a jumping ramp. A quick stop by her boat driver kept her from becoming bug juice on a windshield.

If Baker Bill was Superman and Johnson a ballerina, Lew West was the stylist, the entertainer who never shied away from a stunt if it got a good laugh. Sometimes he dressed in baggy women's clothes. He loved faking falls, tripping on the jump ramp or running on it after kicking the skis off.

The true showman was Don Ibsen, one of the inventors of water skiing and most enduring promoters of the sport. His infectious zest for life entangled those around him. No sense fighting it. With Ibsen, you were going to have fun.

No one was surprised when Ibsen tried to "ski" on water that summer of 1928. Seattle was maturing as a city and no one suspected the Depression was just around the corner. Ibsen and his friends worked enough to pay the bills and go snow skiing. His friends figured it was just Ibsen goofing off when he took his snow skis to Lake Washington.

The skis sunk faster than the I-90 bridge. Ibsen tried other things until he settled on a pair of cedar boards seven feet in length. He steamed and wrapped the tips around a telephone pole to give them the needed curvature.

The next day, he owned the first pair of water skis made in the Northwest. Millions more would follow.

Ibsen thought he invented water skiing. It didn't ruin his fun in later years when he discovered that a Minnesota kid named Ralph W. Samuelson beat him by six years.

But Samuelson didn't bother to teach anyone.

Ibsen started a ski school. And there was no shortage of students. Rugged Northwesterners were ready to give anything a spin, as long as it was fun and fast and risky.

Ibsen became a shameless promoter of the sport. He appeared in countless newspaper and magazine photos. In 1957, he made it onto the pages of Life magazine. He skied the Chicago River in suit and tie. He wore a tux in California during a mock wedding.

He helped start a ski club on Lake Washington in 1941. The $5 initiation fee and $3 in annual dues allowed members to use the club's floating dock and boat.

Dudley Davidson was among the first to join the Olympic Water Ski Club. It was a chance to hang out with his friends and meet some of the women in the skimpy swimsuits. "We got into water skiing at the right time," Davidson, now 76, remembers fondly. "That's when women started wearing the two-piece suits."

He quickly became known as the "Bucket" because his boxer trunks would fill up with water and he would sink - well, like a bucket - every time he fell off his skis.

Not that it was easy to hurt the man's pride. The Bucket was a hardy snow skier. Three-hour hikes up the Cascades through knee-deep snow for a 15-minute joy ride on the way down didn't faze him.

But even the Bucket had to rest. Water skiing seemed so relaxing. Grab a beer and sit by the shoreline waiting to catch a ride. It is no surprise that most pioneer water skiers were snow skiers first.

Ibsen, Baker Bill, the Bucket, Johnson and others quickly got tired of just going around the lake. They started an aquatic team that entertained crowds throughout the West Coast for several years. One of their favorite venues was Anacortes, where the 50-degree water of Puget Sound was an incentive to stay on the skis. Johnson always landed on her behind on the pier after a performance.

When they were not showing off, they were racing. And did it ever bother the lake protectionists. The boats made too much noise, the skiers disturbed wildlife and their wakes eroded fragile shoreline, they said.

Green Lake, which hosted a national water ski tournament in 1972, pulled the welcome mat first. The annual Sammamish Slough water ski race followed.

The narrow slough between Lake Sammamish and Lake Washington was a treacherous body of water. Logs, rocks and other obstacles hid under the surface.

Baker Bill managed to miss the rocks and won five of the 14 races he entered. Johnson is pretty sure she won at least one. West doesn't want to remember how he fared.

"Sometimes, when you really think about it, it is amazing no one got killed," reminisced West, who entered the race several times and took a few tumbles along the way. His boat driver once rode two miles up the slough before noticing West was gone, floating away after taking a spill on another skier's wake.

LAST JANUARY, MORE than six decades after Ibsen made his first pair of skis, O'Brien International held a ceremony at its Redmond plant to mark the manufacture of its 1,000,000th water ski.

The ski symbolized the strength of the water ski industry in the Seattle area. O'Brien and HO in Redmond, Connelly Skis in Lynnwood and several small local manufacturers produce 80 percent of the skis sold around the world.

Ibsen started selling skis for about $35 to the public in 1934 under his name and kept at it until the mid-1970s. He never became a ski mogul. He might have been a great showman, but even his family admits he wasn't much of a businessman. It just wasn't in his blood.

The credit for catapulting the Puget Sound water ski industry to world dominance fell on another unpretentious man: Wally Burr. The grandfather of ski makers. Burr was a master craftsman. Witty. A perfectionist. His modest shop in the basement of his Seattle home didn't impress anybody. But his mahogany and teak skis were something else. To own a Wally Burr ski was to own an Austin-Healey. A Maserati.

He wasn't a typical businessman. Volume and growth were unspoken words. There were no company secrets and everyone knew he didn't care much for money. He started making skis only because his daughter Jannette Johnson got interested in the sport.

His shop was a school without doors. Many of the Northwesterners who started manufacturing skis learned from him. The aerospace industry also helped. The technology and materials that were pioneered by Boeing were applied directly to the Seattle ski industry.

Burr joined Ibsen in the Water Ski Hall of Fame in Cypress Garden, Fla., for his contributions to the sport. He died of pneumonia in May 1986 at age 92.

By then, wood skis had disappeared from the market, replaced by Kevlar, graphite and other plastics. Most of the old timers had given up the sport.

IF YOU ARE LOOKING for the best skiers, you won't find them in Lake Washington or Lake Sammamish anymore. The waters are too choppy, the boats and jet skis too many to count.

Yet locally, the sport remains as popular as ever. At last count, there were 14 million water skiers in this country. Most of them are concentrated in Florida, Texas and Washington, where there's a tournament every weekend during the summer.

So, where are they?

Water skiing has quietly slipped out of view. Many skiers have retreated to private lakes. Twenty-five man-made lakes - for water skiing only - have been built in Washington.

Skiers like Erik Kosney, 21, need quiet water to practice. And there's no better place than his father's lake, only five miles south of the Canadian border.

Kosney is a native Northwesterner but his deep Florida tan betrays his winter home. He took time off from the University of Washington and joined the pro tour last year. He lives in Edmonds, but drives to a friend's lake in Olympia or north to practice.

Interest in water skiing is flourishing, he says, and so is the money. The pros are amazing skiers, the tricks exciting to watch.

ESPN, the cable sports channel, has started televising the major tournaments. Mountlake Terrace's Lake Ballinger is expected to attract several thousand fans on Aug. 26 and 27 to one of the most important water ski competitions of the year. The pros will share $50,000 in prize money. Only the best will make it this far.

Will Kosney be there? He wants to say yes. But in the slalom, a hair out of place could mean the difference between first place and also-ran.

WEST HAS LONG GIVEN up competitive skiing but that doesn't mean he stays high and dry. When the sun comes out, he is on the phone looking for a skiing partner. He hates to admit it, but he has become a fair-weather skier.

This summer, he has been trying to talk Baker Bill into water skiing again.

"Come on, you can do it. I am pretty sure those knees will hold up," he tells him.

Baker Bill stands with his legs apart and crouches several times. West holds his breath.

The knees hold up.

"Not bad. Not bad at all. But my doctor told me I shouldn't water ski again."

"You are getting old, Bill. Come on. One more time."

"Well. Maybe. But I don't have any skis."

"I have plenty of skis."

Titanium sockets. Steel knees. Caution to the wind.

One more ride? Why not?

Ignacio Lobos is a reporter for the Seattle Times. Steve Ringman is a Times photographer. ----------------------------------------------------------------- See them ski

Some of the world's best water skiers will be in town on Aug. 26 and 27 to compete for $50,000 in prize money. The Bud Pro Tour will be held at Mountlake Terrace's Lake Ballinger, the final stop in a national tour.

Gates at the Nile Temple Country Club will open at 9 a.m. both days. Tickets are $6 in advance and $9 at the gate. Advance tickets can be purchased at Washington Water Sports, 90 Central Way, Kirkland. For information, call 827-0600.