Peter Fonda wasn’t
born to be wild. The
son of Hollywood
royalty, with the same
penetrating blue eyes and robust jaw-
line as his father, Henry, Peter seemed
destined for a career playing clean-
cut romantic leads and all- American
heroes. Then the 1960s arrived, and
he started growing his hair long and
smoking pot and dropping acid.
Rejecting the warnings of cautious
studio executives, Fonda teamed up with Dennis
Hopper to co-write and produce 1969’s Easy
Rider, about a drug-fueled motorcycle odys-
sey across the Deep South. The movie earned
$60 mil lion at the box office and an Oscar nomi-
nation for Best Original Screenplay, and kick-
started the independent-film movement of the
1970s. Fonda’s character, nicknamed “Cap tain
Amer i ca” for his star-spangled helmet, became
an icon of the counterculture generation. “It was
a market that had never been played to,” Fonda
said. “Nobody had sung their song to them.”
Born in Manhattan, Fonda was 10 years old
when his mother, “an emotionally fragile social-
ite,” committed suicide, said The Wash ing ton
Post. Henry, a cold and distant father, told Peter
and his sister Jane that their mom had died of
a heart attack; they didn’t learn the truth untilyears later. At age 11, Fonda acci-
dentally shot himself in the stom-
ach with a pistol. He later told the
story to John Lennon, inspiring
the line “I know what it’s like to
be dead” from the Beatles’ “She
Said She Said.” Fonda began his
acting career “the old-fashioned
way, in regional theater,” said The
New York Times. After a stint at
the Omaha Com mu nity Play house
in Ne bras ka and a string of forget-
table films, he found “his true persona” while
starring in edgy, low-budget pictures. In 1967’s
The Trip, he played a TV commercial director
who takes acid for the first time.
His father was appalled at his son’s hippie antics,
“and a long estrangement followed,” said The
Times (U.K.). Meanwhile, many Hollywood
executives viewed Easy Rider’s creator as a
dangerous upstart, and his acting career stalled.
Decades later, he earned an Oscar nomination
for Best Actor for 1997’s Ulee’s Gold, playing a
Vietnam vet turned beekeeper who finds himself
raising his grandchildren. The film led to a late
career revival, although Fonda considered himself
an outsider to the end. “It was when I came into
the counterculture that I came into my stride,”
he said. “You get in that stride, and you can lock
yourself in for that long-distance run.”Sherm Poppen didn’t
set out to invent a
new sport—he sim-
ply 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 manufac-
turing rights to the Brunswick Corp., a bowl-ing equipment maker that was
expanding into consumer prod-
ucts. “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.”Obituaries
Sherm
Poppen
1930–2019Everett Collection, Rocky Mountain News
The Hollywood rebel who made Easy Rider
The inventor who wanted people to go ‘snurfing’
Peter
Fonda
1940–2019 Music producer Henri Belolo
and composer Jacques
Morali had just walked into a
gay nightclub in Manhattan’s
West Village in 1977 when
inspiration
struck. First,
they saw a
bartender
wearing a
loincloth and Native Amer-
i can headdress, then a cus-
tomer dressed as a cowboy.
“Morali turned to me,”
Belolo recalled, “and said,
‘Oh God, are you thinking
what I’m thinking?’” The pair
soon conceived the Village
People, a disco group com-
posed of macho American
archetypes—the policeman,
leather-clad biker, construc-
tion worker, sailor, cowboy,
and Indian—that would sing
barely coded odes to gay life:
“YMCA,” “In the Navy,” and
“Macho Man.” Belolo, who
was straight, and Morali, who
was gay, got a kick out of sell-
ing gay camp to mainstream
America. “I did not like that
American mentality of bigotry
and hypocrisy,” Belolo said.
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 French-
Moroccan. The pair’s first suc-
cess 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 heri-
tage,” he said. “And people
are often surprised to dis-
cover that two French guys
were behind it.”Henri
Belolo
1936–201935
The music producer who
sparked a disco inferno
with the Village People