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Paul Drysdale, one of Canada’s last remaining waterbed salesmen, wants more people to sleep on water-filled mattresses like the one he dozes on at home in North York, Ont.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
Paul Drysdale has spent nearly half a century dispelling the foundational myth that a waterbed will improve your love life.
The North York-based salesman says the late Sue Johanson, a client and the iconoclastic host of the Sunday Night Sex Show, agreed with him, which Mr. Drysdale figures is authoritative proof.
“You can have bad sex anywhere if you’re horrible at doing it,” he says. “And you can have good sex on a table, on the floor, on the couch, in a bed, in the back seat of a car – anywhere – if you care to be good at it.”
However, larger hurdles remain if the masses are to embrace this soupy style of sleeping that burst into the public consciousness in the late 1960s.
A Don Quixote of dozing, Mr. Drysdale is determined to keep making his tiny waves in the mattress marketplace while waiting for the waterbed’s popularity to surge once more. He contends he is one of Canada’s last two specialized waterbed retailers – the final pair standing in a trade so small that they pool their orders from a Colorado-based supplier.
Mr. Drysdale became a waterbed evangelist at 18, when he left his family dairy farm near Georgian Bay for Toronto, and purchased a bed from the man who had opened one of Canada’s first waterbed stores in Victoria, B.C., before setting up shop in Ontario.
The owner liked Mr. Drysdale’s personality and hired him on the spot to split his time selling and installing them.
It was 1977, and the invention was rolling east across Canada from its first showrooms in British Columbia. A Globe and Mail story from that era noted up to a fifth of all mattresses sold back then in B.C. were waterbeds, with many purchased at one of Vancouver’s 45 specialty stores.
About 10 years earlier, a design student in San Francisco had created this apparatus and it soon jumped from Bay Area head shops to mattress retailers across California, and then up the West Coast.
Within his first decade in the business, Mr. Drysdale recalls, he was selling up to five waterbeds a day in and around Toronto. Now, a couple years after winding down his brick-and-mortar Brampton store, he sells about 100 a year through his GTA Furniture Central webpage and by partnering with another showroom.
Yet, Mr. Drysdale, who runs a “I love my waterbed” page on Facebook for 227 other users, still has hope the general public will begin to understand the science he says proves the mattresses are far superior to their conventional competitors, or “dead beds” as some waterbed enthusiasts still call them.
“Over the almost 50 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen evolution of all sorts of mattresses,” says Mr. Drysdale, who once counted the late NDP leader Jack Layton and his wife, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, as long-time customers. “Every one they come out with is trying to imitate what a waterbed does naturally anyway – which is conform to your body shape.”
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Mr. Drysdale says he sold up to five waterbeds a day in and around Toronto in the late 1970s and 1980s. Now, a couple years after winding down his brick-and-mortar Brampton store, he sells about 100 a year.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
Biological anthropologist Kimberly Plomp disputes the therapeutic benefits of waterbeds.
“There is nothing evolutionary or physiological that would prepare us to sleep on a waterbed,” says the archaeology professor. She runs the Human Osteoarchaeology, Palaeopathology and Evolution lab at the University of the Philippines.
The weakest point of our S-shaped spines is the lumbar, or lowest, curve and Dr. Plomp contends a waterbed may offer more support for this region than a typical spring mattress. However, she doubts it could compare to today’s modern memory foam products.
Eventually, the waterbed’s major mattress momentum began petering out in the mid-to-late eighties, according to experts such as Mr. Drysdale. He still bristles at how the early marketing of the bed as a “passion pit” helped ensconce it as a cradle of countercultural kink in the eyes of many.
Horror stories of older models leaking into apartments below, and Hollywood falsely depicting geysers erupting out of the beds if they were punctured (in reality, the liquid seeps out) also soured landlords for years. B.C.’s rental protection agency only rescinded an outright ban on tenants using them in 1980.
Mr. Drysdale also attributes the downfall of his dream bed to bigger mattress manufacturers making inferior facsimiles that dragged down the market, something he says a spring salesman confirmed to him at the crest of its popularity.
Charlie Hall, the former San Francisco State University student who made the first modern waterbed, says the wider industry simply adapted to mimic the contouring effect of his invention, without the more complicated installation or maintenance.
At a past industry convention, he says in a recent interview, someone working for one of the three dominant mattress brands at the time told him that everyone began innovating to create more conforming surfaces, such as memory foam, after the success of waterbeds.
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While experts say there’s no evidence waterbeds offer more or better support than modern memory foam options, Mr. Drysdale says he’ll never give up his waterbed.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
The 82-year-old still sleeps in a waterbed in each of his three houses across Washington State and California, but can’t fit one into his yacht, which his invention wrought.
Mr. Hall knew the waterbed would captivate people the moment his classmates visited his bachelor pad in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, as part of a tour of furniture projects.
“Everybody stayed there the rest of the afternoon and then someone went down and got a big jug of wine, and the party got started,” he says.
Nowadays, when he introduces himself to fellow baby boomers and his invention comes up, people often react with cheery nostalgia for the waterbed that got away, not making it through a long-ago move or otherwise.
While many Millennials have never heard of waterbeds, two younger people have had no choice but to embrace them: Mr. Drysdale’s daughters.
“Both of my daughters sleep on waterbeds, both of my grandchildren sleep on waterbeds, my grandson’s girlfriend sleeps on waterbeds – don’t be silly,” he chuckles with feigned outrage, when asked about the rest of his family. “My children were educated from day one on what the best damn bed is to sleep on.”
