Who was Tommy Bartlett?
Who was Tommy Bartlett?
For years, the cars leaving the Tommy Bartlett Show went home with his bumper sticker on them. Chicago saw so many that columnist Mike Royko mused, “Judging from the bumper stickers, I’d say Chicago’s next mayor will be Tommy Bartlett,” the Chicago Tribune recalled when he died.
Bartlett was born Thomson Bartlett in Milwaukee on July 11, 1914, according to the Water Ski Hall of Fame. He started on Milwaukee radio at 13, on WISN in 1927, the Tribune reported. At 17 he moved to Chicago’s WBBM without finishing high school.
By 20 he was hosting seven radio soap operas a day. His best-known program was “Welcome Travelers,” which went from radio to NBC television. He set it up at a Chicago train station and interviewed people passing through, including Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan.
During World War II he worked in Army Air Corps recruiting, then learned to fly and became a flight instructor. After the war he flew for Northwest Airlines before going back to broadcasting in 1947.
Hooked on water skiing
In 1949, Bartlett saw a water-ski show at the Chicago Railroad Fair on the lakefront. He kept going back, and when the fair closed he bought most of the skiers’ surplus equipment.
He took the show on the road. According to WPR, it started in 1952 as a traveling show in Chicago and made Wisconsin Dells its permanent home the next year, in an outdoor auditorium on Lake Delton. Mercury outboard maker Carl Kiekhaefer became his partner.
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Bartlett added costumes, themes, jumping boats, “dancing water,” skydivers and night shows. In the 1950s he had four shows on the road while the Dells show ran daily from Memorial Day to Labor Day. His skiers performed at four World’s Fairs and toured for the USO and State Department in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and Burma.
The Hall of Fame credits him with bringing more people into water skiing than any other human factor. Yet he only once put on a pair of skis, at his 70th birthday party at the show in 1984.
“He wasn’t a skier at all. He was a true entertainer and promoter,” Tom Diehl, then president of Tommy Bartlett Inc., told the Tribune.
More than a ski show
The company also opened Tommy Bartlett’s Robot World, later remodeled into the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory, a hands-on science center. WPR and Roadside America’s attraction page date it to 1982, though Roadside’s own 1998 story on his death said the 1970s.
His last big draw came in 1996, when he bought Russia’s spare Mir space station and trucked it to Robot World, Roadside America reported.
Bartlett died of kidney failure at Oakwood Village nursing home in Madison on Sept. 6, 1998. He was 84. It was Labor Day weekend, the end of the summer season he had spent decades building.
The last show
The pandemic canceled the 2020 season, and that September Diehl, by then the company’s president and co-owner, announced the ski show would not come back.
“While we are grateful that we had almost seven decades of entertaining visitors in Wisconsin Dells, we have no choice but to close the show,” Diehl said.
The Exploratory kept going and now runs as Ripley’s Tommy Bartlett Exploratory. Stop in next time you’re in the Dells.
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