1950s

In 1956, two Americans crisscrossed Scandinavia to film the world’s fastest Nordic racers and make the first-ever cross-country ski technique film.

One thing leads to another. In this case, a 1956 summer school course in Oslo landed a couple of Americans smack in the middle of the three biggest cross-country ski races in Scandinavia. It was the chance of a lifetime to make an instructional film showing how Scandinavian racers skied so much faster than anyone else in the world—especially those living back home, in the good old USA.

Photo top of page: Norwegian racer Håkon Brusveen, shown here in 1952, won two medals (gold and silver) at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California.  Wikimedia Commons.

The story started the previous summer, as I bounced along on a student sightseeing tour of historical Norwegian landmarks. I saw Viking settlements, ancient stave churches and the famous longboats that took fierce raiders to distant lands. I also happened to meet Fritz Harshbarger, a first-class cinematographer. As we rumbled along, Fritz perched himself next to the bus door, motion-picture camera at the ready, the first off at each stop. Everywhere we went, and everything we did, was recorded for posterity on 16mm film.  His mission: to provide Oslo University with great advertising footage to promote the summer school program and attract dozens of eager tuition-paying students. 

Harshbarger was no ordinary camera-toting tourist. He took amateur filmmaking seriously, and had won a number of awards for his work. Once a collegiate basketball star, he had just completed his PhD in “rocket science” (jet propulsion) and was in Norway for 15 months on a Fulbright fellowship. Tall, lanky, with weathered face and broad smile, he could have passed as a Texas cowboy. And with a laugh you could hear a mile away, he sounded the part as well. 

It was easy to strike up conversations with Fritz. I had been a cross-country racer at Middlebury College in Vermont, and when he learned of my interest in racing technique, the handwriting began forming on the wall. He was taking a year off and had two 16 mm cameras. I was a skier and coach who wanted to study cross-country racing technique. Having just completed two years of U.S. military service, I also had time. We became a team, and the more we talked, the more exciting the possibilities looked. Using two cameras, we wanted to film the biggest ski races, take pictures of all the best racers, and then put together an instructional film showing how to ski like the champions — arguably the first-ever cross-country technique film. 

That was the plan. How it unfolded follows.  

Fritz was sure that future audiences would tire of watching a parade of knicker-clad skiers. We needed a little comic interlude to liven things up. That’s how the “Cowboy on Skis” subplot was born. The script was pretty simple: Fritz, the Texas Cowboy, decked out in a flying scarf, broad brimmed hat, and wearing number O, enters the world-famous Holmenkollen race. But early on, it becomes obvious that the bouncing gait of the tall Texan will be no match for the powerful strides of the Scandinavians.

Luckily, the plot turns when the cowboy meets “The Beautiful Girl.” We found “Tova,” who had all the necessary attributes, plus a few more. What followed was love at first sight, culminating in a passionate trailside kiss that catapulted the fired-up cowboy to victory. As any sports psychologist will tell you, motivation is the key to success. 

In the film, the cowboy was shown zooming up hills in a tuck position. How did we do that? First, we modified the back end of a pair of skis so they would slide backwards. After many practice runs, along with some pretty good falls, we got the footage. Later we edited the film by flipping it to produce reversed direction and splicing that section into the final edition. It worked! The cowboy coasted up hills on custom skis with curved tips that resembled a ram’s horn.

Alas, the cowboy subplot failed to amuse the elderly members of the Holmenkollen organizing committee. Perhaps the opening shot of the cowboy, standing in the starting gate of the Holmenkollen on a pair of ridiculous-looking skis, was too much for them to swallow. Norwegian pride, you know. But the committee did like the ski technique part of the film and once completed, the NSF (Norges Skiforbund) was the first to purchase a copy. 

We had started planning our filming schedule in September 1956. We decided to focus on the marquee race in each of the three Scandinavian countries. Letters were written, phone calls were made, interviews took place and national coaches were consulted. The three national ski associations provided us with the necessary permissions. At every turn we were greeted with a friendly handshake. Many were quite enthusiastic, even flattered, that we wanted to film their racers. And, of course, national team coaches wanted to see the motion picture.     

In late fall I took a trip to Vålådalen, a sports resort and training center in northern Sweden made famous by the legendary coach, Gosta Olander. Vålådalen is a resort like no other. Ordinary vacationers and world-class athletes mix freely, eating at the same tables and enjoying the same evening entertainment. There are facilities for all the major sports, enough to satisfy the most ardent fan. I chose to hang out with the Swedish cross-country team on one of their interval training days. Yes, they were very impressive, and yes, I learned a lot that day. 

Later, the skiers showed up at the training room for their monthly bicycle ergometer test. They rode an adapted stationary bicycle that kept pedaling effort constant while heart rate was taken every minute.  Calculations would show the amount of oxygen each skier can take in and send to his working muscles.  In recent decades, science has become the basis for endurance training. The process was developed by the famous Swedish sports physiologist, Per-Olof Åstrand. 

Endurance will always be the key that unlocks the door to cross-country skiing success. I was reminded of this truism one evening in Finland when the famous Finnish racer, Arnie Hiiva, and I were hanging out with a bunch of his friends. These guys had little formal schooling. They were loggers, or woodsmen, raised on farms, and accustomed to hard work. Many generations of this hardy outdoor lifestyle had evolved a genetic pool from which gold-medal winners were born. The takeaway for other countries? When it comes to physical endurance, the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do. Sixten Jernberg’s advice for Americans was simply put: “...endurance training, endurance training, and more endurance training.” A pretty clear message.  Sixten’s own life gives us a perfect example. His formula was: Get up early, run or ski to work, chop and saw wood all day, run home and then train for two or three hours. Repeat six times a week for many years. 

Jernberg was typical of the cross-country skiers we had the pleasure of associating with during our time in Scandinavia. These were honest, simple people, no frills. They asked for no favors but, on the other hand, were willing to give you the shirt off their backs. And I remember them as being patient—in fact, amazingly patient—with some of our crazy requests. A couple of them persuaded a neighbor to hitch up his horses and pull a sled, so Fritz could take long, uninterrupted pictures of them skiing in the field. When I asked Veikko Hakulinen to use diagonal stride the whole way, he said that was not the way he usually skied, but he did it anyway, just because I asked.  

With four world titles and nine Olympic medals, Jernberg was one of the most decorated cross-country skiers of all time. He and his wife lived in a modest house, with one exception: the kitchen. Thanks to her husband’s race winnings, she had every appliance and kitchen convenience known to the civilized world. 

Another time, when we were visiting Håkon Brusveen at his home in Lillehammer, I asked if we could film him sawing a log with a bucksaw. “Why does this crazy American want me to do that?” But there was a method in our madness:  The slow-motion pictures of his sawing motion clearly showed the body initiating each stroke, with the arms following in a coordinated sequence. Good body mechanics produces a powerful and energy-saving sawing technique. I can’t imagine today’s Olympic champions taking time to do those things. We live in a much different age. 

Saunas are big in Finland and are treated with respect bordering on reverence. The family sauna is given credit for everyone’s good health and recovery from fatigue. That last part is where Nordic skiers come in. One afternoon, members of the national team suggested that I join them. It’s funny how a trip to the sauna could turn into a ski-racing lesson: Hakulinen and his teammates could have been models for an anatomical wall chart. Hakulinen probably had zero percent body fat, and that was lesson number one: Lose the extra fat.

Lesson number two is not so obvious: You needed to notice that the flat muscle on the forward side of Hakulinen’s hips was exceptionally well developed. This is an important muscle for hip flexion, as in swinging the leg forward. The Hawk’s stride had a very fast leg recovery, a rapid swing-through that carried him forward onto the next glide. Repeated thousands of times, over many years, his hip flexion muscle had become strong and well defined, a hidden key to his success.  

Dr. Birger Tvedt taught at the Oslo Orthopedic Institute and had a lifelong interest in the science of human movement. As Norway’s team doctor and physical therapist, he had a perfect opportunity to study the skiing technique of world-class athletes. He produced “training films” to help loggers and farmers benefit from his kinesiological understanding. Whether swinging an axe, cutting hay with a scythe, or sawing logs, good body mechanics affected how much work was done, effort used, and at what energy cost. It is fascinating to see how a small technique improvement makes a real impact on the day’s work.   

The same in skiing. Good technique results in going fast and saving energy. Motion picture analysis, together with a coach’s trained eye, can help anyone who wants to ski better. Feeling the improvement is exciting and so the skier’s love of cross-country skiing increases. As we learned 60 years ago as amateur filmmakers in Scandinavia, the reward is in the doing. 

The technique instruction film described in this article was released over 60 years ago. It was 35 minutes long, in black and white, with English soundtrack. Copies were sold to a number of ski associations in Europe and Asia. In the United States, several college ski teams purchased it, as did the Vermont Ski Museum in Stowe. No other copies remain.  

Rick Eliot is a former collegiate racer and coach who lives in Massachusetts. Thanks to ISHA editorial review-board member John Caldwell for his help in reviewing and editing this article.

Long before the internet, influential newspaper columnists gave us up-to-date dispatches on where to ski, where to stay, and where the snow was best.

By Jeff Blumenfeld

Long before the internet took over our lives like a giant electronic Godzilla, when skiers wanted to know where to go, where to stay, what to bind to their feet, and what to wear in all kinds of weather, they turned to ski magazines. But it was newspapers that carried the most up-to-date information. Legendary scribes like ski columnist Frank Elkins (1910–1973), one of the country’s most influential mid-century ski writers, worked for 28 years at the The New York Times and 18 years at the Long Island Press, and was elected posthumously to the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1974.

But Elkins wasn’t the only journalist whose columns influenced generations of skiers. From Europe to Canada and across the United States, during the 1950s to 1980s heyday of print journalism, a skiing press corps churned out copy. Usually every Thursday or Friday, these outsized personalities—old-school journalists, every one of them—would profile ski area executives, write about their visits the previous week, offer tips about money-saving lift and lodging packages, and stories about beginners, seniors, children, gear, racers and ski patrollers. Snow conditions were rated: poor, fair, good, very good or excellent, although a Friday night freeze could turn it all to boilerplate.

Their names are now legendary and include, in addition to Elkins, 1928 Canadian Olympic women’s track-and-field star Myrtle Cook (1902–1985) of the Montreal Star, one of Canada’s greatest advocates of women’s sport; Sir David English (1931–1998), editor of Britain’s Daily Mail and noted ski writer; Robert William Lochner (1930–2015), sportswriter/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and Oregonian newspapers; John Samuel (1928–2014), sports editor of the UK Guardian; Carson White (1914–2001) of the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Examiner, among other outlets; and Archer Winsten (1905–1997), a leading American film critic and ski writer for the New York Post.

Reading their columns, one imagines them pounding on classic Remingtons or Olivettis, then later TRS-80 desktop microcomputers (affectionately nicknamed “Trash-80s”), sipping bourbon as unfiltered Camels burned down to their fingertips.

Today fewer newspapers cover skiing, due to competition from online sources and loss of advertising dollars. Snow condition reports and race coverage has been drastically reduced. Newspapers have less space to cover hard news, let alone to write about winter enthusiasts who slide down mountains. This is despite the fact that for most newspapers, skiers are an ideal demographic that tends to be upscale, affluent, active, suburban, and thus, attractive to advertisers. So it’s not surprising that ski writers who still file a column every week during ski season reminisce fondly about four ski journalists in particular.

Kings of the Press Rooms

No one could dominate a press room like French journalist Jean-Jacques “Serge” Lang (1920–1999). An imposing 6-foot, 7-inch mountain of French Alsatian stock, Lang was a sports journalist for Blick, La Suisse, 24 Heures, and L’Équipe, and founded the Association of International Ski Journalists in 1971.

“Here was this giant man with his hands on a small typewriter. He was so huge and his hands were so big, you wonder how he could type,” remembers John Fry, author of The Story of Modern Skiing (University Press of New England, 2010). “Much of Lang’s avoirdupois appeared to be concentrated in a beach-ball abdomen, teetering on surprisingly sturdy legs. His skull was square and massive, framing a florid peasant’s face that could have come from a Bruegel painting. His eyes tightened into slits when he was angry, and his smile was gap-toothed and friendly,” Fry said.

Lang also co-founded the World Cup, the racing circuit that made stars out of Jean-Claude Killy, Ingemar Stenmark and Franz Klammer. He modeled the concept on the soccer competition of the same name. With U.S. Ski Team coach and broadcaster Bob Beattie and French coach Honoré Bonnet, Lang hashed out the details in January 1966 near Hinterseer Farm, halfway up Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkamm downhill course.

Another larger-than-life character was Michael Strauss (1912–2008), The New York Times sports journalist for 54 years and its ski writer for 25 winters. He had a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of personal anecdotes about everyone from Babe Ruth to Pete Rose, Sonny Liston to Joe Namath, Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon. Strauss covered everything from archery to yachting, but he especially loved skiing. As the Times ski specialist from 1954 through 1979, it’s said he wrote more ski stories than any other writer for a major American newspaper, about 1,600 of them.

“Straussy” was a Panama hat-wearing sportswriter who would enter a press room shouting, “Somebody give me a lead for my story,” remembers Phil Johnson, a ski columnist for the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

Sports reporting was in his blood. Stories in the Times covered every facet of skiing, including alpine and nordic competitions all over America, NCAA tournaments, and recreational ski happenings, according to Carol Hoffman, president of the Lake Placid Ski Club. He was elected into the organization in 2001. Strauss covered the Winter Olympics at Calgary, Squaw Valley, Grenoble, Innsbruck and Lake Placid.

Olympic silver medalist and world champion Billy Kidd, now 76, met Strauss when he was a teenager. “He used to come to Stowe to cover the International Races, created by American International Group (AIG) founder C.V. Starr, and write about the skiing Kennedy clan and the Aga Khan, a competitive downhill skier who skied for Iran in the 1964 Olympic Games…If he mentioned you, that meant you were playing in the big leagues.”

After retiring from the Times in 1982, Strauss became the Florida Palm Beach Daily News sports editor for 25 years. Asked through the years why he never was a fine skier himself, Strauss had a ready answer: “I never found time to do much skiing. By the time I finished my interviews, wrote my stories and went into town to send them by Western Union to make my paper’s deadlines, the lifts had stopped running.”

No Better Advocates

There were no better advocates for the sport of skiing than enthusiastic ski writers, many of whom can be credited with the early growth of the sport.

One such super journalist/fan is Arnie Wilson, a veteran British ski writer who started in the 1970s, and for 15 years was the London Financial Times ski correspondent. He then wrote for Ski+board, the Ski Club of Great Britain magazine, which he edited for 13 years, and for a few years had a regular ski column in Australia’s The SkiMag.

In 1994, he and the late Lucy Dicker skied every day for a year in The Financial Times Round The World Ski Expedition—a feat which took them to 240 resorts in 13 countries, and into the pages of the Guinness Book of Records. In all, Wilson has skied 737 resorts worldwide, including ski areas in all 38 U.S. skiing states, and 40 heli-ski operations in 14 countries.

From his home south of London, he tells Skiing History, “When I started writing about skiing there were very few full-time ski writers except the tiny staffs working on dedicated ski magazines. Most of the writers who gradually became regular ski writers were all doing other jobs on national newspapers at the time.

“I suppose you could say we were all cheerleaders for the sport. I’d like to think that our enthusiastic stories about skiing were contagious and hopefully led to more people taking beginner lessons,” Wilson said. 

The power of the printed word should never be underestimated, and certainly not when it came to Charlie Meyers (1937–2009) of the Denver Post. Meyers, who also wrote for magazines, covered six Winter Olympics, opening doors to the nascent sport of American ski racing.

In February 1987, tragedy struck the sport when an avalanche killed four skiers on Peak 7, a then-unpatrolled backcountry stash in Breckenridge. In search of epic powder, skiers disregarded the skull and crossbones on bluntly worded warning signs, and were swept away. More than 250 volunteers and skilled mountaineers were involved in the recovery efforts, working shoulder-to-shoulder with probes and ground radar. Lawsuits ensued. Even the mountain’s own ski patrol thought the company was negligent, according to David Peri, Breckenridge director of marketing at that time.

In the aftermath of the deadly slide, Meyers attended town meetings and witnessed volcanic anger among parents, ski patrollers and resort management. Peri says Meyers worked to defuse the situation with even-balanced Denver Post coverage of both sides of the issue.

“Charlie advocated for backcountry skiing and wondered whether it’s better to give people freedom, or try to create a nanny state that attempts to protect them from themselves,” says Peri, who now lives in Santa Cruz, California. “His words soaked in like a rainstorm. People were still hurt but Charlie had brought all of us together, particularly first responders on the front line.”

Rise of the Internet

Ski columnists are no longer the primary source of snowsports information. During the winter season, nonstop coverage is everywhere: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, blogs, vlogs and podcasts. The news may be instantaneous, but it lacks the depth evident in the work of those ink-stained wretches who were the greatest advocates for the sport.

Tom Kelly, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame honoree and former VP-Communications at U.S. Ski and Snowboard, fondly remembers that the sport was lucky to have dedicated sports writers, especially considering its size compared to traditional ball sports. It was more than a job.

“If you participated in skiing and were a journalist, you wanted to write about it. Maybe they did it for their passion, the sense of adventure, the ability to travel or the free lift ticket—or all of the above,” Kelly says.

“We don’t have that same level of coverage now. They helped play a significant role in helping grow the sport. Skiing wouldn’t be what it is today if not for the grassroots efforts of journalists in those days.”

Adds Billy Kidd, “They brought new and creative ways of covering skiing. People followed along as their favorite athletes accumulated points. It built up season-long interest, and more importantly, readership.

“Sure, I can obtain ski race results online, but it doesn’t provide the kind of insights I gained from classically trained ski columnists who took a lot of information and boiled it down to concise analysis.”

Kidd continues, “The columnists who followed ski racing were the best at helping readers understand why an exceptional athlete like Jean-Claude Killy, for instance, had his best events under pressure when it counted the most. Try getting that on Instagram or Twitter.”

ISHA vice president Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, is the president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He is author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Learn more at travelwithpurposebook.com.

From the January-February 2020 issue of Skiing History.

Kitzbühel’s Karl Koller formalized short-ski instruction for beginners, reshaped children’s learning, fostered terrain-based teaching, and was a dominant force in Interski.

By John Fry with Barbara Thaler

The man who systematized the use of short skis to accelerate learning is alive and well, and about to celebrate his 100th birthday. Karl Koller shook up the world of ski instruction in 1953 when he demonstrated to the International Congress of Ski Instructors how in his Kitzbühel ski school, the year before, he had successfully employed 150- to 170-centimeter skis to teach novices to make simple turns with skis parallel, bypassing the traditional snowplow and stem progression. And that’s not all he did.

Austrian junior champion in downhill and jumping in the 1930s, Koller was the first man after the war to win the Hahnenkamm Combined title, in 1946. For 25 years, from 1950 to 1975, he headed Kitzbühel’s renowned Red Devils ski school. He built what was, at one time, the world’s most successful children’s ski school, Kollerland. He invented Kollerhelp, a device that children could hold onto when first learning to ski. He inaugurated terrain-based teaching. He introduced the early season wedel week in Kitzbühel. He invented the “Golden Ski Book,” honoring any skier on holiday who completed runs on 50 slopes around Kitzbühel. Indeed, Koller was the heart and brains of Kitzbühel’s ascendency as a ski resort—home of the world’s most famous downhill race, and of more famous natives like triple Olympic gold medalist Toni Sailer, Anderl Molterer, Christian Pravda, Hias Leitner, Ernst and Hansi Hinterseer, as well as nordic and snowboarding medalists.

Short Ski Teaching
As wedeln—the quick ski turn with reverse shoulder action—grew in popularity in the 1950s, the conventional method of teaching beginners with the old Arlberg system—snowplow to stem to stem christie turn, with rotation—looked increasingly obsolete. Students had to unlearn V-shaped ski turns in order to turn with skis parallel.

Koller sensed that the solution was to have students make parallel turns from the beginning, eliminating the old, slow, stage-by-stage Arlberg progression to parallel. But it couldn’t happen if beginners started on conventional skis of 200 centimeters and longer—skis that they would later own, but were too cumbersome for novices.
Koller first experimented with the use of short skis in 1952. He got a factory to make the skis—the Kitzbüheler Schul-Ski. The next year, he spoke about the radical new development in teaching at the 3rd Interski Congress of instructors at Davos. Eventually 93 ski schools in the Tyrol alone took up short-ski teaching.
Independently, and probably unaware of Koller’s teaching in the early 1960s, Clif Taylor with Morten Lund in the United States popularized GLM, the graduated length method of ski teaching (see sidebar). GLM involved a progression through three or four lengths of skis, more complicated and arguably less efficient than Koller’s kurz-ski method. GLM did not make lasting inroads in Europe. 

To meet the demand from ski schools around the world, Head Ski began full-scale manufacture of short skis. Others followed. But with the advent in the early 1990s of Elan’s SCX and Kneissl’s Ergo, and the introduction of high-performance carving skis under 190 cm in length, the special use by ski schools of short teaching skis came to an end.
  
Skiing Polymath
Karl Koller was born in 1919, the youngest of ten children. As a three-year-old he suffered from skin problems. A doctor recommended fresh air, and from that time on he spent every possible minute outdoors. He competed in both nordic and alpine skiing, and played soccer in summer. In 1936, he became Tyrolean Youth Champion in downhill and jumping.

Nothing stood in the way of his skiing career except World War II. Drafted, he became a member of the Greater German Reich National Ski Team. From 1943 to 1945 he was a mountain guide for the German Army at the Mountain Medical School in the neighbouring village St. Johann in Tyrol.
“I also had to teach the Nazi bigwigs how to ski,” he says, his face darkening.

During World War II, Koller met his wife Hilde in Zurs. Their son was born in 1944. At the end of the war he wanted to become an instructor, although his family didn’t like the idea. “At the time two instructors had fallen ill with syphilis and died,” Koller recalls.
In January 1946 he won the Hahnenkamm Combined, finishing second in the downhill. As stipulated in the regulations, he competed with the same pair of skis in the slalom and the downhill.

“The 1946 downhill on the Streif was unforgettable,” recalls Koller. “It had rained all through the night. The slope was like an ice skating rink. Worse, thick fog reduced visibility down to no more than fifty metres. There were no directional gates. ‘Another one’s coming,’ called out the fans, who could only ascertain whether a racer was approaching in the thick fog by the sound of their skis rattling on the hard snow.”
  
The Red Devils Ski School
In 1947 after gaining certification, Koller founded the new Association of Kitzbühel Ski Instructors and Mountain Guides in 1950, uniting two Kitzbühel ski schools. Under his leadership, the reconstituted school expanded rapidly.

It was important to Koller that his instructors have a clean, neat appearance. With his best friend, painter Alfons Walde (see Skiing History, July-August 2012), he developed a uniform—black trousers, red sweater and a red pointed cap. The Rote Teufel (Red Devils) ski school was born. The instructors were often required to attend five o’clock tea, the hottest society gathering of the day. They had to appear in uniform, always with a tidy haircut. 

“One day,” recalls Koller, “Anderl Molterer came to ski school finely dressed, crisply pressed trousers, nice shoes, a smart sweater. When asked if he didn’t have work clothes with him, Anderl said: ‘No, I always work in these clothes.’”

The famous Ski Instructors Ball and New Year’s firework display with ski show were Koller ideas. He also introduced Wedel Weeks: To promote lessons, he created tests for pupils at four levels of turning skill. You needed an instructor to succeed. On Friday, at the end of ski week, an award ceremony was held at 5 o’clock tea in the hotel Zur Tenne.

Along the way Koller was elected president of the Austrian Ski Instructors Association, and chairman of the Kitzbühel Tourism Association. He and his wife Hilde came to run a boarding house, Das Kollerstüberl, in the center of town. 

Teaching children in a new and different way
In 1960 Koller introduced specialized teaching for children in his Red Devils Ski School. He was convinced that children should be introduced to skiing in a playful way. He built a special terrain playground of steep curves, hillocks, jumps and gates. Koller’s approach was so innovative that in 1968 he brought children with him to make a demonstration at the 1968 Interski congress of instructors at Aspen.

His ski school was among the first to enable its instructors to share in profits, a seemingly benevolent idea. But Koller came to see it as a mistake. The instructors, or employees, now had a voice in how the ski school was run. He was no longer totally “the boss,” free to invent new ideas as he wished. Innovations like short ski teaching were questioned. The costly construction of a building to house the instructors caused the ski school’s profits to decline. Arguments ensued. Finally in 1975, angry, he left the ski school to concentrate on teaching children, founding his own school, Koller Kinderland.

Koller is the author of two books, Freud und Leid zu meiner Zeit (Joy and Sorrow in My Time) and Kitzbühel zu meiner Zeit (Kitzbühel in My Time). He has documented and archived every development in Kitzbühel, neatly filed in folders and bound books, which he keeps in his garden house.

His wife, to whom he was married for 54 years, died in 1997. One of his grandchildren, Alexander, won the overall World Cup of snowboarding and the World Cup of boardercross in 1998. Koller enjoyed cross-country skiing regularly until he was 95 years old. He suffered a health setback in 2017 when he broke his femur. But he battled back, diligently completing his rehab—typical for a man who has lived a century of “never giving up.” 

ISHA chairman John Fry prepared this article based on the writing and research of Barbara Thaler of the Kitzbühler Ski Club.

 Swiss reader Luzi Hitz recently sent us a collection of photos of snow rollers used to groom pistes in Switzerland and France during the 1950s and 1960s. The picture at right, for instance, was apparently taken above the St. Bernard Pass in 1950 (but it may be as late as 1964). This raises the question whether any of these devices predate Steve Bradley's packer-grader, first used at Winter Park in 1950.

Well, yes and no. In both Europe and the United States, the process of rolling snow to achieve a smooth surface long predates the development of ski lifts and trails. Snowy roads were commonly packed out hard by hauling heavy agricultural rollers behind teams of horses. The purpose was to provide easy gliding for sleighs and sledges, and solid footing for the horses pulling them (horseshoes were often equipped with caulks to give them traction on hard and icy surfaces). In the American Ski Annual for 1945-46, Phil Robertson, manager of Mt. Cranmore, described using an agricultural roller in the fall of 1939 to pack down the early season snow so it would freeze

to the ground and make a solid base for later snowfalls. The resort used a small Caterpiller tractor to haul the roller. European snowsports operators had the same idea in the prewar years, but by November of 1939 they had more pressing issues to worry about. 

Repeated rolling did nothing to break up the icy surface that developed under heavy skier traffic, or after a melt-freeze cycle. Robertson wrote “We remedy this condition by scarifying late in the day, creating a powder surface which freezes during the night to the harder snow below. This operation is carried on with our invention called the Magic Carpet, a network of chains and caulks 10 by 14 feet, weighing 1200 pounds, which is hauled over the slopes with a tractor.” Find photos of this device in action accompanying Jeff Leich’s article on early snowmaking and grooming in the Spring 2002 newsletter of the New England Ski Museum.

After the war, new resorts used pre-war grooming methods. Despite the development of early snowmobiles (and the 10th Mountain Division’s Weasel), no over-the-snow vehicles yet existed with the power to drag rollers through the deep soft snow found in the Western states, and bulldozers were too heavy – they sank out of sight.

In the United States we generally credit Steve Bradley as the father of snow grooming. Bradley assumed management of Winter Park in June of 1950 and immediately began working with Ed Taylor on ideas for stabilizing and smoothing the snow surface. Taylor, a member of the Winter Park board of directors, was a former chairman of the National Ski Patrol and had a special interest in snow physics, based on his work controlling avalanches.

Bradley and Taylor appear to be the first experimenters to focus on the problem of smoothing out moguls. At the time Winter Park was smoothing out moguls manually, by sending out teams of men with shovels. According to Jerry Groswold, who watched Bradley and Taylor at work, they tried a number of devices to automate the process, beginning with their own version of Cranmore’s Magic Carpet, a six-foot length of chain-link fencing they pulled down the slope while skiing.
 

By the close of the year Bradley had designed and built a roller design, but with a difference: First, it was a “slat roller,” which had the effect of packing half the snow and “powdering” the rest for a soft, skiable surface. Then, in front of the roller he put an adjustable steel blade, spring-loaded to shave the tops off moguls. It worked like a road grader and steamroller ganged together. It wasn’t just a packer-and-smoother: it was the Bradley Packer-Grader. The January 15, 1951 issue of the National Newspaper of Skiing reported on the successful use of the Bradley XPG-1 -- X for experimental, PG-1 for the first packer-grader.

The gravity-powered Packer-Grader weighed about 700 lb and was steered by a skier. The technique: go straight down the fall line, depending on the blade for speed control. At Winter Park, Bradley sent teams of “pilots” down the mogul fields in V-formation, like a squadron of fighter planes. According to Groswold, they earned 25 cents an hour “combat pay” over and above the trail crew wage. Rig and pilot returned to the top of the hill via T-bar. Jim Lillstrom, who was one of the pilots, believes that their crew were the first skiers to use the newly-invented Bell fiberglass helmet. (Video link: See a formation of XPG-1 in action at Winter Park)

Bradley filed for a patent on the packer-grader in December 1951. By 1952, Fred Pabst was using his new Tucker Sno-Cats to pull slat rollers up and down the Bromley slopes.

Patent number 2,786,283 was issued to Bradley in March, 1957, covering “Apparatus for grading and packing snow.” That year Bradley mounted a Packer-Grader behind one of the new Kristi snowcats just going into production in Arvada, Colo., rigging a hydraulic cylinder to control blade height in place of the original steel spring. Thiokol Corp., then beginning snowcat production in Utah, licensed the Packer-Grader technology and modern powered snow grooming was born.
 

Returning to the St. Bernard photo: Note that this is a slat roller machine without a grading blade, and that the skier behind the roller controls the speed by sideslipping or snowplowing. A note on the French website http://www.skistory.com/F/domaines/B32.html suggests that more sophisticated powered grooming machinery was introduced by Emile Allais, who arrived at Courchevel in 1954 after having worked in North and South America since the opening of Squaw Valley in 1948. He brought American and Canadian ideas with him.

Two of the world’s most popular adventure sports have inspired and influenced each other for more than half a century. By Jay Cowan

LIFE magazine was likely the first national publication to recognize surfing’s impact on skiing, and it wasn’t favorable. In the issue dated March 12, 1965, the editors ran a feature headlined, “Aspen’s Awful Surfer Problem.” The story described Aspen as “one of the toniest ski resorts in the country—until the surfers arrive. Then the town fills with youngsters…there’s wild skiing and wilder parties rock the nights. These surfers-turned-skiers are a new breed on the slopes.”

While the story insisted “the new invasion makes Aspen very unhappy,” it gave skiing the same glamorous national spotlight that was already making surfing explode. Skiing grew in popularity among surfers—and also attracted people who had never considered either sport, but wanted to try something sexy and fun. 

Snow riding and wave riding have many of the same followers who pursue both passions with one love. Soulful sports that employ water as their medium—on liquid waves or frozen slopes—both are artistic expressions of freedom in exciting and beautiful places. And the lifestyles can be alluringly hedonistic. 

Of course, not all the surfer/skiers were “bums” and “vagabonds,” as the Life story labeled them. Joey Cabell from Hawaii was one of the most famous surfers of the 1960s. He started skiing at 19 in Alta and moved to Aspen in 1960 to take up ski racing. “In the early ’60s, Europeans still dominated the Aspen ski scene,” he told me. “And we weren’t what they were used to. But as long as crossovers with [skiing] exist, surfers will be there.” ...

Above: Adam and Irwin Shaw in 1953, walking into the village of Klosters.

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an American writer. He’s best known for his novels The Young Lions, whose film version starred Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando; Rich Man, Poor Man, adapted into the first-ever television mini-series; and short stories such as The Eighty Yard Run, Act of Faith, and Girls in Their Summer Dresses. His seminal anti-war play Bury the Dead, originally staged in 1933, is still produced around the world today. 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Shaw saw action in North Africa, France and Germany during World War II. He moved to Europe in the early 1950s with his wife Marian and young son Adam, living first in Paris before discovering the Swiss village of Klosters, which he made his permanent home. In this article, Adam remembers the days when the sport was simpler and the Alps were studded with stars who didn't take themselves seriously.

By Adam Shaw

All photos courtesy Adam Shaw / www.irwinshaw.org

In the angry days through which the world was passing, there was a ray of hope in this good-natured polyglot chorus of people who were not threatening each other, who smiled at strangers, who had collected in these shining white hills merely to enjoy the innocent pleasures of sun and snow…The feeling of generalized cordiality…was intensified by the fact that most of the people on the lifts and on the runs seemed more or less familiar…Skiers formed a loose international club and the same faces kept turning up year after year. —Irwin Shaw, “The Inhabitants of Venus”

My father wrote this in 1962. A week later, in the middle of the Drostobel—one of the seriously steep runs that rise above Klosters—he whacked me across the back of the legs with a ski pole. 

He was 49 and in his prime, I was 12. He’d never hit me in anger before, and he never would again. I’d cut to a stop above him on a patch of ice, and clipped his skis. He’d grabbed a piste marker, but I’d slid a quarter of a mile down to the Drostobel’s tree line. 

He bulled his way down the run to me. “You coulda killed us!”

I stared at the tips of my Kneissls, a gift from a rotund Frenchman who designed cars, some of them famous.

“Showing off,” Irwin shouted. “That’s what happens when you show off!”

Before Prince Charles and other “royals”—not to mention Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo, Gene Kelly, and Lauren Bacall—brought a certain kind of newfangled fame to Klosters, it was just another village with a few ski lifts…nothing fancy like St. Moritz, Gstaad, Cortina or St. Anton. And for me, it was just home—the place where I grew up. 

Irwin at the top of the Gotschnagrat above Klosters with fashion model Bobby Charmoz.

When my father and mother bought a half-acre of hay field from Mr. Brosi in 1955 and built a house there, cows outnumbered people. Chalet Mia (named for the three of us, Marian, Irwin and Adam) had pink shutters—the locals thought this was nuts—and one side of the roof was longer than the other, in the Basque style. It would be the only house they’d build in their lives. We all learned to ski on wooden Attenhofers, with screw-on edges and bear-trap bindings. Then Walter Haensli, a neighbor and ex-ski racer who married an American heiress, got the right to import Head skis. My parents each got a pair, and I borrowed my mother's—black with white lettering—to win my first race at age seven. 

The old man had spent a few unmemorable days in Sun Valley right after the war. But now, patient souls by the name of Hitz and Clavadetscher got him back on track: “Ya, Herr Shaw…mitt de knees you must go DOWN und den UP, und den down mitt de knees…Und de shoulders, de shoulders must be looking down de mountain…down.”

In those days, skiing was as much a voyage as a sport, and that appealed to the old man.

Imagine growing up dirt poor in Brooklyn before the Great Depression. Imagine landing in Normandy in 1944, and liberating the Dachau concentration camp. Then imagine standing on top of the Gotschna on skis, and with a newly built chalet visible down in the valley. 

Imagine standing there with Peter Viertel, your old buddy from California, and Jacques Charmoz and Moshe Pearlman. Peter saw combat with the U.S. Marines in the South Pacific and later ran agents into Germany for the OSS; after the war, he was a screenwriter and novelist. Jacques raced for France in the 1936 Winter Olympics; during the war, he was a pilot in the Free French Air Force and, later, flew the last French general out of Dien Bien Phu. A British major who risked being shot for treason for helping Israel get guns, Moshe later served as David Ben Gurion’s first spokesman and wrote a book on archeology called Digging Up The Bible. Imagine their disbelief, their sheer sense of luck, and of joy, at simply being on top of a Swiss Alp, alive after the war and with all body parts intact.

Left to right: Actor Noel Howard, an unidentified friend, Marian and Irwin Shaw, Jacques Charmoz and Jacqueline Tesseron on the slopes of Parsenn.

Over three decades, the group at the top of the Gotschna, or at our dinner table, included Swissair pilots,  Kiwi sailors, regal Spaniards, French ex-Prime Ministers, ambassadors sitting out diplomatic storms and barons of industry, who, before the term was coined, showed off their trophy wives. I remember well the Greek shipping magnate whose most beautiful daughter was destined to tragedy, and various spies whose covers as bankers or businessmen fooled no one. There were, of course, actors with Oscars, agents with chutzpah, writers who could ski and writers who could write—like James Salter, who could do both in a class quite his own (Downhill Racer, The Hunters, Solo Faces, A Sport and a Pastime). And, at one time or another, almost everyone met Dr. Egger, a truly fine and old-fashioned doctor who, faced with broken bones, first would whip out his stethoscope and say: “Ya, now you inspire, and now you expire…” 

On some winter afternoons, on the mild slopes of Alpenrösli or Selfranga, you might find a Harvard professor whose Nobel Prize did nothing for his balance, or various “belles,” including one particularly well-known for her Mafia ties. You’d recognize many of them, like Virginia Hill, the ex-girlfriend of mobster Bugsy Siegel, but I think name-dropping is like blowing your nose with stolen money, so you’ll just have to take my word as to the others.

Adam Shaw at the top of the Gotschna above Klosters last winter. He now lives in the French Alps

For Irwin, no matter how glorious the weather, how deep the fresh snow, mornings were meant for the typewriter. Skiing en famille began at noon, in front of a wood chest in the front hall, with a grab to retrieve mittens, goggles and wax. We’d then latch our skis to a rack on the back of a VW Beetle and grind up the hill past the old Hotel Pardenn, turn left at Nett’s grocery store, turn right onto the Bahnhofstrasse, past Mr. Meilhem’s bank and APorta’s bakery, left again at the Chesa, and right at the old Apotheke to park at the Luftseilbahn. 

Depending on who was around at the top, and their skiing ability, the decision was taken to traverse over to the Furka and ski down to Küblis, or, if the visibility wasn’t good, to make the shorter run down Kalbersass through the pines, to the Schwendi. With the callowness (and legs) of youth, I called that "social skiing," pleading for the Drostobel or the Wang.

The Gotschna and the Parsenn, and later the Madrisa, were our local playgrounds. Skis were long, and runs were not flattened into antiseptic boulevards by snowcats. To enjoy the virgin faces on the north side of the Weissfluhgipfel, down towards Fondei, or the steep chutes and glades down the backside of the Bramabuel in Davos, you had to know how to turn ‘em both ways. In those days Klosters was to St. Moritz and Gstaad, what Montauk was to Southampton.

For the old man, skiing was also a reward for pages batted out on his green Olivetti portable. Unlike handball, which he had played in Brooklyn and at which he was awfully good, skiing gave him time and space to work up a sweat without points or scores. Everyone was a winner on the mountain.

Irwin (far right) and Marian Shaw (far left) in Klosters in the 1960s with the writer Peter Viertel (black hat) and film director Bob Parrish (red and blue parka). Everyone in the group was on Head skis that day.

If one of the chums at the top of the cable car—often Robert Ricci of haute couture renown or Freddy Chandon (you’ve surely drunk his champagne….)—had a ski teacher in tow, they’d choose the runs. If not, the best skier took the lead. 

I still remember the bite of good edges on spring snow on March mornings in the late Sixties, between the Meierhoff shoulder and Totalp, with the grip then mushing into a spray of slush at the front side of a shoulder. This was before the freak avalanche passed under our feet and took out the train and the road leading to Jakob Kessler’s terrace at Wolfgang.

It was an innocent era. No one except downhill racers wore helmets, the Casa Antica opened with 45s lent by Marisa and Berry Berenson, Angelica Huston wasn’t a star yet, John Negroponte was years away from telling tall tales at the United Nations, and Joël De Rosnay didn’t know he’d be a world-famous scientist.  The big lip (Minsch-Kante) below the Hundschopf on the Wengen downhill wasn't yet named for Klosters' station-master son, Josef Minsch, because he hadn't crashed there yet. But Salka Viertel already made the best chocolate cake in the world, even if Deborah Kerr or Orson Welles were not coming to tea that afternoon.

In the Seventies, the group had a few more birthdays in the legs and knees, and the choice of runs reflected this. One day, on the way to Serneus, Annie, Geza Korvin’s wife—he’d played the Captain in the 1965 movie Ship of Fools—fell into a small ditch, followed in close order by Peter O’Toole’s British brother-in law. The tall Englishman lay there, flopped down on top of her, quite unable to move. After a while the lady firmly said: “Derek, either f*** me, or get off of me!”

In the summer there was tennis on the red clay courts opposite the Silvretta Hotel, and picnics up near the Vereina glacier. Summer was the season for Garbo’s walks along the Landquart torrent with a straw hat over her ears and an incongruous “frowner” on her nose. One day, at lunch, she girlishly insisted on calling one of America’s most brilliant, and controversial, writers “Vigoredal” as though she didn’t know who he was. Gore loved it.

My father had a hip replacement operation in 1979, and we skied one last time the next winter. Savvy old athlete that he was, he knew when the legs couldn’t be trusted, so he quit. But until then, though he loved powder, he skied his best in the spring, on corn snow, with a whole hill for space and no goggles to fog up. On such Klosters mornings the world was just wind in his face and sun on his back; talent felt inexhaustible, good reviews seemed guaranteed, and wives were deemed faithful and friends true. 

Adam Shaw is a freelance writer, ex-reporter for UPI and the Washington Post, and author of Sound of Impact: The Legcy of TWA# 514. He lives in the French Alps and works as a flight instructor and mountain and airshow pilot.

To learn more about Irwin Shaw, visit www.irwinshaw.org. You can see photos of Shaw’s skiing life in Switzerland on the “Klosters” page, and on the “Memories” page, you can read an excellent profile on Adam and Irwin Shaw, titled “Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggarman, Skier” (Skiing, October 1977). One of Shaw’s best short stories, The Inhabitants of Venus, can be found in The Ski Book (Bookthrift, 1985).

This article and its images are copyrighted extracts from the forthcoming book, Jay Peak, by ISHA member and author Bob Soden. To learn more, go to www.jaypeakhistory.com.

(Above) Photo Courtesy of Jay Peak Resort

How a once-isolated outpost became a busy year-round destination for visitors from the Northeast U.S. and Canada—with investors from around the world. By Bob Soden

Vermont’s Jay Peak is a picturesque 4,000-foot monadnock (a mountain that refuses to be worn down) punctuating the end of the Green Mountains’ 250-mile run up from Massachusetts. To be an isolated sentinel at that lonely post, just five miles from the Canadian border, is both a blessing and a challenge—great snow and 360° views, but the last exit on a skier’s figurative highway. 

“How do you get them to go that extra mile?” has been foremost on the minds of Jay’s managers over the years. Jay always has been—and still is—a place for real skiers. The snow and challenging terrain have assured that. But the challenges of its location have required savvy marketing and visionary leaders. Fortunately, Jay has had very good luck in that regard.

Take Bill Stenger, co-owner and president of today's Jay Peak Resort, who was lured north from Pennsylvania’s Jack Frost ski area during the Mont St. Sauveur International (MSSI) era at Jay. When he arrived in 1985, seven years after the Canadian company had purchased the mountain from the Weyerhaeuser Company (WeyCo) of Seattle, skier traffic had stalled at 78,000 visits annually. The infatuation of Montreal skiers with the south-of-the-border mountain was starting to wear off. Today, Canada accounts for 55 percent of Jay’s 400,000 skier-days a year. How did Stenger turn it around?

First, he upgraded the mountain’s tired uphill facilities. Then he did what all Jay Peak managers have done if they wanted Jay to succeed—he offered skiers something they couldn’t find elsewhere. 

He found it in a lift line. Or more specifically, covering a pod of young skiers in the line in front of him. The kids were dusted with powder, which was odd, because the sky was decidedly blue. It turned out, as the miscreants mumbled, the powder came from their off-piste antics. 

A quick study, Stenger realized that here was something different. Jay Peak, overlooking the flat Quebec plain, stretching 70 miles west-northwest to the Canadian metropolis, works as a foil on westerly storms, precipitating huge powder dumps on the mountain’s flanks. With proper marketing and judicious culling, Jay’s wild glades could be domesticated and enlarged. That would be the calling card that would bring skiers and snowboarders from all over the Northeast and even Europe.

Early Days at Jay

(Right) Photo Courtesy of Jay Peak Resort. Bill Stenger, president and co-owner, has turned the mountain around--and weathered a few storms--since arriving in 1985.

Back in 1940, some skiers from the nearby town of Newport founded the Jay Peak Outing Club (emulating the Mount Mansfield Outing Club) and, in a leap of faith, built a ski jump in the foothills of Jay Peak. Two journalists, brothers Wallace and Earnest Gilpin, who worked at newspapers on opposite sides of the mountain, had been editorializing for years on how the region needed to be developed as a year-round recreation destination. But a problem remained—you couldn’t get there from here. So a road was built: Route 105A.

The challenge was the same in 1953 when a young North Troy high school teacher, Harold Haynes, had 4,000-foot dreams. Stowe had succeeded and now Sterling Mountain in Jeffersonville was in the running. How could he divert the economic snow train to his neck of the woods—the Northeast Kingdom?

So Haynes and the local Kiwanis Club boosted the idea in town halls and state legislature lobbies. Guided by the wise counsel of “The Father of Vermont Skiing,” state forester Perry Merrill, the state acquired 1,400 acres of what would become the Jay State Forest. By 1955 Jay Peak was incorporated. The advice of Charlie Lord of Stowe—a highway engineer who had worked with Merrill to cut the first trail on Mount Mansfield—was sought. He generously produced a trail and lift sketch, but money was needed to buy a lift. 

This was primarily a bootstrap operation. Full-page local newspaper ads touted the economic benefits. Future Jay Peak manager Jim (Porter) Moore went door-to-door and farm-to-farm selling shares at $10 a pop. As he later related, “Folks would sell a cow and buy a share.” With the help of a sports-car-driving, jaunty-cap-wearing Catholic priest from Richford, Fr. George St. Onge (whose nonstop enthusiasms to aid his flock included such projects as a successful hockey stick factory in his home town), the fundraising goals were reached, and a ski lift was ordered from France.

Despite Route 105A, in 1956 Jay remained difficult to reach. Merrill, now the state Commissioner of Forests and Parks, came to the rescue, acquiring a right-of-way over the mountain pass connecting Montgomery Center and North Troy. The Jay State Forest Route, later renamed Route 242, was soon constructed. Later that summer, Merrill and Jay Peak president Haynes would stand at the foot of Jay’s south shoulder and guide the cutting of a lift line and its first trail.

But the new ski area needed more than a lift and a trail. A local vacation homeowner, Rudi Mattessich, just happened to be director of the Austrian Tourist Office in New York City. A few calls overseas and they’d found their man.

When Walter Foeger arrived in December 1956, hired as the area’s sole ski pro, he found one open slope and an unassembled Poma lift. He dropped his Kneissl skis and picked up a wrench—and the lift was completed by the end of the year. In January 1957, in two feet of new snow, he led a team of local woodsmen with chainsaws to cut the beginner-intermediate Sweetheart Trail. That year, he also sold hot dogs, gave lessons to gargantuan ski classes (and free ones to local kids), coaxed a homicidal wooden roller behind him to smooth the area’s two trails, wrote newspaper articles and repeatedly climbed the mountain to lay out additional trails. A year later, as the new mountain manager (and still the only ski pro), Foeger picked up a brush, and the December 1957 issue of SKI Magazine featured an oil painting of a future Jay Peak. By the time he moved on in 1968, a whirlwind twelve years later, during which he had attained the position of General Manager and Vice President, the ski area could boast 46 trails and 7 lifts.

Foeger was promoter, ski theoretician, writer, ski racer (posting a better time than Emile Allais in the 1936 Hahnenkamm downhill and combined), tennis champion (Vermont Seniors’ Tennis Champion many years running), artist, film maker and manager—all wrapped up in one bow-legged “determinedest man I know,” according to former Vermont Gov. Phil Hoff.  He had been born in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1917. Growing up in Kitzbühel, he became ball boy at the local tennis court and rink rat on its ice rink in winter, when he wasn’t schussing the backyard Alp. During World War II, he was drafted from the local militia to train Germany’s ski troops. Wounded in Russia, he was sent to Spain to recover and was eventually named coach of its Olympic ski team, which he led to Oslo in 1952.

But what really helped Jay Peak avoid the unfortunate fate of so many New England ski areas in that period—and brought skiers to Jay from Montreal and Boston and New York—was something they couldn’t find elsewhere.  That was Foeger’s maverick ski teaching system, Natur Teknik.  The technique, eventually taught at more than a dozen ski areas in the eastern U.S. and at one in Japan, was unconventional. It eschewed the use of snowplow or stem: It was parallel from the start! That did the trick, and skiers schussed in.

Gross receipts for 1957 were $4,400; by 1964 they were $271,000. Haynes would often repeat, “Without Walter Foeger, there’d be no Jay Peak.” But despite the ski school’s success, growth was plateauing. Something new was needed to pull in the crowds at Jay.

Deep Corporate Pockets

In 1964, a forestry giant from the West Coast was looking for a way to re-purpose its logged-out lands. It just so happened that WeyCo owned real estate adjoining the Jay State Forest. Impressed by the showing the self-made ski area had made in a brief seven years, and after internal studies on diversification showing profits could be made in the ski and real estate businesses, WeyCo came courting. The company’s overtures were warmly received by Haynes and Foeger and Fr. St. Onge. 

WeyCo purchased Jay Peak, Inc. in 1966, arriving with deep pockets. Foeger described his vision of an expanded Jay Peak, encompassing the west “snow bowl,” complete with an Austrian village anchoring a tramway to the top of “Vermont’s Peakedest Peak” (as an early boosting poster touted). WeyCo listened with rapt attention.

A new tram opened in January 1967, just in time to catch tourists heading north that year to Montreal’s EXPO 67. And the new lift did its duty in bringing in the crowds to ride the East’s fastest and longest tramway (Cannon Mountain’s tramway in New Hampshire was an elder statesman from 1937 but would get an upgrade in 1980). WeyCo and Foeger, differing on what development directions they thought the mountain should take, decided to part ways in 1968. 

In the early 1970s, the 48-room Hotel Jay and a couple dozen condos were built. Then some bad snow years followed, coupled with the energy crisis, making the extra mile more costly. A corporate change in philosophy on diversification led WeyCo to sell Jay Peak in 1978.

That year, seven owners from Mont St. Sauveur, 45 minutes north of Montreal, heard of WeyCo’s plan and made an offer. The group felt this would offer MSSI’s legions of loyal skiers a way to triple their skiing vertical with a mere doubling of their travel time.

The first changes were the installation of the Green Mountain Chair on the tram side and improved on-mountain bed numbers. But MSSI realized by 1985 it needed an experienced American professional on the ground. They found Bill Stenger, who’d managed Jack Frost in Pennsylvania and doubled skier visits. Stenger had a condition, though: In addition to being mountain manager, he wanted an ownership position. He got it, and that has made all the difference.

A Rising Tide Floats All Boats

Stenger moved quickly, doubling uphill capacity, upgrading the snowmaking and improving the guest services. Skier visits were 78,000 in 1984. By 1996, they were 200,000. Stenger pushed Jay into the glade business, and by 1997 it was voted No.1 in the East for its powder and tree skiing by Snow Country magazine. The area was now the “Jay Peak Ski & Summer Resort.” A championship 18-hole golf course, designed by Graham Cooke, opened in 2007. By then Jay had 76 trails and 8 lifts.

In 2006, after 30 years of ownership, MSSI decided to sell its stake in Jay Peak. Senior shareholder Jacques Hébert had passed away and the remaining shareholder families wanted to go in new directions. 

(Left) Photo Credit: Newport Daily Express / Bob Soden Collection. A 1941 Jay Peak Outing Club jumping competition on Mead Hill in North Troy, in the Jay Peak foothills.

About that time, Stenger and a group of interested investors approached Ariel Quiros, an international entrepreneur and longtime Jay skier and local property owner, with a plan to purchase Jay. The deal was concluded in 2008. 

Stenger had investigated the potential of investment funding through the federal government’s EB-5 visa program (see box) back in 1997, but immigration policy at that time interfered. He revisited the idea successfully in 2004 under MSSI to fund the new golf course (which opened in 2007). But the partnership would take the concept to a whole new level.

Through the program, Stenger and Quiros have raised in excess of $500 million, and to date Jay Peak has been the beneficiary of more than $200 million in development. Investment has come from at least 60 countries, including China. This funding has underwritten the construction of three new ski-in, ski-out hotels and 250 new condo townhouse units, in total adding 2,500 on-mountain beds (a key feature for the resort’s success) and nine restaurants.

Jay Peak has been known since its inception as a low key, no-frills, friendly ski area “for skiers.” More recently its reputation has grown due to its extensive glades and out-of-boundary skiing, unmatched in the Northeast, and its transformation into a full-fledged four-season resort featuring a 60,000 square-foot water park and an NHL-sized indoor ice hockey/curling rink, among other amenities.

As well, Stenger and Quiros have launched the Northeast Kingdom Economic Development Initiative to benefit the nearby town of Newport (on Lake Memphremagog) by revitalizing its downtown core and waterfront. In addition, they are enlarging the Newport Airport to make it regional-jet capable, thereby providing direct access for its international customers.  EB-5 funding to match that of Jay Peak’s is to be involved there. 

Stenger and Quiros are very different men, yet similar in many ways: Both started out in sales (Stenger in insurance in Boston, and Quiros selling jeans as a high-school student at a New York City subway station). But they both love skiing and have a quality all Jay Peak managers had to have to be successful—chutzpah.

Stenger, who was named manager of the Jack Frost ski area in the Poconos in 1974 at age 26, has spent more than forty years in the ski business. In the early 1990s, he chaired a national skiing industry marketing committee of the combined NSAA and SIA to increase the number of new skiers nationwide. He was honored in November 2013 with a BEWI award for his transformation of Jay into a year-round resort and continuing efforts on behalf of the U.S. ski industry. In April 2014, Jay Peak received the Vermont Governor’s SMART Award for Creative Marketing in Tourism.

There has been some grumbling of late from local off-mountain innkeepers, bed-and-breakfast operators and restaurateurs, who worry that Jay will diminish their business. Fair enough. But Jay’s philosophy has long been that a healthy ski resort will assure healthy neighbors. And it’s not just paying lip service to the matter: Witness the Newport renaissance soon to be underway. So let us remember what JFK often quoted: “A rising tide floats all boats.” 

Skied for 55 or more years, Ruthie’s Run on Aspen Mountain has been the venue for classic, hotly contested World Cup and Roch Cup races. On the mild upper section, the whims of wind and waxing have often decided the downhill winners over the years. If you’re an intermediate, you can easily cruise the upper part, and avoid the steep section by taking Ruthie’s Lift back up to the top. Or you can head down.

For racers, the real technical test on Ruthie’s starts as racers plunge into Aztec and Spring Pitch, setting up one of the most demanding sequence of high-speed turns of any downhill in the world. “It is still one of the classic runs in North America,” says ex-Olympian Tom Corcoran.

One of the most spectacular recoveries on Ruthie’s, recalled by Aspen photographer Bob Chamberlain, occurred when Buddy Werner was thrown backwards at high speed, and flew for a long time through the air. He landed on his back, then incredibly Werner recovered without missing a click and went on to win the race.

Franz Klammer won on Ruthie’s Run in the winter of 1976 after his televised spectacular Olympic gold medal downhill win at Innsbruck, Austria. Crazy Canuck Todd Brooker, who would becme prominent as a TV expert commentator, won in 1983. Wild Bill Johnson won the 1984 World Cup downhill after a sensational recovery. Johnson told ex-Olympic racer Christin Cooper that he saw one leg above his head, retrieved it, lost footing on the other ski, almost veered off the course through the bough markers, then finding both skis once again under him Johnson went on to victory. Four-time World Cup champion Pirmin Zurbriggen won in 1987. The lower sections of Ruthie’s offer one of the most severe tests of slalom and giant slalom on the World Cup today.

Ruthie’s is named for Ruth Humphries, who became the wife of Darcy Brown, long-time boss of the Aspen Skiing Company. Before the young resort hosted the 1950 FIS World Alpine Ski Championships, it was desperately short of money to promote its candidacy. Ruthie Humphries made the initial donation of $5,000 that enabled Aspen to host the first major international alpine ski championship held in North America. Grateful Aspenites, led by Dick Durrance, named the trail in her honor. 

At first a gimmicky convenience, the boot buckle took ten years to earn its place among the sport’s enduring inventions.

In 1955 a former stunt pilot and Swiss inventor named Hans Martin sold the world’s leading ski boot company, Henke, his patent for using metal buckles rather than laces to fasten leather boots.

Dolomite double lace boots (Vintage Ski World photo)

Skiers needed such a convenience. The number of lacing hooks and eyelets on a pair of boots had skyrocketed to as many as 90 with the introduction around 1950 of the inner boot and rear lacing. The digitally challenged skier could now spend as long as 10 minutes lacing the equivalent of four boots before setting out on the slopes, to say nothing of fine-tuned re-lacing adjustments during the day. Time wasn’t the only inconvenience. Tightening the laces of the hard, stiff outer boot, unless you used a hook-like device to draw them taut, caused raw, sore fingers. And pity the racer who attempted to adjust his laces on a raw frigid January day before stepping into the starting gate. It was an experience comparable to that possibly felt by Scott penciling his dying thoughts in Antarctica.

The buckle boot surely would be the answer. “No more frozen fingers!” claimed Henke. “Flip it open. . .flip it shut. Keep your gloves on!” But when Henke’s salesmen began to show their $49.50 Speedfit boot to dealers in the 1955, they were often laughed out of the shops. At the time buckles were associated with the galoshes worn by folks to walk through slushy streets. “Who would want to wear galoshes to ski?” sneered skeptical shop owners.

Henke Speedfit

Nor did skiers invade shops demanding the revolutionary lace-less boot. They were reluctant to give up lacing’s comfortable close fit, especially when the hard outer boot contained a soft separately laced inner boot. The infinite adjustability offered skiers the most personalized fit they would enjoy until the arrival of custom-foamed liners 20 years later. By contrast, buckles created stresses and painful pressure points on the foot where they attached to the leather.

Racers — usually the first to seize on new technology — didn’t begin to adopt the buckle boot until the early 1960s when other bootmakers improved on Martin’s original design, and offered hand-lasted inners and better-designed tongues to even out the pressure.  Even then, a top racer would wear out a boot in a few weeks as the leather stretched beyond repair. What the performance-oriented skier awaited was leather’s replacement by indestructible, stiffer plastic. In Dubuque, Iowa, plastic boot inventor Bob Lange made his early prototypes using laces, but it was almost humanly impossible to cinch tight the hard, unpliable plastic. Only buckles, Lange discovered in 1965, would enable his new boot to work. Fortunately for him, the buckle had already been invented. . . and the design and making of ski boots changed forever.

Heinz Herzog, long-time president of Raichle-Molitor USA, adds this comment:

It was not uncommon to suffer frostbite as a result of wearing seamed leather boots without interior padding or insulation. To cinch a long thong around the boot, I remember having to thread it through a couple of steel rings with bare fingers. Hans Martin, a Swiss, invented the buckle. Part of his patent covered the method of mounting each buckle on the boot, a challenge because it was leather. Need to spread pressure, not create pressure points. Martin sold the patent to the Swiss boot company, Henke. Others tried to design their own, but Martin’s design was the only one that worked, so the other boot companies like Molitor paid Henke for the right to use the Martin-designed buckle. Le Trappeur had the greatest success in racing. Instead of having the two buckles going laterally across the shaft, they attached one diagonally at the heel.

Martin spent tens of thousands trying to make a one-buckle boot.