[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 198 (Wednesday, December 11, 2019)]
[House]
[Page H10024]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           HONORING LIFE AND LEGACY OF JAKE BURTON CARPENTER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Vermont (Mr. Welch) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WELCH. Mr. Speaker, on November 20, 2019, only 3 weeks ago, 
Vermont lost a great Vermonter and an inspiring American, Jake Burton 
Carpenter, the person who started Burton Snowboards, the person who 
actually created the whole sport of boarding.
  Jake was a great Vermonter and pioneer of snowboarding. He was a 
great husband to his wife, best friend, and business partner for 
decades, Donna Carpenter, and the proud father of George, Taylor, and 
Timi, snowboarders or riders all.
  Jake's life was one of great effort, inspiring originality, perpetual 
decency, and deep love of the snowboarding sport Jake created, deep 
love of the people who came to the sport, and deep love of his 
community and all the people who worked in his company.
  Snowboarding in 2019 is a wildly popular sport that Jake started. It 
has a prominent place in our Winter Olympic Games, and it has 
extraordinary champions. It was once shunned and prohibited in all our 
ski areas.
  Mr. Speaker, you couldn't bring a board to a mountain, and it was 
because the kids who wanted to do this were rambunctious, energetic, 
and Jake would sometimes say disrespectful of their elders. But they 
loved to ride, loved to be outdoors, and loved to be with each other. 
It was this culture of community that Jake created as much as this 
extraordinary sport that allowed people to demonstrate amazing physical 
skills.
  He started this company in Stratton, Vermont. He worked as a 
bartender at night. During the day, he worked not in his garage but in 
a barn at a house where he was housesitting. By himself, he was making 
these snowboards.
  This is one of his early Burton Snowboards.
  With Donna, whom he met in 1982 and married in 1983, he then started 
promoting to ski areas to let these rambunctious kids ride. Ski area 
after ski area relented and ultimately came to see riding as the 
economic future of their mountains because as ski trips have gone down, 
boarding has gone up.
  The company that Jake left behind that he started out of nothing now 
has about 32 percent of the sales in this huge market, about $400 
million. It is over a $1 billion industry. It has over 1,000 employees 
in six different countries.
  Riding today is something you do if you dare. It wasn't always so. 
When Jake started in 1977, he started from nothing, but he loved it.
  After he graduated from NYU in 1977 and a short stint on Wall Street, 
the last time I think Jake ever wore a suit, he went to pursue his 
dream in Vermont. He marketed this board initially to 22-year-olds. 
Then he realized that when he was a kid, the first time that he got on 
something that was the predecessor to these beautiful Burton 
Snowboards, it was two skis bound together with a rope at the top 
called a Snurfer, and he was 15 or 16. He started marketing to even 
younger kids. They went outside, got on the mountain, and then a sport 
was born.
  Mr. Speaker, so many champions have been folks who rode these boards 
in their glory. One of them, of course, was Shaun ``The Flying Tomato'' 
White. The Flying Tomato got so many awards that he has become one of 
our greatest Olympic champions.
  Now, Jake's life was not without real suffering. He lost his beloved 
brother, George, in the Vietnam war. His mom, Kitty, died when he was 
17.
  I want to end with Jake's words: ``The riders, the product, the 
process, this is my heart and soul. I just love the freedom 
snowboarding gives you to do whatever you want.''

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