![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I started working for him when I was a punk kid in high school. Mark Heingartner: The showroom was in the dining room, the basement was the shipping area, and the barn was where manufacturing happened. He moved into a remote farmhouse in Vermont and launched Burton Snowboards. Then, in 1977, Jake remembered his Snurfing days and concocted what he called a “get-rich-quick scheme”. Then, upon graduation, Jake plied a conventional path and landed a job at an investment banking firm that, as he says in Dear Rider, “sold little companies to big companies”. In college at New York University, he was captain of the swimming team. Mark Heingartner, 58 Two-time snowboarding world champion and early Burton employee “Early on, Jake bought a Snurfer for 10 dollars and surfed the golf courses.” 1970-82: the birth of Burton Snowboards At Jake’s next boarding school – Marvelwood in Connecticut – he became valedictorian (the highest-ranked student in their class, who delivers a speech at the graduation ceremony). “I realised at a young age that people wanted to be around him because he was authentic and real” It fucked up the family dynamic, so Jake felt pretty alone, and he started getting into trouble.” Real deal: “My dad had a certain energy about him,” says Jake’s son Timi. He was the good son in the family, and Jake’s dad was taken aback by his death. He was cocaptain of the football team at his boarding school, and the senior prefect and class president. Timi Carpenter, 25 Jake’s youngest son (pictured below, right) and creative director of Mine77, a Burton brand “Jake lost his older brother in Vietnam when he was 12. told me that’s when he decided that whatever the fuck he was going to do in life, he would apply himself. My dad was in this pit of despair and angry at the world. The school called his father, and on the five-hour ride home he said to Jake, “If you don’t get your shit together, the whole family’s going to have to move.” Timi Carpenter: It was apparently a very quiet car ride. But a janitor found the keys in Jake’s bag. It involved a secret set of keys that opened every lock in the school, including the one on the headmaster’s gun cabinet, and one year Jake was picked as the keeper of the keys. When he was little, his sisters would spend hours dressing him up, putting on make-up, wigs, dresses… At Brooks School, where Jake was a boarding student, they had this underground tradition. Any excuse – Halloween, a costume party – he’d just go for it. Donna Carpenter: It became a theme in his life that he loved to dress in drag. Now, as a new documentary, Dear Rider, chronicles his life, several of the key players in that story detail what he meant to them and to everyone who has ever strapped on a board… 1954-70: the early years Burton grew up in an upper-middleclass family on Long Island, New York State, the youngest of four children During the four decades he ran Burton Snowboards, he evolved a rebel culture whose spirit – raucous and human, nature-loving and fearless – now permeates the entire action-sports universe.īurton died of cancer in 2019. Jake Burton Carpenter – better known simply as Jake Burton – was the father of snowboarding, the mind behind the sport’s most celebrated brand, and the man who first stood up for scraggly renegade boarders, demanding they be allowed access to the exclusive, manicured slopes of the nation’s ski resorts. Words BILL DONAHUE Origin story: Jake takes flight on the Burton Backhill – a snowboard that his company first introduced in 1979 “Jake always put snowboarding frst, and he listened to the riders” He was an entrepreneurial disruptor who shepherded this once-maligned pastime into the mainstream and inspired countless riders to live life – as he did – to the fullest. Without him, modern snowboarding might not exist. ![]()
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