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WATERSKI MagazineThe waitress looked back at her inquisitor through the tops of her bifocals. She had a slight grin on her face, a look of suspicion. Why would someone walk into this Hastings, Minnesota, restaurant and start
firing questions while showing no interest in the bratwurst
melt special?
“Yeah, I know Lake Pepin,” she answered hesitantly. “It's about 40 miles from here, down around Lake City.”
If she was unsteady with the first question, the follow-up made her stagger.
“Have you heard of Ralph Samuelson?”
“Rollie Nickolson? No.”
“No, Ralph Samuelson.”
“Ralph Nickolson? Never heard of him. Does he live around here?”
This investigation into Ralph Samuelson's life was sputtering from the start. It hadn't gotten off the ground at the Minneapolis airport an hour earlier. A tourist information clerk had peeled off directions to the historical homes of Charles Lindbergh and a couple guys named Oliver Kelley and James J. Hill. But when asked for the route to Ralph Samuelson's old stomping ground, the clerk merely pushed his earhole up close.
“Who?”
It was time to make way for Lake City. Between the Twin Cities and Samuelson's childhood turf – a 65-mile hike – someone or something was bound to provide a clue about water skiing's heritage. This is where it all happened, for crying out loud. But the first 50 miles gave no hint of water skiing days past or present, though they smacked of plenty of corn, soy and yards the size of nine-hole golf courses. Around Red Wing – the shoe city – infinite fields gave way to glacier-carved bluffs. Though the scenery was pleasant, there was still nothing to indicate that water ski historians should mark these roads with a highlighter. No billboards, no splashy road signs, not even a tourist information center. It wasn't until 64.5 miles had flashed by, when Highway 61 ran practically headfirst into the widest section of the Mississippi River, that paydirt was struck. A sign appeared on the opposite side of the road: “Welcome to Lake City, The Birthplace of Water Skiing.” And it was gone.
The seed of our sport hides in a town with a population of 4,391. It will never gain the acclaim of hamlets like Cooperstown, New York, or Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Just like Ralph Samuelson won't be lumped together with Abner Doubleday or Orville Wright. It doesn't really matter. You realize this only after stopping in Lake City long enough to snoop around. You find the folks within the town lines know about Ralph Samuelson. You learn that 75 years ago, this venturesome 18-year-old kid had no concept of glory. You find he had the close friendship of maybe four people. You're told that Samuelson was a young man typical of his time. And you determine that the story which binds him to Lake Pepin is only now, at this moment, being shared with a dose of pride.
From the time Father Louis Hennepin came upon Lake Pepin in 1680, the massive spread developed a dark reputation and became known as the Lake of Tears. Storms would whip up on the lake and galvanize its dangerous notoriety. One in particular, on a Fourth of July in the 1890s, swallowed a boat called the Sea Wing, killing 90 people.
“It was a lake you couldn't trust,” says Carl Bremer, a lifelong Lake City resident who breathes the town's history. “A lot of people were afraid of it. But Ralph spent all his time out there.”
A self-described water rat, Samuelson treated Lake Pepin like his personal candy store. As a boy he taught himself to swim and dive so he could scour the lake bottom for clams. Lake City was the nation's button-making hub and those clam shells were like gold. Even on days when the weather drove everyone inside, Ralph would refuse to leave the water.
“That lake had been almost a mystic force in my life,” he said a few years before his death in 1977. “The good Lord must have kept his eye on me. I never got hurt, as long as I was on the water.”
Into his teens, something about the lake nagged at Samuelson. He had dived its depths, swam along its perimeter, ridden across it in boats and skated its frozen surface. To embrace the lake in holy matrimony he yearned one more stunt. He wanted to stand on top of Pepin and skim its cool surface, just like he did on southeastern Minnesota's snowy hills in the winter.
The idea became an obsession. From November of 1921 until the lake thawed the following April, Samuelson's life centered on conquering the impossible. He could only guess how he'd do it because nobody had ever tried it before. And, aside from his brothers and friends like Ben Simons and Red Walstrom, he had no help.
“He didn't care about going from here to there for the first time, or about inventing a gizmo,” says his son, Jon Samuelson. “He wanted to do it for the thrill. There was no other reason.”
In April 1922, Ralph hit the water. He didn't hit it running. Best estimates are that the outboard rig he used had a top-end speed of 16 mph. The first tools he put on his feet were barrel staves, followed by watchband-wide snow skis. Either way he might as well have been using anchors.
“People came to watch,” remembers Don Anderson, who was 8 at the time. “But it wasn't to see him succeed. He was kind of cocky. We were out there to see him drown or break his neck.”
If anything, that kind of community “rallying cry” drove Samuelson harder. From the feel beneath his feet, Samuelson knew snow skis didn't have enough surface area to work on water. He also figured he'd need to curve the tips to keep them from diving. Innovation was about to drench a young man who wouldn't complete high school.
Samuelson fashioned history's first water skis from two 8-foot-long pine boards. Total cost: $2. He took the planks home and boiled the tips for three hours, then molded them in vise clamps and braces, where he left them for two days. Tip rocker was born. After painting the skis “to help preserve the wood,” he fastened scrap leather to the center with wood screws. Bindings entered the world. The modern-day rope and handle? They go back to Ruechert's Hardware Store, where Samuelson bought 100 feet of sash cord, and Pearson's Blacksmith Shop, which sourced an iron ring that he wrapped in black insulation tape. Now Ralph Samuelson was geared and ready to roll.
During the summer of 1922 Lake City had a population of 2,500. The highest point in town was the top of the steeple on St. Mary's Catholic Church. A few Model T's shared the unmarked roads with horses and buggies. Out on Lake Pepin canoeists and sailboaters virtually risked their lives where clam barges ruled the water. From June 28-July 2, however, an adolescent who had seen every mood of the lake firsthand took over.
“History was the furthest thing from our minds,” says Anderson, who watched from the shore while Samuelson struggled to satisfy his ridiculous passion. “Skiing? We didn't care. It looked like a waste of time. But we figured anyone who had that much guts to take those nasty spills must be on to something.”
Over the next four days Lake Pepin beat Samuelson unmercifully. He tried jumping off his brother Ben's rickety motor boat with the only success being that he hit water. He tried starting in the water with the skis beneath him, leading to water skiing's first facial smears. He tried stepping off a contraption called an Aquaplane – like a boat house door – with similar painful results. The kids on the beach loved it.
Then Samuelson, always tinkering in his mind, thought the answer might just be in those curved tips. Keep them sticking out of the water and they wouldn't catch; the rest might follow. A basic strategy 75 years later, this was a revelation in 1922.
Sure enough, July 2, 1922, a day befor
e his 19th birthday, Ralph rose from the water and felt the pine planks under his feet shaving Lake Pepin. At that moment water skiing was born.
“Did I feel like a pioneer, like Jesus walking on water?” Samuelson asked on a local TV show 50 years later. “All I felt was that at long last I had proved to my family, to myself and a lot of fellows who had been laughing at me for months, that I could do what I had set out to do.”
It was a miraculous birth in the world of sport. A futuristic achievement in a tiny upper Midwest town. And the townsfolk responded with a collective yawn.
In Samuelson's memoirs, he wrote: “The bells of St. Mary, St. Mark, St. John didn't ring; the fire whistle atop the old Georgian-style red brick city hall didn't howl; the newly organized Louis McCahill Post No. 110 of the American Legion didn't organize a parade. In fact, nothing happened at all.”
Not until 1930 was the first water skier finally given recognition. His name wasn't Samuelson. It was a Frenchman who was made a hero for skiing near the Riviera in 1928. But the American Water Ski Association later stepped in and made a claim for the U.S. The name? Fred Waller. The place? Huntington, New York. Circa 1924. By then Ralph Samuelson had skied behind a sea plane at 80-plus mph and was putting on his own ski shows on Lake Pepin – he'd eventually take the show on the road from Detroit to Florida.
“He never took anything more than gas money for himself,” says Bremer of Ralph's shows, which sometimes attracted thousands of gawkers. “The rest of the money helped Lake City build up the lakefront.”
Samuelson could have made a stink about being not only the first to water ski, but also the original ski racer and show skier. Even slalom was his doing. During one of his shows in Florida, Samuelson wobbled, lost one of his skis and kept going on one. Jump? He did that by sinking one end of a dock and smearing lard on the top. All this he had done before anyone else got up on two skis. But instead of campaigning for his due, the self-assured eccentric moved on.
In 1937 Samuelson injured his back while working on a dock. Unable to ski, he relocated half a county away to Pine Island, where he made himself a small fortune raising turkeys. Best as Don Anderson can recall, the next skier on Lake Pepin didn't show up until just before World War II.
“Dad didn't make a dime from water skiing,” says Jon of his father. “He didn't make a big deal of it. If we saw someone skiing he might casually say, 'I think I was the first to do that.' He could have formed the first ski company, but he didn't really care to. Sometimes the inventors aren't the ones who reap the rewards.”
In 1963, 10 years after a storm wiped out Samuelson's turkey farm and 41 years after he made history in obscurity, Margaret Cummins, a writer for the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, found his original skis stowed in Lake City's municipal bath house. In an effort to find Samuelson, she wrote an open letter titled “Your Old Water Skis Are Great, Mr. Samelson – Mr. Samelson (sic)?”
The truth was about to surface. And so was Samuelson. In 1966 the American Water Ski Association, after receiving photos of Ralph skiing, finally acknowledged him as “the first water skier of record” and made him an honorary life member. By the time Ralph Samuelson received his first congratulatory handshake, 11 million people were skiing in the U.S.
In the last two decades of his life, Samuelson, still remembered by acquaintances as an aloof and brash character, softened. He experienced two rebirths. One was through Christianity. “On July 2, 1922, the good Lord chose me for a mission,” Samuelson said, “a mission I am finally, after 50 years of delay, beginning to fulfill. It started with two pine boards; it will end with two pine boards again, when I'm in my coffin.”
His second revival came when he rediscovered the passion he once had for skiing, and for the lake where it all started.
“When he was 64 years old he tried to get up for the first time in more than 40 years and got up easy,” says Jon. “He started to get really involved again. The most joy I saw him get was from teaching kids how to ski on Lake Pepin. He loved seeing them do it for the first time, probably because he knew better than anyone the thrill of conquering the elements and being on the water.”
On the 50th anniversary of his first ski run, Samuelson was honored at Lake City's first Water Ski Days. A few years later he was invited to the grand opening of the Water Ski Hall of Fame. Against doctor's orders, Samuelson attended the ceremony despite the onset of prostate cancer. According to Jon, “It was one of the most important days of his life.”
In the years since, Lake City, Ralph Samuelson and water skiing have started to become synonymous, if only to the people who live here.
“I didn't know anything about it really until I moved here,” says Becky Oakland, who grew up an hour away in Pine Island, where she had Ralph's wife, Hazel, as a fifth-grade teacher. “She didn't say anything about it. Here it's common knowledge.”
Two summers ago the post office unveiled an eye-popping mural depicting the sea-plane stunt. Letterhead from the chamber of commerce now touts Lake City's birthright, and in 1991 the office put Samuelson's original skis on display.
“Most people who are born here live here their whole lives,” says Lake City Chamber of Commerce executive director Jenny Dankers. “So the people in the city know the story. But outside the city …”
Outside the city, there isn't a scrap of evidence to distinguish a Samuelson from a Nickolson. Even Don Anderson, the man who watched a cocky 18-year-old try to bust his neck 75 years ago, had forgotten. It wasn't until 1979, when the city erected a sculpted wave in the same spot where Anderson stood on July 2, 1922, that a nugget from his childhood hit him upside the head.
“I never gave it a second thought until they put up that wave,” says Anderson. “He deserves a lot of credit, and he didn't really get anything out of it.”
Best as a visitor can tell, Lake City has changed only in basic cosmetics since the summer of 1922. Cargill Flour Milling has a grain elevator that barely outstretches the St. Mary's steeple. There are a couple traffic lights, but most intersections operate on the honor system and don't even have stop signs. And on warm summer evenings, in the exact spot where water skiing dawned, you're likely to see a water skier or two replicating Ralph Samuelson's feat, not realizing what they owe to whom.
“Even though he lived most of his life in Pine Island, my dad wanted to be buried in Lake City,” says Jon. “He said he couldn't have picked a better place to ski for the first time. In his final years, what he did had become more important to him. He wanted to be remembered for two things, as the first water skier and as a man who served God.”
In the days before his death Samuelson spoke with others about the miracles of his life. It was a message that he lived, yet nearly missed. “I started poor, without a dime,” starts a passage in his memoirs, “became rich (but not because of my connection with water skiing), became conceited and then went through more tribulations than Job himself. I went bankrupt, lost $250,000 and a beautiful home, broke my back, nearly died several times and nearly let my family starve. And what happened? Miracles happened. After decades of anonymity, God permitted me to be rediscovered. What seemed an accident, a sheer coincidence, was a miracle. I've lived a whole lifetime of miracles. Inventing water skiing was only one of the first.”
On the way out the west side of Lake City, about a mile from the lake where it all started, there&apos
;s a cemetery that passes in a blink. You have to know where to look, and even then it takes a careful eye to find the modest tombstone sitting no higher than a blade of grass. On it is an engraving of a skier going over a jump and the following epitaph:
Ralph W. Samuelson
Father of Water Skiing
Witness for Christ
1903-1977
Outside the birthplace of water skiing, most people are oblivious to all this. But it doesn't matter. All that ever mattered to Ralph Samuelson is right here, etched in granite.
