A Passion for the Past
The author, a budding ski book collector, meets “the big crocodile” of the worldwide collecting clan, Mason Beekley: International Skiing History Association’s founder amd president.
by Eric Hanson
I have more books and fewer skis than most of my friends do. Actually, the second part isn't true: I have a rackful of old wooden skis in the garage. But I'll go 10 years on the modern pair that I ski on. It's the same with boots: I wear them until they die. I have great sales resistance when it comes to new stuff, but if it's obsolete and it has to do with skiing, I'll buy it. Books especially.
I began collecting ski books when I was around 13. Before I could afford to go there myself, I could afford to buy a book about Switzerland, study the maps, and read about the runs and the little inns and the famous names. In books written about Switzerland in the 1920s and '30s, I could read about a time and a place I could never visit. St. Moritz with Cole Porter and the Aga Khan. Murren at the moment when Arnold Lunn was inventing slalom.
I became an aficionado of places I had never been to. By the time I got out of college, I was loaded down with a library big enough to doom any ambitions I had of being a ski bum: I couldn't fit my belongings into the back of a car. The reading brought its own compensations, though. When I finally visited Sun Valley, I knew my way around its past as well as its present. I knew it was here that Hollywood actress Norma Shearer met the ski instructor who became her husband, and I knew where Hemingway had punched out drafts of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Skiing Stowe for the first time, I felt like a historian visiting Pompeii. I climbed the last few hundred feet of Mount Mansfield to ski the Nose Dive from the top, and made a point of taking the long zigzag path of the old Toll Road, once a path for carriages to the mountaintop, down to a cocktail waiting in the white clapboard and fieldstone lodge at the end of the day.
Over time, my quest for ski books has become just as absorbing as the skiing. I've found that discovering a good antiquarian bookshop can be every bit as exciting as discovering a favorite ski run or a stash of untracked powder. Below the walls of Quebec's old city, in a street of antique shops, I found one such place. Tucked into an alley, behind a narrow door, was a small shop with walls lined with beautiful cloth-and leather-bound books. Everything was in French. I asked a young clerk, who was eating his lunch, "Any sporting books?" "Qui." "Any in English?" "Non." As I was about to leave, an old man's voice came out of the back room: "Un moment." Papers rustled and after a minute the old man emerged with a small volume slightly larger than a deck of cards. It was a ski guide to the Laurentians, published in the mid'40s by the company that made Sweet Caporal cigarettes. It showed all the inns and lifts and the hundreds of kilometers of interconnecting trails, on 12 very detailed foldout maps. It's probably the most remarkable book in my collection. In it I can find Hill 70 near Shawbridge, Quebec, where the first rope tow was put into use, and trace with my fingers the trails laid out by Jackrabbit Johannsen. Even something as trivial as an old, outdated ski guide is a window into what skiing was like at a particular time and place.
Pictures tell a story too. Photos from books written in the '20s by Arnold Lunn and Tony Knebworth show English skiers in tweed sports coats and neckties on free-heel skis with "Amstutz springs" that allowed that extreme forward lean. By the 1930s, the first lightweight Leicas were becoming available. Suddenly top-quality cameras were small enough to be thrown into rucksacks and carried easily up above the tree line. The results were revolutionary. Books by the likes of Luis Trenker and Stefan Kruckenhauser raised ski photography to the level of art, capturing the offhand exuberance and choreography of skiing. Skiing as picnic. Skiing as ritual. Skier as Ubermensch and Schneehase. The snow appears almost luminous.
Some of the best written accounts in the early age of skiing are not only eye-opening but very funny. My own favorites are the rival accounts of the first Inferno race in 1928, by A.H. D'Egville and Arnold Lunn. Over the 7,500-vertical-foot descent, "Deggers" describes the lay of the land and the many collisions and mishaps, sharings of brandy flasks, the stratagems and horrific falls. It's all very tongue-in-cheek, a kind of civilized Rat Pack badinage.
But some of the best stories never make it into print. The best ski stories are those spun out over lunches at mid-mountain restaurants or in the off-season. Personal stories, traded back and forth in a friendly game of one-upmanship. Details get embellished over the years. Slapstick details are elaborated to enhance the plot. Most of ski history is oral history: conversation, anecdotes.
Last April, over lunch at 10,000 feet, I heard one of the most famous anecdotes in American skiing, the one about how KT-22 at Squaw Valley got its name. What made it especially memorable was that I heard it directly from Sandy Poulsen, the woman, whose first run down the mountain some 40 years ago, required the 22 kick turns that inspired the abbreviation.
The occasion for our lunchtime conversation was the annual meeting of the International Ski History Association (ISHA), a loosely knit association of ski buffs, writers, historians, and historical figures dedicated to the preservation of ski history. Park City played host. Among those attending were Penny Pitou. double silver medalist at the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics; Jerry Nunn, the first woman snow ranger; Dick Durrance, the first international-class racer to come from America; ski writers Morten Lund and Doug Pfeiffer; and racing guru Warren Witherell. It was a week of long lunches, late powder, and late evenings filled with stories--apocryphal, hilarious, cliff-hanging (literally), flavorful, and memorable.
Everyone had a bagful of stories to tell. Penny Pitou told about how relieved she had been to have won a silver in the Olympic downhill, until then vice president Richard Nixon (who was soon to know about such things) told her how bad he felt that she hadn't won. Doug Pfeiffer told about falling all the way down the Headwall at Tuckerman Ravine. Bill Briggs, longtime ski-school director at Snow King, Wyoming, described his premier ski descent of the Grand Teton, with spine-chilling nonchalance. Wolfgang Lert, longtime trafficker in Bogners and Sweaters, related the fun he and his friends in the skiwear business used to have. Humorously rewriting the ad copy, for instance. There was one famous ad for Henke, which was introducing the new buckle ski boots. It asked the question: "Are you lacing, when you could be racing?" This prompted the waggish reply: "Are you buckling, when you could be....?" Most of the best ski stories never make it into print because they're unprintable.
A vocal extension of the ski anecdote is the ski song. After dinner one night at Adolph's in Park City, there was a troubadour session, at which we sang what seemed like every ski song ever written, including every verse of "Super Skier," recorded by the Chad Mitchell Trio in 1960. (The chorus went, "he was goin' down the slope 'bout 90 miles an hour, when he caught an edge of his ski. His skis they were fast but the slopes they were faster. That's the last of Super Skier we shall see.") Despite long, arduous apres-ski hours, none of the so-called elderly members of our group failed to ski the legs off us young and supposedly more supple ski writers the next day. Keeping America in Bogners has kept 78-year-old Wolfie Lert remarkably fit.
But the ISHA meetings aren't called just for the sake of socializing, as enjoyable as that part is. The underlying mission is to bring together like-minded people for the writing down-cataloguing, and preserving of ski history; the recording of oral histories; and the championing of ski books. In a sport that tends to focus on the cutting edge, once in a while it's good to pull up and look back at the tracks left on the hill.
ISHA is the brainchild of a man named Mason Beekley, who founded the organization in 1990. Besides being the current godfather of ski history, Mason is also the big crocodile of all the collectors of ski stuff--in the world, I suspect. Luckily he is an affable crocodile, with sufficient charm to act as master of ceremonies and enough connections to pull together such a far-flung collection of people.
I first came across Mason a couple of years ago, when I tried to buy a few items from a ski-book catalog and found out the whole collection had been bought up by one guy in Connecticut. Up until that point, I'd imagined I was the only collector of ski memorabilia in the field, except for the people who buy pairs of old skis to hang over their fireplaces. But next to his, my enormous collection of books and clutter is but a shoeboxful.
Mason loves to ski and is a good skier, but among collectors he is a kind of master. He has 1,800 books about skiing, which he keeps in a 2,500-square-foot library he built specifically to house them. (He calls it the Ski Aerie.) It also holds 200 paintings and sculptures depicting skiing, not to mention his 30 posters from the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Mason's collection also contains several rare skis, including one of Howard Head's 13 original prototypes (a wood and plastic core sandwiched between an aluminum base and topskin). If Rosebud had been a pair of skis instead of a sled, Mason would own it.
On one day during the week, we skied at Alta, and afterward I had a chance to relax in an armchair at the Peruvian Lodge with Mason and Doug Pfeiffer (the number-two crocodile of ski books) and do what collectors love best--namely, talk about what we have and don't have. Like fishermen protecting their best spots, we avoided talking about our favorite book sources. Doug, a longtime instructor and technique pioneer and the editor-in-chief of Skiing from 1966 to 1972, collects technique books, which I don't buy. Mason collects everything. Even so, I managed to come up with a book neither of them had ever come across: my pocket-sized Sweet Caporal ski guide to the Laurentians. I'm sure I noticed Mason making a mental note. It's gratifying to know that even for the man who has everything, the quest goes on.