SKIING
HERITAGE

SKIINSKIINsk

2005 ISHA AWARDS

Richard Needham: Lifetime Achievement Award in Ski Journalism

For over thirty years, Dick Needham has been actively contributing to the ski history record as a journalist and editor, becoming editor of the trade journals Ski Business and Ski Area Management in 1971, moving to Ski as executive editor in 1973, being named editor in 1974, and editor-in-chief in 1992. During this editorship, he also wrote and hosted two radio series, Ski Spot for CBS Radio in New York from 1978 to 1983, and On the Slopes for Audio-TV Features from 1984 to 1987.

Beginning in 1996 he became desktop publisher and editor of Inside Tracks, a monthly newsletter dedicated to serious skiers. He became editor of Skiing Heritage in 2002. Since that time he has enlarged ISHA's quarterly from a 36-page to a 48-page periodical, and has presided over a gain in circulation from 800 to 1,300 subscribers, which is the current number of associates in America's largest ski history organization.

His love for alpine skiing began in 1957 at Caberfae, Michigan, when he was unceremoniously shoved down a slope by a college friend. Surviving that initiation, Dick since has skied more than ninety mountains in fourteen countries. The length of his involvement with ski journalism can be registered by noting his first contribution to Ski in the October 1972, "The Resurgence of the Rope Tow." He specialized in industry and business reportage, interleaved with articles such as on Robert Redford in 1975 and 1985, on Truman Capote in 1981 and summer skiing in Portillo in 1978, with an occasional foray into investigative journalism as in his 1980 article "The Trashing of Lake Placid."

In all Dick contributed more than a hundred articles to Ski through the years ranging from resort reportage to racing, to early technical articles on carving. In all his guises as a ski journalist, Dick's growing gamut of subjects engendered an ever-deeper expertise in reportage on all phases of the sport. Currently Ski's archive of several hundred issues serve Dick as an indispensible text and photography resource for Skiing Heritage.

His major book contribution to ski history was his 1987 Ski 50 Years in North America, published while editor of Ski, a substantial coffee table book celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Ski, the most popular ski magazine in America. As he wrote in the book's introduction, "I have learned more about the sport in the twelve months that it has taken to compile the remembrances in these pages than I have in the last twenty years. I am still, I can say unabashedly and without blushing, a student of the sport. And that is fine with me since, like skiing, the real fun in history-poking is in the discovering, in the learning." In is third year as editor of Skiing Heritage, Dick is still out there on the frontier of history preservation, discovering.

Dick was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1939. He graduated from Denison University in 1961, and earned an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1967. He served four years as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, from 1961 to 1965. Before coming to Ski he had been an editor at several national magazine publications including Saturday Review, American Home and Institutions; In 1985. Dick won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in ski journalism.

Charles Sanders: Ullr Award for Boys of Winter

Charles Sanders is Director and Executive Vice President of the music industry's worldwide anti -hunger program, Artists Against Hunger and Poverty, as well a copyright and First Amendment attorney, and a New York University professor. He grew up as the nephew of a 10th Mountain Division World War II combat veteran, skiing with former American mountain soldiers in Massachusetts Berkshires. Since then, Charlie has spent over three decades of winter vacations as an avid skier and mountain photographer, visiting over 100 different mountain ski centers on three continents. On the profession legal side, he authored a seminal legal article combining his expertise as a skier and as lawyer on the protection of ski areas against predatory personal injury lawyers, under the title "The Cold Truth: Have Attorneys Really Chilled the Ski Industry?"

Sanders is co-founder of the James Madison Project, established to assist private citizens in exercising their right to freedom of information. "What we don't know can hurt us," writes Sanders, "and that includes what civilians don't know, or would rather not know, about the brutal nature of military combat."

Some of Charlie's Berkshire 10th Mountain skiing mentors were among those critically wounded on combat duty with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy, and as he says, "I wrote The Boys of Winter in part to educate myself on what my skiing friends had been through, and to explore what it really means to 'give all' for your country."

Three years ago, Charlie started his research and began writing a manuscript centered on the lives of three young talented skiers who at some point volunteered for the 10th and fought on the Italian front during World War II -- Ralph Bromaghin from the Northwest, Jacob Nunnemacher from the Midwest and Rudy Konieczny from the Northeast -- who enlisted in the 10th Mountain and fought in Italy in the last few days of World War II-none of the three came back.

John Imbrie, co-editor of the collected memoirs of C Company of the 10th Mountain's 85th regiment, Good Times Bad Times, writes that Boys of Winter is "the best book on the 10th yet to appear in print" and a book that "perfectly captures the spirit of the men who made the division what it was-as well as the spirit of those troopers who survived to help shape the postwar world." Imbrie praises the author's accuracy not only in spelling of names, places, and recording of casualties but in large matters like the basic structure of the Italian campaign. The Boys of Winter is an immensely valuable and substantial addition to 10th Mountain literature and to the history record of skiing in the United States in the 1940s.

Peter Oliver: Ullr Award for Stowe: A New England Classic

Peter Oliver first outing on skis came as a seven-year-old on a family Christmas vacation in Lermoos, Austria in 1960. His first skis were wood, without edges, with beartrap bindings, lace-up boots, and bamboo poles. Undiscouraged, and except for three winters missing in action due to college partying, Peter has been faithful every winter since.

He began writing freelance ski articles 20 years ago after five years of editing grade school kids' magazines. He has written for Outside, Powder, Ski Press, Men's Journal, Bicycling, and Backpacker. His mainstay are the articles published as contributing editor for Skiing since the late 1980s. He has covered skiing in New Zealand, a history of ski film, secrets of Tommy Moe's 1994 Olympic downhill, and the wackiness of the X Games, among other diverse themes.

In a career itinerary to more than 100 ski resorts on five continents, he has recorded for posterity four World Championships, the ski aspects of three winter Olympics, rubbed august elbows in writing down notes on Olympians, celebrities of film, stars of TV, and skiing politicians the likes of Howard Dean. He compares the consequent financial reward with that of a checkout clerk at Costco, yet of course a career endeavor pitched at a level of satisfaction incomparably richer and more rewarding.

In 2002 he wrote Skiing and Boarding for Outside, a guidebook and travelogue covering the great ski destination resorts of the world. In 1995 he received the Lowell Thomas Award for Excellence in Journalism, and Outside included his 1997 Bicycling: Touring and Mountain Biking Basics, among its Best Books-ever-in travel, sports, fiction and science.

In 2001, he went under contract with Time Inc.'s later defunct Mountain Sports Press to author one of their sumptuous coffee-table North American ski resort histories. Peter produced Stowe: A New England Classic in a tearing hurry to meet a normally unreasonable corporate deadline. Given the assignment in November 2001, he delivered by mid-April 2002 his fascinating tale of that most complex of Northeast ski resorts. Stowe, a ski town whose roots go back farther and deeper in history than any other in New England.

Peter has lived ten years in his house in Warren, Vermont, not far from Sugarbush, where he teaches cross-country skiing when not pounding away at a computer keyboard or dreaming up proposals for his current, not-yet-funded book project on the entire wonderful world of skiing.

US ski history owes much to Peter's discovery of the freebies that spurred his journalistic visits to world-class super-slopes and turned him into a longtime ski journalist who has now made this substantial contribution entitled Stowe: a New England Classic.

Henry Yaple: Ullr Award for Ski Bibliography

Henry Yaple, college librarian at Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington describing his motivation for undertaking this massive research project, writes, "As a hopelessly addicted skier of more than 40 years, and an academic librarian of nearly 30 years practice, the literature of skiing has always been kind of a surrogate drug during the summer and fall when I could not ski." Henry Yaple's desire to "think skiing" during the off-season bore fruit after ten years of labor: 7,615 entries in two volumes, totaling 743 pages.

Ski Bibliography is a most exhaustive listing of thousands of public expressions of the sport -- books and periodicals, leaflets, reports, dissertations, government documents and non-print categories such as film, video, sound, software, and e-books. This magnificent work is slated to please and profit historians present and future, collectors of skiing literature, and skiers curious about the extent, breadth and scope of writing and recordings on the sport in English from 1890 to 2002.

Henry's first time on skis at Schweitzer Basin, Idaho in February, 1964 immediately motivated the purchase of a pair of wood skis at Bill Hatch Ski Shop in Spokane. Henry skied nearly every weekend at North South Ski Bowl, near Emida, Idaho. It was instant, and total love.

After he became Acquisitions Librarian at University of Wyoming Libraries, he joined National Ski Patrol in April 1978. He took Advanced First Aid, and passed his ski and toboggan test in 1979. He was a member of National Ski Patrol, Snowy Range Patrol, Wyoming and Spout Springs Patrol, Oregon until 1995. He served as Patrol Director of the Snowy Range Patrol for two years, and for ten years as an Avalanche Instructor. The National Ski Patrol was his postgraduate education in skis, snow, and mountaincraft.

Henry's educational credits: BA from Kalamazoo College in 1963; Rotary Foundation Fellowship to study at the University d'aixe-Marseille in 1965-66; MA from University of Idaho in 1966; and Master of Science in Librarianship from Western Michigan University in 1972.

Ian Scully: Film Award for Legacy: Austria's Alpine Ambassadors

Ian Scully is a PSIA Level III certified ski instructor fluent in German, English, and Spanish who taught at Sugarbush, Vermont, then at Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire for five years and last season for the Ernie Blake Ski School at Taos, New Mexico. His interest in ski history stemmed from an Austrian heritage (his mother's family is from Austria) and from growing up in Franconia, New Hampshire, site of the New England Ski Museum (he is a longtime member), and the Cannon Mt. Ski School. The Cannon Mt. school was directed early on by Paul Valar, from Davosby, and his Viennese wife, the late Paula Valar. Ian came to know the Valars, retired from teaching to their Mittersill home below the slopes of Cannon.

Ian's interest in ski history was heightened by visits to two resorts in neighboring Mt. Washington Valley intimately linked with early US ski history. First there is Jackson, site of the first ski school in the East authorized by the world famous Hannes Schneider. Benno Rybizka, the founding director of the school, arrived at Jackson in 1936 after having taught many years at the Schneidier ski school in St. Anton, Austria. The second historic ski town in Mt. Washington Valley to pique Ian's interest in ski history was North Conway, where Hannes Schneider himself had arrived from Austria to direct the Mt. Cranmore ski school in 1939. After Hannes' death, his son Herbert Schneider directed the Mt. Cranmore school. Ian has become a friend of the family.

In 2001, Ian decided to interview the Valars and Herb Schneider as a start toward creating a chronicle of the Austrian influence in the development of a viable and prosperous American ski industry. Ian videotaped interviews with Paul Valar and a number of Austrians. Based on the transcripts, Ian wrote a paper presented at the 2002 International Ski History Congress in Park City, Utah entitled "Why and How Austrian (and some Swiss) Ski Instructors were Central in and to the Development of the North American Ski Industry."

Ian expanded his efforts to document the influence of Austria by spending a year touring the Americas and Europe interviewing pioneer Austrian instructors and ski school directors who had emigrated to the US. These interviews became the basis for an hour-long documentary film in collaboration with history filmmaker Rick Moulton. In January 2005, at the Third FIS Ski History Congress in Muerzzuschlag, Austria, Ian showed excerpts of the film now released as Legacy: Austria's Alpine Ambassadors.

Ian is a man of many talents, having spent five years as a marketing manager in the business world; two years as a high school administrator; six years translating and interpreting in hospitals as well as teaching grades 5-12 in Spanish, Social Studies, Bilingual Vocational and Technology, plus coaching soccer and skiing. He has a BA in International Relations and Latin American Studies from Davidson College, an EdM. in International Education from Harvard, and a MBA from Northeastern.

Rick Moulton: Film Award for Legacy: Austria's Alpine Ambassadors

Rick Moulton has been a filmmaker for thirty years. Born and raised in Hanover, New Hampshire, he began his career in the late 1960s with the the surf films Oceans and Freeform, shot in Hawaii and California. He returned to New England to work as a director for Vermont Public Television in the 1970s. He continued his relationship with Vermont Public Television as an independent producer with the New England Emmy Award-winning Vermont Memories I and II.

As an independent filmmaker in the early 1980s he made Legends of American Skiing, the film that won the 1984 Banff Mountain Film Festival. The film was aired nationally on PBS. Since then, Moulton has produced a number of ski history documentaries such as Change and Challenge in 1994 and Thrills and Spills in 1998, films currently released on DVD.

He has made a good many spot ads for New York agencies with national clients including Rolex, Ray-Ban and Visa. His industrial clients have included NBC, IBM, and the R.J. Reynolds Corp. He has produced the annual ski industry magazine format Vegas Video for Ski Magazine.

Rick has a deep interest and extensive experience working with vintage ski film. He set up the Care Collection Archives for the New York Public Library, and serves as a film consultant for the film archives of the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame as well as for the restoration of films in the archives of New England Ski Museum such as Der Weisse Rausch, starring Hannes Schneider and Leni Riefenstahl in their famous fox-chase romp and the earlier Fox Chase in the Engadine, two of six films NESM has restored under his direction and transferred to video and DVD.

Rick worked on ski history sidebars for NBC's productions of both the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics and has just finished producing the first part of a two-part Legacy: Austria's Alpine Ambassadors with Ian Scully. The film alternates on camera interviews of significant Austrian ski pioneer instructors and ski school directors such as Otto Lang and Herb Schneider with vintage footage of relevant technique and teaching methods to create one of the most ambitious ski history films so far brought to the screen.

Rick is currently working with the Lowell Thomas collection to create a documentary about the man who was once the world's best known newscaster, and pioneer adventure filmmaker. He will be presenting Ski Moments in Time, seven two-minute ski history TV vignettes for RSN.

JOURNAL OF ISHA, THE INTERNATIONAL SKIING HISTORY ASSOCIATION
The International Skiing History Association is a not-for-profit corporation, whose mission is to preserve and advance the knowledge of ski history and to increase public awareness of the sport's heritage.

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