Museums

ISHPEMING, MI  (October 30, 2014) -- The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame has announced that ten people have been elected to the Hall of Fame this year.  They are: Curt Chase, Joe Cushing, Chris Davenport, Kristina Koznick, John McMurtry, Ralph Miller, Ross Powers, Erik Schlopy, Bob Smith and Jeannie Thore

The induction of the Class of 2014 will take place on April 11, 2015 in Steamboat Springs Colorado at the conclusion of Skiing History Week. The class will also be enshrined in the Hall of Fame on September 18, 2015 in Ishpeming, Michigan which is the home of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.  

CLASS OF 2014 INDUCTEES

Curt Chase (Colorado) was an innovator and motivating force in the field of ski instruction for over 40 years.  He served as a survival training Instructor of the U.S. Army’s 10^th Mountain Division and later held the same positon for the Strategic Air Command.  He contributed to what is now known as the American Ski Technique and was one of the eight founders of the Professional Ski Instructors of America.  He passed away in June of this year.

Joe Cushing (New Hampshire) was a pioneer in ski area planning and design.  Working with the legendary Sel Hannah he designed over 400 ski areas in North America and the world.  Among those areas where his impact can be seen are Loon Mountain and Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, Sugarbush and Stratton in Vermont, Copper Mountain and Keystone in Colorado and Deer Valley in Utah.

 Chris Davenport (Colorado) is widely regarded as one of the world’s premier big mountain skiers.  In 1996 he was recognized as the World Extreme Skiing Champion and four years later was the International Freeskier’s Association‘s World Freeskiing champion.  In 2007 he became the first person to ski all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000 foot peaks in one year.   He has been featured in 30 ski films.

 Kristina Koznick (Colorado) was an outstanding slalom racer from the mid-west who began her career under the coaching direction of Eric Sailer (Hall of Fame Class of 2005).  With six national titles and six World Cup victories she finished second twice in the season-long fis World Cup.  She was named to three Olympic teams and competed at six World Championships.

 John McMurtry (Colorado) was a US Ski Team coach during the 1980’s, which saw several of its members win World Cup titles, Olympic medals and the only Nation’s Cup Award for the U.S. Alpine Team. In 1987 he became the U.S. team’s development and later alpine director establishing a regional development program that continues to bring thousands of young athletes into the sport including Picabo Street, Bode Miller, Lindsay Vonn and Julia Mancuso.

Ralph Miller (Kentucky) was one of America’s top skiing competitors in the 1950’s where he excelled in four event competitions (downhill, slalom, jumping, cross country).  He won or placed in the top three of many of the top competitions held during this time and frequently was able to beat Olympians like Stein Eriksen and Othmar Schneider. In 1955 he set a world speed record of 109 mph which stood for 15 years.

 Ross Powers (Vermont) is the fourth person from snowboarding to be elected to the Hall of Fame.  He won the first U.S Olympic medal in snowboarding, a bronze, at the 1998 Nagano Games and was the Olympic halfpipe champion in 2002, leading an American podium sweep.  Two years earlier he had won a World Championship.  During his career he held every title in halfpipe snowboarding.

Erik Schlopy (Utah) was a three time Olympian and seven time national champion who had one of the longest and most successful careers in U.S. ski racing history.  He was a World Pro super G champion and a bronze medal winner in the giant slalom at the World Championships in 2003.  Throughout his career he demonstrated not only his great ability but also his perseverance and tenacity coming back from many serious injuries to compete with the best in this sport.

Dr. Robert Smith (Idaho) was a dentist turned goggle inventor who changed skiing, which was his passion, when he founded his eyewear company in the 1960’s   Smith Optics was founded literally from his kitchen table where he developed a thermal lens goggle that did not fog up when it was being used on the ski slopes.  It was an invention that was enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of skiers initially and continues to have an impact on the experience of skiers and snowboarders today.  He passed away in 2012.

 Jeannie Thoren (Minnesota) is regarded by many as the “Johnny Appleseed” of women’s skiing.  She was a pioneer in developing women’s specific ski equipment, which helped women ski better because they were using equipment better suited to their physique.  For nearly 20 years, beginning in 1988, she conducted an estimated 70 women’s ski equipment seminars annually around the country in her effort to improve the sport for all women.

With thousands of photos, clippings, film and manuscripts, this collection tells the ski story of the Intermountain West. By Mike Korologos

Pictured above: Dr. Greg Thompson, co-founder of the J. Willard Marriott Library Utah Ski Archives, and Molly Creer, moving image and sound archivist in Special Collections, display a few items from the library’s extensive ski archives.

To the first-time visitor, the shipping and receiving dock at the main campus library at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City appears similar to one you’d see at a grocery or furniture warehouse—high overhead clearance, heavy-duty rubber bumper guards on the dock platform, oversized metal doors with wire security windows and several “no parking” signs. 

Pictured to the right: Hollywood leading lady Claudette Colbert strikes a publicity pose on the front porch of the Alta Lodge in the early 1940s. Photo credit Clyde Anderson / special collections / J.  Willard Marriott Library / University of Utah

If you’re delivering boxes of old documents, news clippings, files, photos, videos, scrapbooks or collections for inclusion in the library’s Utah Ski Archives, the dock takes on an entirely different persona in that nanosecond when you notice the person about to receive your materials is wearing white gloves.  

Yes, white gloves—to protect your materials (that “ski stuff” that’s been gathering dust for decades in the attic, garage or crawl space at home) from the body oils that fingerprints might place on them. What’s more, if you return to the library months or years later to look up an item in your donated materials, you too will be required to wear white gloves before you are allowed to handle any of that once-forgotten, almost-trashed “ski stuff.”

Such is the meticulous care that underscores the receiving, identifying, labeling, categorizing, cataloguing and filing of materials at the J. Willard Marriott
Library’s Special Collections, thus making them easily referenced by an international audience of students, scholars, researchers, historians, authors, reporters, photographers and others. It’s a ski historian’s nirvana, especially for researchers mining for nuggets of information regarding the history of skiing in the Intermountain Area (comprising Utah, Idaho and Wyoming).  

Viewed in total, the collection includes several thousand photos, plus negatives, movie film, video cassettes, scrapbooks, news clippings, lift tickets, brochures, letters, interviews, posters, personal manuscripts, oral histories, books, and ski team and ski area files. (For an overview of the collection, see “Details” sidebar on page 13.) Dr. Gregory C. Thompson, assistant dean and director of Special Collections at the library, co-founded the ski archive in 1989 and has watched the collection grow exponentially ever since.

“Funding wasn’t a big deal when we got our first few collections,” Thompson recalls. “But we sure can’t say that now. While we’re thrilled to see the archives grow into such prominence, with that growth comes the continual task of raising funds.” While the library’s annual budget covers the collection’s basic costs—such as salaries for key employees—the staff also raises outside funds through events, foundations, and individual and corporate donors. 

This additional revenue supports part-time student employees who help with organizing, scanning and developing the collection; and the costs of storage, preservation, acquisitions and the Website.

Among the early significant collections that Thompson describes came from Alta, Utah’s first lift-served ski area (1938). In 1989 the library’s development director, the late Sue Raemer, was a second-generation ski instructor at Alta, where she learned that the company was looking to significantly thin its vast files, some dating to its mining heyday of the 1870s. 

That’s when Raemer and Thompson had an “ah-ha” moment:  “Why not have Alta donate its unwanted documents to the University of Utah library’s Special Collections?” Raemer’s foresight and fortuitous dual employment were coupled with Thompson’s expertise in launching archives to give birth to a cocktail party for 200 local ski aficionados who heartily endorsed the Ski Archives idea.

Within a few years that cocktail party evolved into a ski season-launching extravaganza called The Utah Ski Archives Ski Affair. The event is the library’s most prominent outreach activity, raising $40,00 to $50,000 every fall (see sidebar). Another significant library outreach effort links the archive with the Alf Engen Ski Museum, in Park City, which serves as a repository for multi-dimensional collectibles—such as trophies or equipment—that the library does not store. (The museum is an ISHA partner, and Skiing History serves as its official publication.)

“The affiliation with the museum gives the library’s historical preservation efforts a very broad visual component that is popular with the public,” says Thompson, a long-time member of the museum board of directors.

The ski museum is housed in the S. J. (Joe) Quinney Winter Sports Center at Utah Olympic Park. Opened in 2002, the museum exhibits an array of historical ski items and is home to the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame and the Professional Ski Instructors of America/Intermountain Hall of Fame. One level above is the George S. and Delores Doré Eccles 2002 Olympic Winter Games Museum. Admission to both venues is free. 

Pictured to the left: In this early 1940s photo, majestic Mount Superior serves as a backdrop for skiers at the Alta Lodge. Photo credit: Clyde Anderson / special collections / J.  Willard Marriott Library / University of Utah

Individually, the museum and archive are each a rich cache of ski history in its own right. Combined, they become an unmatched treasure that’s mined daily by casual visitors and serious researchers. And your “ski stuff” is in the thick of it.

Mike Korologos is the former ski editor for The Salt Lake Tribune and served as Communications Director for the Bid and Organizing Committees of the Olympic Winter Games of 2002. He was inducted into the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in 2009.

Details

Here’s a sampling of the archives’ holdings:
• 250,000 photos, slides and negatives (20,000 digitized and available online) 
• 300,000 photos donated by Ski Racing Magazine, plus 100 bound volumes (1940s–2011)
• 250 photograph collections
• 250 manuscript collections
• 300 oral histories 
• 100 audio-visual collections
• 500 videos, film and audio tapes
• Extensive materials from the Bid and Organizing Committees of the Olympic Winter Games of 2002
• Records and photos from almost every ski area in Utah and several in Idaho and Wyoming
• Scrapbooks of prominent ski industry pioneers
• Photo collections of the U.S. Forest Service’s role in ski safety and multiple use of public lands
• Records of the Professional Ski Instructors of America/Intermountain Division
• Documents from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn.

The J. Willard Marriott Library is the main academic library of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. To learn more about the library’s Ski Archives, and to search the digital collections, go to: http://www.lib.utah.edu/collections/ski-archives/index.php. For more information, call program manager Judy Jarrow at (801) 581-3421.