Lake Eloise, Winter Haven: Where Performance Water Skiing Began

During World War II, a newspaper published a photograph of skiers at Cypress Gardens, and soldiers stationed in the area turned up expecting a water show. There was no water show. Julie Pope gathered her children and their friends and sent them out on Lake Eloise to put one on. Visit Central Florida tells the story that way. The improvised show did not stay improvised; the skiing became part of what the attraction did every day.

Cypress Gardens had opened on the Lake Eloise shoreline in 1936, founded by Dick and Julie Pope, and it opened as a botanical garden. Cypress trees, canals, flower beds, and Southern Belles in hoop skirts gave photographers something Florida could sell, and Dick Pope was known for knowing what to do with a photograph. Skiing was not part of the original attraction. What people tend to remember about Cypress Gardens is the Belles, Pope's publicity, or its billing as Florida's first theme park, all of it decades ahead of the parks that came later.

Water skiing itself was not invented on Lake Eloise. Performance water skiing was: the theatrical kind, with timing and costumes and stunts. Florida Memory dates that to Cypress Gardens in 1941, and the title the place carried afterward, Water Ski Capital of the World, was earned on the water rather than in the gardens.

The lake is what made a daily show practical. Lake Eloise put a broad, open sheet of water directly at the edge of the attraction, wide enough for a towboat to build speed and close enough that visitors watched a run from start to finish without going looking for it. An act that carried real physical risk could be rehearsed and repeated on a schedule, because the water in front of the gardens was calm often enough to allow it. Human pyramids rose behind the towboats. Skiers crossed the surface barefoot. The same routine ran in front of tourists, photographers, soldiers, and Winter Haven families who grew up thinking it ordinary to watch people build a pyramid while a boat pulled them along.

The cameras came for it. Movie crews and newsreel crews filmed at the gardens, celebrities came to be photographed there, and Esther Williams pictures carried the Cypress Gardens look far past Polk County. LEGOLAND Florida's history of the old gardens counts more than 50 films and television shows, and credits the water-ski shows with helping make the place a world-renowned destination. The lake is in a great many of those frames, because the act the cameras came for happened on it.

Cypress Gardens changed hands. After Walt Disney World opened, Central Florida's tourism business shifted toward the new parks, and the old attraction eventually closed. LEGOLAND Florida opened on the former Cypress Gardens property in 2011 and preserved the historic botanical gardens inside the new park. Skiing on Lake Eloise outlasted the attraction that invented it: the shows kept running in a new form, with LEGO pirates in place of the old Cypress Gardens cast, until WLRN reported that LEGOLAND planned to end its water-ski shows and competitions in 2025.

Eighty-nine years after Dick and Julie Pope opened their garden on this shoreline, the beds, the canals, and the cypress they planted are still inside the park on Lake Eloise.