16 minute read
Jake Burton
The neverending ride
Without him, modern snowboarding might not exist. 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. This is the story of JAKE BURTON
Words BILL DONAHUE
Origin story: Jake takes flight on the Burton Backhill – a snowboard that his company first introduced in 1979
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. 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.
Burton died of cancer in 2019. 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
Timi Carpenter: Jake was mischievous. He just wanted to have a good time. Donna Carpenter: It became a theme in his life that he loved to dress in drag. Any excuse – Halloween, a costume party – he’d just go for it. When he was little, his sisters would spend hours dressing him up, putting on make-up, wigs, dresses… At Brooks School [in the state of Massachusetts], where Jake was a boarding student, they had this underground tradition. 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. But a janitor found the keys in Jake’s bag. 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. My dad was in this pit of despair and angry at the world. [Jake] told me that’s when he decided that whatever the fuck he was going to do in life, he would apply himself.
Timi Carpenter, 25
Jake’s youngest son (pictured below, right) and creative director of Mine77, a Burton brand “Jake lost his older brother [George] in Vietnam when he was 12. George was a very proper dude. He was cocaptain of the football team at his boarding school, and the senior prefect and class president. He went to Yale. He was a Marine. He was the good son in the family, and Jake’s dad was taken aback by his death. 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. “I realised at a young age that people wanted to be around him because he was authentic and real”
Above: Jake at play in the ’80s. Left: a night session at Whistler, Canada, in 2001. “Even into his mid-fifties, he was still going for it,” says Timi
Donna Carpenter, 58
Jake’s widow and owner of Burton Snowboards “It took [Jake] a very long time before he’d talk with me about losing his brother. Or his mum. She passed away when he was 17. Those deaths were really painful for him. But I think they shaped him. They made him see how important it is to live in the moment, to have fun.”
Mark Heingartner, 58
Two-time snowboarding world champion and early Burton employee “Early on, Jake bought a Snurfer [the precursor to the snowboard – a monoski ridden without bindings, like a skateboard] 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). In college at New York University, he was captain of the swimming team. 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”. But he was bored. Then, in 1977, Jake remembered his Snurfing days and concocted what he called a “get-rich-quick scheme”. He moved into a remote farmhouse in Vermont and launched Burton Snowboards.
Mark Heingartner: The showroom was in the dining room, the basement was the shipping area, and the barn was where manufacturing happened. Every board was hand-cut and sawed. I started working for him when I was a punk kid in high school. It was just me and three other kids in the factory, and Jake was like an older brother to us. He was the grown-up in the room and took pride in the product from the get-go. Donna Carpenter: He worked 14-hour days and survived on Slim Jims [a US snack similar to Peperami] and black coffee. He was that focused on making snowboards. This is a guy who started out with no
technical skills, failed shop class [lessons on practical skills], and couldn’t change a light bulb. When I first met him – on New Year’s Eve, 1982, at a bar in Londonderry, Vermont – he was drinking Jack Daniel’s and milk, for a “pre-ulcerous stomach”. He told me his name was Jake and that he made snowboards. I thought, “This business is going nowhere.”
But then I started coming up from New York at the weekends to help him. He was taking these pre-laminated pieces of wood, dipping them in polyurethane, and hanging them to dry. It was a very toxic process. We wore these respirators connected to a hole in the wall, and sometimes people would blow marijuana smoke into the hole, so I’d get high. Jake thought that was hilarious. Mark Heingartner: He had a way of making everything fun. Whenever it snowed, he gave us a few hours off to go ride. Donna Carpenter: But he was lonely up there in Vermont. He was busting his ass trying to figure out how to launch the business and not run out of money. His friends in New York were looking at him, thinking, “What are you doing with your life?” And the ski areas were actively fighting him, trying to keep snowboarders off their mountains. At our first trade show – Ski Industries of America [SIA] in 1982 – they sent union guys to remove us. They told us, “You’re not part of this industry.” I remember Jake getting into a tug of war over a board. And somehow we stayed.
The very first National Snowboarding Championships took place at a tiny Vermont ski area, Suicide Six, in 1982. A contingent of Michigan Snurfers came east to race – they slept on Jake’s floor – and one daredevil hit 63mph [101kph] in basketball shoes. In 1985, with Jake as host and MC, the event moved to Stratton Mountain, a larger Vermont resort, and officially became the US Open Snowboarding Championships. Burton employee Andy Coghlan won the slalom by 0.01 seconds. Donna Carpenter: There were women competing at the US Open early on, and I remember asking Jake, “What are we going to do about the women and prize money?” He said, “Why wouldn’t we pay them the same?” Mark Heingartner: His goal was to grow the sport. A few other Burton riders and I started going to ski areas to prove to the ski patrol and mountain management that snowboarding was safe; that we could make turns and stop on a dime; that it was compatible with skiing. Mike Cox: At sales meetings, Jake was super-focused and really intimidating. At the very first meeting in 1990, he listened to us present products and said, “These guys are supposed to be the best of the best?” But when he spoke it was inspirational. He talked about what snowboarding meant to him, and about how we were a community. It felt like we were a family, and the customers could become a part of it. Donna Carpenter: We hired a guy to work with the insurance companies and iron out legalities with the ski areas. But we were bringing all these 15- and 16-year-old kids who didn’t know the protocol. So, for a while we focused on etiquette in our communications to customers. We said, “Hey, you’ve got to follow the rules at ski areas.” But this was a demographic that was just going to say “fuck you” anyway. Mike Cox: At the trade shows in the ’90s, one company had a school bus as a booth, and there were Vegas strippers in there. They had porn stars signing posters. The ski side of the arena was boring, stale, but on the snowboard side there was buzz. Every night at five they’d start serving beer; punk bands played, and it was so loud you couldn’t do meetings. I remember one day Jake and I stood a way from the Burton booth and it looked like a beehive, with people coming and going. We just looked at each other and nodded, thinking, “Holy shit. It’s game on.”
Making a statement: Burton Snowboards had to battle for its place at ski shows
Mike Cox, 56
Burton global brand ambassador “Jake was a prankster. Once, when we were hiking up Mount Mansfield in Vermont, we came across this young couple. Jake asked them, ‘Do you want us to take your picture?’ Then he had me take the camera, and he got up behind them and mooned me in their picture. They had no idea.”
Kelly Clark, 38
Olympic gold medallist, halfpipe “Burton did more for women’s snowboarding than probably any other company. It made a place for us and didn’t treat us less than the guys. I was a direct recipient of that kind of investment.” Mark McMorris, 27
Nine-time X Games gold medallist “[Jake and I] were homies. We fed off each other. He was super- inspiring to me, and a good friend. In 2017, when I hit a tree at Whistler and got hospitalised, he flew to visit me. The founder of the biggest snowboard brand in the world. I don’t think that would have happened at any other company of that scale. We just kicked it. All over the world, Jake and I would check out clothes and different products for inspiration. No one cared more about product than that guy. He obsessed over the most minuscule details. He could talk about a backpack strap for an hour and a half – where it was snagging, whatever. He looked to me for what was cool and what was next. For a while he’d only listen to hip hop, because we did.”
Chairman of the board: founded in Vermont in 1977, Burton has become one of the world’s biggest and best-loved snowboarding brands
Above: the Burton Team at the 1985 US Open Snowboarding Championships at Stratton Mountain. Right: the making of a Burton board. Below: carving on the slopes
1996-2011: world domination
By 1996, Jake and Donna were the parents of three young sons, and lords of a multimillion-dollar business that was growing by 25 to 30 per cent each year. In 1998, snowboarding made its Olympic debut in Nagano, Japan. Four years later, when the Games were held in Utah, two Burton team riders scored gold. And in 2006, Burton rider Shaun White – known as ‘the Flying Tomato’ due to his red hair – found himself on the cover of Rolling Stone, shirtless and draped in the US flag. Jake Burton was now the paterfamilias of a global brand, and the Pied Piper of an ever-growing band of outsiders.
Mike Cox: Jake and Donna had this party every year, the Fall Bash, which started with 25 guests and [eventually grew] to 1,200 people. And everyone gets to walk through their house, their closets, their barn, their yard. Kelly Clark: He wasn’t afraid to have a good time – like having a fireworks show at his house on a Tuesday. Donna Carpenter: What Jake tapped into – what he realised – is that humans need to play, even when they’re adults. He and the boys would all play Pig [a dice game] to see who took out the garbage, and up until our kids were all 6ft tall, we had a basketball hoop in our living room. Timi Carpenter: The ball was small, but it was a legit hoop with a metal rim 8ft high, and you had to dribble, no travelling allowed. We’d break so many picture frames and lights, and Jake would just get them replaced. The games would get physical. At the Fall Bash late one night, Jake took a pretty hard foul from one of his buddies. He went down face first and got two black eyes. He had a TV interview the next day and had to wear big sunglasses to cover the bruises.
On good snow days, my dad let us skip school and go riding. He was so quick through the trees. Even into his mid-fifties he was still going for it. My brothers and I still talk about the last time he ever hit a box jump. When you get on a box, you have to stay completely flat, but my dad got nervous and tried to turn off the box. He fell hard and hit his back on this piece of metal. So he was like, “That’s it, I’m done. I’m going to stick to the trees and the backcountry.”
2011-19: the long fight
In 2011, Jake sent his 800 employees a memo saying, “The bad news is that I have cancer. The good news is, it’s as curable as it gets.” He underwent chemotherapy for seminoma, a form of testicular cancer, and beat it. But four years later, in 2015, he was diagnosed with Miller Fisher syndrome, a rare disease that temporarily paralyses the nervous system.
Donna Carpenter: The doctor told him, “If this is what we think it is, tomorrow you’re not going to be able to open your eyes, the next day you’re not going to be able to swallow, and the day after that you’re not going to be able to breathe.” Soon, the doctors told us, “We don’t know how long he’ll be paralysed. We don’t know if we can stop it.” Timi Carpenter: He was the most active person I’d ever met. And all of a sudden he was in a hospital bed, locked in his body. Donna Carpenter: By the third week, Jake was distraught. You could see his heart monitor – his pulse went from 52 [bpm] to 160. He never lost the ability to move his hands, though. One night, when our sons were visiting, he wrote, “I want to commit suicide.”
The next morning – I’ll never forget it – I walked in and he’d written this long note saying, “I realise I have no control over this. I surrender.” And when the nurses took him outside and sat him in front of the mountains, he wrote, “I want to live now.” A couple of days before his birthday, he said to me – he was on a ventilator, so he was doing this by writing – “I want to give every patient and doctor a cupcake.” So I had a friend order 300 cupcakes. Timi Carpenter: Once he got back on his feet, he started riding a hundred days a year again. We went to snowboard events in Europe and hung out with the riders all night. For my 21st birthday, in 2017, he took me to Burning Man. I remember him dancing at this party and schmoozing this crowd. This girl I was talking with was like, “Wow, that dude’s super-fun and rad.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s my dad.” Donna Carpenter: When he was 63, he said, “I think my best friend right now is Mark McMorris.” He was a twenty-something pro snowboarder from Saskatchewan, Canada. Timi Carpenter: I was worried about Jake. I told him, “Hey, man, you were just laid up for a long time; you probably need to ease back into life and take better care of yourself.” But he was having none of it. He said, “I’m on my victory lap.” Then one day he called me and there was something in his voice. “The cancer came back,” he said, “but I’m doing everything I can to fight it. I’ve beaten it before, I’ll beat it again.” But he sounded flat and defeated. Donna Carpenter: I think if Miller Fisher hadn’t happened, he could have fought the cancer a second time. But now I think he just knew in his heart that he had fought all he could. He saw what chemotherapy does to you and he didn’t want to waste away and die like that. He didn’t really have his sense of humour any more – that’s how I knew.
The never-ending ride
Jake Burton died on November 20, 2019.
Mike Cox: Right after Jake died, an old Burton rep called me and said, “I realise that Jake didn’t just bring us snowboarding. He opened up his lifestyle to all of us, and we all looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, I want to live like that, too.’” Donna Carpenter: If people want to honour Jake’s legacy, they should get out there and ride. Snowboarding is the best way to be one with nature. Stay a community. Have each other’s backs. Kelly Clark: Jake always put snowboarding first, and he listened to the riders. I think he would be proud if we could continue that legacy. Mark McMorris: We just gotta keep it core. Enjoy the mountains with your friends, push the boundaries. Don’t be the skier on the hill. Stay rebellious. Standing sideways is the dopest thing ever. Dear Rider: The Jake Burton Story will hit digital streaming services in early 2022
