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Genealogy — McElmeel Family Pages

This page accompanies the information about the family of Lonald Vincent McElmeel and Leona Colette Jasper -- parents of:

• Lynell
• Madonna
• Bernadine (Thielen)
• Kathleen (Luensmann)
• Patricia (Doughtery)

Kathleen Doris McElmeel married David Luensmann in 1934 and later, in 1969,  the family moved to Westminster, Colorado because of David's job with the Lange Ski Company.

Lange Ski Company
Dubuque, Iowa to Westminster, Colorado

Robert Lange (1925-2000) a engineering graduate of Harvard was also a skier who wanted to find a solution to his constantly swollen joints and his falling over.  So in 1957, while operating his Dubuque, Iowa plastics fabrication firm, he designed a molded plastic ski boot. The boots were designed to protect the ankles and provided support for the calf muscles.  The boots transferred power from the lower leg to the skis and took the stress from the ankle joint.  Lange was able to patent his design in 1958 but later the plastic was deemed too brittle and was replaced by polyester which was more pliable.  Five years later the design was further refined when laces and steel buckles were incorporated into the boot. Other major boot manufacturers began manufacturing similarly designed boots. The Lange boots revolutionized alpine skiing and within 10 years leather ski boots had all but disappeared. In 1968 75% of the skiers competing in the Olympics at Grenoble wore Lange’s ski boots. 
By 1970 the Lange Ski Company had relocated to Broomfield, Colorado.

Information from: George Chesterton’s article "Sports active: No turning back: The modern ski boot". Independent on Sunday, The. Dec 22, 2002. Online at FindArticles.com. 30 Sep. 2006.  www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4159/is_20021222/ai_n12667926

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Obituary of the founder of the Lange Ski Company  (posted here September 2006; date of obituary (2006?)

ROBERT BROOKINGS LANGE

Robert Brookings Lange, best known as the inventor of the plastic ski boot and the founder of the Lange Company, died Thursday June 15th, in his Boulder, Colorado home, ending a life of innovation, action and entrepreneurship.
The second son of Philo and Alice Lange, Mr. Lange was born in Dubuque Iowa on September 5, 1925. There he attended Lincoln Elementary and Washington Junior High Schools.
Mr. Lange’s life of motion and challenge appeared at a very early age. He often told others of a wristwatch his grandfather presented him as a boyhood gift.  One day his mother found him crying because he could not get the disassembled watch back together, running again. Although his mother scolded him, his grandfather returned with a second watch, one to tell the time, the other to take apart and explore a process that would never end. Lange’s first ski slopes were the winter bluffs of the Dubuque Mississippi River, and as a seventh grade shop project in the late 1930’s, he built a pair of solid maple skis. Thus began a path of snow, which over the years would take him around the world.    .
For his secondary education, Mr. Lange went on to the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire class of 1943 where he received letters in Cross Country Track, Swimming and Lacrosse. During his senior high school year, Mr. Lange joined the war effort to enlist in the Army Air Corps as an aviation cadet, where he remained until discharged in October 1945. He enrolled in Harvard University in l946, also receiving letters in Swimming and Lacrosse, and obtaining a degree in Economics. He graduated in June 1949 in the company of Robert Kennedy and Henry Kissinger.
College winters and springs were spent on ski trips, first climbing and skiing Tuckerman’s Ravine, (he said one time was enough) and then on a 1948 spring break in Aspen, Colorado, where “he would really learn to ski” in a pair of army surplus boots. In Aspen he made friends with Morrie Shepard, Pete Seibert, Steve Knowlton, Dean Perkins, Bill Mason and Oak Spence, always, as he put it, “Bringing up the rear.” Lange realized that if he wanted to keep up with his speedy friends, he would have to improve his equipment. He tried to buy a solution, first a pair of hand made boots from Peter Limmer in North Conway, New Hampshire and later a pair of hand-made Molitors from Gale Spence at Aspen Sports. To his dismay, neither purchase improved his skiing. The first were like slippers; the second were like painful metal clamps. Both softened over time, convincing him that something could be made better. To reinforce them, Lange used a material from the repair work on his Higgins plywood boat, just declassified after the war, called fiberglass. Thus in the summer of 1949 the plastic ski boot was born.
Mr. Lange’s Mechanical pursuits also spilled into his personal life. On a date at Four Mounds in Dubuque Iowa, he repaired a jammed home movie projector before the very young Vidie Burden. She would later, in 1950, become his wife, life companion, and mother of three. It should be noted that Lange proposed to Vidie on a ski trip. Their honeymoon was spent in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1951 Mr. Lange received an MBA in Finance and Marketing from Southern Methodist University. He began his career in the family insurance business as salesmen, an occupation that taught him to sell, and also financed his experiments in new materials of the day, plastic. In a basement at North Home Furniture, he began tinkering with small jobs, beginning with doorknobs and hula-hoops, which would grow to production of miniature Corvairs in 1956. At this time Mr. Dave Luensmann of Dyersville, Iowa joined him and became Lange’s development companion for the rest of his life.
Although Lange had been exploring plastic ski boot reinforcement for several years, in 1958 he finally decided to transform his hobby into a business, and the development of the Lange boot began. There were many designs, production developments in different materials, and many failures. Lange developed an ABS vacuum molding process an innovation of its day, but produced boots that broke in cold conditions. Multi-colored fiberglass models were attempted, but these were impossibly stiff and the world would not accept colors that did not resemble leather. Buckles, an innovation from the Henke Company, were intro-duced making it less painful to put the boot on.
At this period, Lange lived a 20-hour workday, selling insurance during the day and designing at night. His wife Vidie would bring the children for a picnic dinner in the factory that produced a product with a 50% breakage rate.
Such circumstances did not tire his lust for challenge. At the same period, his father-in-law, Bill Burden, told Lange he could have a houseboat that had sunk in the Mississippi,  if only Lange could bring it up front the river bottom. With his friends, Lange developed an air pump system that floated the houseboat to the surface, much to the surprise of family and people in the community.
The breakthrough in boot development came in 1963. With the help of Dupont, the Lange team transformed a polyurethane test tube procedure into a complex molding machine that produced a boot that would optimally perform under changing conditions. The two-piece hinge concept was patented at this time, a design predominately used today, now thirty-seven years later. Lange was joined by his older brother Wells,  who left a career in the US Army to help run the expansion of the production operation. Howie Madigan also joined the team.
The new Lange boot significantly improved edge control and race times. The major marketing breakthrough came at the 1966 World Ski championships in Portillo, Chile when Nancy Greene, Rod Hebron and Suzy Chafes had exceptional results with the “boots from Dubuque.” Robert Lange was on the scene at the race, repairing racer’s boots himself, trying competitors’ designs on his own foot, taking copious notes in a Dictaphone. However, not everyone appreciat-ed his new technology. The boot was such an advantage to racers, that there was a European movement to ban it. But Lange provided free boots to coaches and racers of all national teams. The vote swung in the favor of plastic. It seemed that champions all preferred to ski faster that keep out a new competitor.
Ski champions became part of the Lange Company research and design team. By the 1968 Grenoble Olympics, almost 72% of the world’s racers wore the Lange boot. Several national coaches had helped design the boot and Dave Jacobs and the late Vern Anderson joined the Lange Company from the Canadian National team.
In 1968 the Lange Company’s world production was 25,000 pairs. In December 1969 the company went public, and by 1970 production facilities swelled from one factory in Dubuque, to several in Broomfield, Colorado, Montreal, Canada and Valgardina, Italy producing 60,000 pairs annually. Robert Lange’s younger brother Philo joined the team at this time to help the expansion and the Lange Company headquarters and family moved to Colorado.
The company began developing a larger range of products, including skis, hockey skate, experimental bindings, gold clubs and tennis rackets, hoping to expand beyond a one-product organization. But with hyper-expansion, the company could not be sustained. This coupled with a sluggish economy, and some product recalls (from a chemically reactive “Lange Flow liner”) Lange chose to sell the company. Recently he described this as a “sad day” but one that would always have the “fond memory of having been the first and very best at what I did.”
Since that time, Lange continued innovating, accepting challenges and attempting to be the beat in new domains. At times this was a new business, others as a consultant. Some were successful, others not, but they were always daring and new in their vision. He founded the RBL Ski Company and at the time of his death, held the C.E.O. position at Pro Golf. Lange also worked in health technologies, improving production facilities for hydrophilic contact lens, and in management for a corporation closing human skin. Most recently in 1994, along with his son Robert Jr., and Dave Luensmann, Robert Sr. developed a proprietary biomaterial in an implantable carbon composite called OstaPek. This material is without radiographic artifact and has mechanical stiffness properties closer to bone than implantable metals available today. Over the last 6 years, OstaPek has been used for thousands of spine surgery implants in Europe and will soon be available in the USA and Asia.  Its applications are expected to grow, and it is expected this will be yet another competitive advantage.
As a father, Mr. Lange showed his children how to attempt what seemed impossible. He was always available for encouragement and advice. Until his final days, even in failing health, he was active, making plans, and attempting new challenges.
           
Robert Lange is survived by:
Vidie Lange, his wife
Cornelia Wells Lange, MD, daughter
Robert Brookings Lange Jr. son
James Gronen, nephew.

His third child, Swasey Thayer Lange, passed away in 1991.
Her surviving family:
Mr. Clark Nielsen
Ms. Kristine Nielsen, his wife   
Garret Nielsen, Swasey’s son
Thayer Nielsen, Swasey’s son
Morgan Nielsen, the daughter of Clark and Kristine.


Services will be held at 2 pm Sunday at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 1419 Pine St., Boulder, Colorado. Interment will be in Dubuque, lowa.

The family grieves his departure, and asks everyone to join them in their prayers.
Memorials  may go to: Phillips Exeter Academy Alumni Assoc., 20 Main St., Exeter, NH 03833-2560 - Phone (603) 777-3454

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Last Updated: October 2006
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