Milestones 1973
1973
Critical Mass By Eugene Buchanan
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Forty years ago, the last American combat troops were leaving Vietnam, and the Watergate scandal was gaining momentum. The Miami Dolphins had just finished an undefeated season, Native American activists were holed up at Wounded Knee, and the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Roe v. Wade. The counterculture of the 1960s was beginning to enter the mainstream, and a restless generation was seeking freedom on the rivers of North America. Paddlers were still a small, insular community in 1973, but they were infused with energy. Whitewater slalom had debuted at the Munich Olympics, with 19-year-old American Jamie McEwan winning the bronze in C-1. Hollowform, a plastic garbage can manufacturer, diversified with the River Chaser,
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the world’s first roto-molded kayak. The rugged craft opened new opportunities for riverrunners, as did the advent of nearly indestructible Royalex canoes and ultra-lightweight Kevlar expedition boats. A powerful film called Deliverance had debuted the previous summer, introducing the notion of whitewater canoeing to millions of would-be adventurers. “All sorts of things were happening right around then,” says Dagger founder Joe Pulliam, who started making kayaks that year with Pete Jett and Bill Masters, who would later found Perception kayaks. “And certainly one of the big things to happen was Canoe magazine.” The first issue weighed in at just 40 pages and sold for 60 cents. Like Pulliam, Canoe founder Peter Sonderegger was looking for a way to make a living in the sport he loved. They weren’t alone. When
Ralph Frese leads an expedition to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Joliet-Marquette expedition of 1673 using replica canoes // Mad River builds the first Kevlar canoe, the Endurall
Canoe debuted in April 1973, Bill Parks had been running Northwest River Supplies out of his Moscow, Idaho garage for 12 months, Steve O’Meara’s river apparel company Blue Puma (now Kokatat) was in its second year, and eventual Ocean Kayak founder Tim Niemier had recently sold his first sit-on-top kayak on the beach at Malibu.
A year earlier in North Carolina, Payson and Aurelia Kennedy and Horace Holden had converted the sleepy Tote-n-Tarry Hotel into the Nantahala Outdoor Center, providing river-based employment for themselves and their friends. Kevlar was an experimental product then, but paddlers working for DuPont somehow
obtained samples to turn into boats. “There wasn’t much of an industry back then,” Walbridge recalls. “The sport was just beginning a serious growth spurt.” Paddlers in those days would wave when they saw another car with a boat on top, a cherished tradition that has never completely gone away. In
1973, they often did more than wave—they’d stop and chat. Walbridge remembers one such conversation on the median strip of Interstate 81. Despite all the sport’s advances and growth in participants, paddlers still share that bond. Over the last 40 years, this magazine has been one dab of glue helping to hold that community together.
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