CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Testing an early, self-shaped stick at Northern Long Beach, WA, in 1985. Photo: Mervin Lessley Washington coast morning check circa 1985 with my modified VW bug surf “camper” that I also slept in at the mountain. Photo: Mervin Lessley What are we doing today, Pete? We got some work done and now we’re not working anymore. Maybe you’re working, but I am driving to the beach. How long have you lived in… is it Sequim? We live in Agnew. It’s technically Port Angeles, but we’re in the Sequim School District. We’ve had a place out here for about 12 years near the Mervin factory, and we were always gonna move here. But when the pandemic hit, Annette and I decided to bail and move. The first day we started working remotely, everybody had been practicing for 20 years and our Teams meetings worked perfectly. We were able to mix work with a lot more surf. I think it helped us emotionally get through the psycho-ness of everything that was going on in that two-year period. One of the silver linings of COVID for us was that we could surf when there were waves and snowboard when there was snow and still get work done. It allowed us to blend our work lifestyle into shred lifestyle a little more like pro snowboarders do. You still put in the long hours, but you could flex a bit. Before that you were in Seattle? I was born in Denver, lasted nine months there, and then we moved to Seattle. Then my parents moved to Paris for two years when I was in first grade, then to New York City for two years. We came back here when I was in fifth grade, and I’ve been in Washington [state] since. What are your parents’ names? Jack—well John Charles, but he goes by Jack—and Peggy. My mom passed about eight years ago, but she’s Peggy and she’s a powerful lady. We lost her to cancer. She was diagnosed and about a month later she was gone. It was painful, but I’m kind of grateful that it went quick. You watch some people have this slow memory loss, for years… I moved back to be near my parents when I was 45. I had such good moments with my parents at that time, and my mom especially. Ide-ally, she would’ve gone another 10 or 15 years, but that got cut short. When you lose somebody, you realize that you can bring ’em with you anywhere you want. So I got her with me all the time now. Still, it was hard. She literally died in my arms. It’s never easy. What did your parents do? They were teachers. My dad was a [University of Washington] college professor—he taught biochemistry to first-year med students. He did ophthalmology and he was a research scientist. I used to work in his lab as a kid. My mom was a schoolteacher and became a stay-at-home mom, then she was president of the League of Women Voters and was really politi-cally active in Washington state for a whole bunch of different things. Total powerhouse. Tell me more about working in the lab as a kid. She was. I was the gopher in the ophthalmology lab. I worked for everybody, xeroxing, going to the library and researching stuff and then messing around in my dad’s lab. I did that as a kid, but when I went to UW, I did it as a job. Costa Rican sunscreen at Witches Rock in the mid-’90s. Photo: Joe Sprauer Otter Rock, OR, longboard contest with Mike Olson and Mervin Lessley—“Team Washington” with a DIY glider, 1986. Photo: Shirley Lessley They paved our street in 1976. Saari bros sniffing the fresh asphalt. Photo: Jack Saari Your dad’s research took you guys to Paris? My dad was just going through graduate school and did his post-doc at the Pasteur Institute for some badass scientists that ended up getting Nobel Prizes. I was just a kid in Paris, and I got thrown into French schools. It was the middle of first grade, and I remember the first day sitting there, looking at the teacher and being pissed off because I couldn’t understand a word they said. By the time we left, I could speak French well enough that the French teachers didn’t know I was English [speaking] anymore—they just thought I was a shitty student [laughs]. Do you still speak the language? Annette’s family lives in Berlin and so we trick them into going to the coast of France and meeting there so we can surf. Then I get to use French. But I don’t get to use it too often. We used to sponsor Mathieu Crépel and that was fun because he spoke French. I’ve gotten some good French friends from over the years ’cause we were part of Quiksil-ver for a while and they have offices in France. How did all this movement shape your life? We moved enough that when I came to Seattle, I started playing soccer and the kids on the soccer team were kind of dicks. I didn’t enjoy it. So I started skateboarding and fell in love. That set me on a path of skateboarding, which sent me into board sports, into BMX and skiing and then snowboarding. With skateboarding, I could do it any time I wanted and there was nobody telling you what to do. I loved all the technical advancement of skateboarding in the ’70s. Trucks were new; they were just discovering how to make good bushings. They had just figured out urethane wheels. I wasn’t doing that math, but I was shopping through it, and I was a nerd trying to figure out: What systems work best for me, what trucks, what board? I had a lightweight G&S FibreFlex, 23-inch kicktail. A lot of people had big oak boards, but I couldn’t kick turn those. They were too heavy. All that to say, moving around is what brought me into board sports. It sounds like you had a bit of tech brain going into it. Not as tech as [Mike] Olson, but I love equipment. As we started build-ing snowboards, it was about building the best snowboards in general— initially it was just studying what worked best for us and then it was studying what worked best for other people. 072 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4: Page 72
