Water skiing is a reasonably new, American invention in the world of performance and competition. Most folks trace its origin to Lake City, Minnesota, where a teenager named Ralph Samuelson put together some makeshift and ridiculously heavy wooden skis and decided to try hanging on for amusement and dear life behind a twenty-four-foot speedboat in 1922.
Minnesota curator Sondra Reierson explains that “despite broken skis and several failed attempts” at getting up on the water,
on the third day Samuelson successfully rode the water of Lake Pepin aboard a pair of nine-foot-long pine planks from the local lumberyard. Samuelson had softened and curved the tips of the boards using his mother’s wash boiler and reinforced them with metal strips.
Three years later, Samuelson greased up a homemade wooden ramp—four feet wide, sixteen feet long—and landed the first water-ski jump.
Midwestern lakes were an ideal testing ground for water skiing, even if the season was short: calm water, close to shore, plenty of lakes and boaters already available. And the Midwest continued its pursuit of water-ski showmanship, notably through Wisconsin’s Tommy Bartlett, but it was in Florida that the sport took off, soon becoming a cultural shorthand for mid-century American pageantry.
Florida went through a boom-and-bust cycle in terms of development and tourism in the 1920s. The upswing was aided by media buzz and car culture, but the state was vulnerable to things like hurricanes, housing shortages, fruit flies (affecting citrus harvests and therefore economic prosperity), and banking busts. After a real estate collapse in 1926, no one was bullish on Florida—especially not central Florida. Librarian Dorothy Mays explains that “[t]he deplorable condition of Florida’s road system meant that long-distance travel was practical only via railroad.” Consequently, “[t]he interior of Florida remained largely unaffected by tourism as the railroads bypassed most of the state and funneled tourists directly to opulent resorts in the coastal cities of St. Augustine, Miami, and Tampa.”
When tourism started to recover in the 1930s, despite the Depression, entrepreneur Dick Pope saw an opportunity and capitalized on it, founding a park and a vaguely Venetian-style pleasure garden in Winter Haven. The so-called “Swami of the Swamp” opened his business in 1935, calling it Cypress Gardens.
Cypress Gardens became well known for a variety of entertainments, many of which emphasized conventionally beautiful women. This was due to Pope’s wife, Julie, who ran the park while Dick was serving in World War II and who zeroed in on southern belles and bathing beauties to bring off-duty soldiers (who would become tourists after their discharge) into the establishment. Historian Stephen E. Branch credits Julie Pope with introducing iconic showy skiing displays.