Summer’s End at Tommy Bartlett Show
When you are young, the seasons turn like a pinwheel.
Seasons slow over time and become a paddlewheel in muddy water. As you grow old you try to hang onto something. The last flower from a garden. A John Prine song about summer’s end.
Or a place you may never see again.
On the steamy Fourth of July weekend, 2012, I visited the Tommy Bartlett Show in the Wisconsin Dells with my award-winning videographer Jon Sall. The homespun big top on water was celebrating its 60th anniversary and there was a reunion with a dozen Bartlett skiers from the 1950s and 60s.
Jon shares my eye for the simple beauties of Americana and this was something we needed to capture for the Chicago Sun-Times. We wanted to collect oral histories. Anyone who grew up in the Chicago area was familiar with the unique Bartlett presentation of water skiing, acrobats, clowns, and hillbillies performing on the tree-lined shores of Lake Delton. It was “Circus Circus” on skis.
On Wednesday the Tommy Bartlett Show announced it was closing down for good. It cited the “catastrophic loss of business” due to the pandemic. The show generally runs from Memorial Day through Labor Day, attracting about 2,500 spectators daily.
The Tommy Bartlett Show was the longest-running professional ski show in the world. Cypress Gardens closed in 2009, ending a 73-year-old run. The Tommy Bartlett Show billed itself as “The Greatest Show On H20.”
According to a Tommy Bartlett Show press release, over the years there were more than 18,700 performances for more than 30 million people. The unique experience was passed down through generations. A place isn’t a place until it is remembered.
And I’ve been thinking about some of the people we met in 2012.
Here are some of them in Jon’s fine video:
Over the entire weekend, nearly 650 Bartlett staff alumni and families watched the shows of another generation. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Fans sat in 5,000 seat bleachers, half under the stars or sun, and the other half under covered grandstands. During the 1950s people sat on peach crates on the beach and blankets on the hillside.
Leslie “Skip” Gilkerson was the Bartlett show director from 1960 to 1984. Outside of Tommy Bartlett himself, few had committed as much energy to the water show’s legacy as Gilkerson. As a show director, he helped design costumes, picked out the music, made the show schedule, and coached young skiers. He grew up in landlocked Monticello, Ind. and made his skiing debut at the Indiana Beach resort.
Gilkerson flew in from his home in New Braunfels, Tx. for the event. He told me, “I don’t want to sound haughty, but no one knows who John Heisman was but everybody knows the Heisman trophy. The outstanding water show skier in America gets the Skip Gilkerson award. I’m supposed to be the best water skier that ever lived. I’m in the Wisconsin Water Ski Hall of Fame, the (U.S.) Water Ski Hall of Fame.”
Provided photo from Tommy Bartlett Show
Gilkerson was sitting under a pavilion near the cool water. He took in all the festivities and he took his time. “It is family,” he said with a soft smile. “I met my wife (Sharon) out here 45 years ago. I went to have a pizza 45 years ago and there she was. This is wonderful, but there’s also a sad connotation.
“It may be the last time I see some of these people.”
Gilkerson died on Oct. 25, 2015, two and a half weeks after he was in a motorcycle accident while on his way to coach high school swim practice in San Marcos, Tx. He was 74. He was survived by Sharon, her daughter, his sister and nephews, and nieces.
As Gilkerson told us in Jon’s video, Tommy Bartlett did not like water. Bartlett was born in 1914 in Milwaukee and spent most of the 1940s as an announcer for WBBM-AM in Chicago. He became a flight instructor for the United States Army Air Corps during World War II but returned to ‘BBM to host the “Welcome Travelers” radio show. “Welcome Travelers” evolved into an NBC and CBS television show that was taped in the College Inn Room at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago.
Tommy Bartlett on land.
In 1949 Bartlett saw a water skiing show as part of the Chicago Railroad Fair at Navy Pier. “He thought it was the wave of the future,” Gilkerson said, no pun intended. “So he went to Mercury Motors and said he was going to produce a water ski show. His love of publicity outweighed his fear of water. But on his 70th birthday, he went water skiing.”
That would be the only time Bartlett would appear on water. He was inducted into the U.S. Water Ski Hall of Fame in 1993. He died during the season’s final performances on Sept. 6, 1998.
Bartlett launched his water show in 1952 on the shores of Lake Mendota at the beloved Edgewater Hotel in Madison, Wis. Later that year he moved north to the Wisconsin Dells. By 1964 Bartlett water skiers were attracting standing room only crowds at the New York World’s Fair. According to the Tommy Bartlett Show, more than 4.8 million people attended the water show performances.
The Bartlett show dodged one bullet in 2008 when rainfalls broke the Lake Delton shoreline. The 12-foot deep lake emptied into the Wisconsin River. Water skiing was curtailed, but acrobats and jugglers continued to perform on land. The show always went on.
Author living the dream with Bartlett performers (Jon Sall photo)
Bartlett was one of the first entrepreneurs in the Dells. His water show set the stage for today’s Dells that include the Kalhari Resort, Noah’s Ark, and Robot World. A plaque on the show property called Bartlett “Mr. Wisconsin Dells.”
According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel current owner Tom Diehl is planning to sell the 25-acre property with 2,000 feet of lakefront. He’s hoping another entertainment company would be interested in reconfiguring the property.
Paging Jimmy Buffett.
Gilkerson enjoyed sharing stories of Bartlett’s history. He interrupted one conversation and said, “Trivia question! Who was the first person to ski in Central Park? My sister Judy, because Tommy produced a show there and then in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. She carried the American flag.”
Bartlett was a full-fledged promoter. Generations of Midwesterners remember driving around with Tommy Bartlett bumper stickers on their cars. Through the 1980s, parking attendants would wander through the lot, slapping stickers on cars without permission. People started complaining so Bartlett changed the game to where a customer had to lower the sun visor on their driver’s side to denote they wanted a free sticker.
Gilkerson should have the final word. I asked him about the differences between the shows of the 1960s and 2012. “We went through a period of time where they wanted all the girls to look alike,” he answered. “They had all the girls wear wigs so they had the same length hairstyle like the Rockettes. The boats are more powerful now. The skis are more expensive. The skis are fiberglass versus wood. We used to have an organ. Now it’s pre-scripted music.”
The theme of the 2012 revue was “Livin’ the Dream.” The sound system played Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.” The summer of 2012 was half over and the Tommy Bartlett alumni would sail off to an unknown future.
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