Sherm Poppen, who helped start the snowboarding industry in the 1960s when he bolted together his older daughter’s skis to create a stand-up board that could surf the snowy sand dunes behind their lakeside cottage in Michigan, died on July 31 at his home in Griffin, Ga. He was 89.

The cause was complications of a stroke, his family said.

A practical consideration — not an epiphany — drove Mr. Poppen to invent his forerunner to the snowboard.

It was Christmas Day 1965, and he was at home in Muskegon when his pregnant wife, Nancy, implored him to go outside and entertain their rambunctious daughters, Wendy, 10, and Laurie, 5.

“You can imagine — it’s Christmas, and my wife is pretty uptight, and she said, ‘Sherman, you’ve got to take these kids out of the house,’ ” he recalled in 2009 in an interview with Steamboat Pilot & Today, a newspaper in Steamboat Springs, Col. “And we were having a huge snowstorm on the shores of Lake Michigan.”