It’s hard to spot the exact moment when something new and valuable comes into the sport. It usually arises as a casual thought unrecognized as the seed of an idea whose time has come. By the 1980s, the need for a rational record of American skiing history had reached the tipping point. The only one to respond to the need was Mason Beekley of New Hartford, Connecticut. He had a simple thought, the wit to broaden it to a vision, and hang on to it. Out of that came the International Skiing History Association (I.S.H.A.) and Skiing Heritage, twin results of Mason Beekley’s tenacity in getting needed things started. It is an extraordinary story of one man who had the right idea and made it work.
Tenacious is as good a word as any to characterize Mason Beekley. His career is a testament to quality. It explains why Mason and not someone else founded the International Skiing History Association even though the need for an organized overall national ski history advocacy group had become crucial. This writer is one who had the thought, earlier, fleetingly. He had proposed a U.S. Ski History Association in 1976. Nothing came of it.
Mason, to start with, long before he became chairman of Beekley Corporation in Connecticut, had started out as a teacher in western Massachusetts’ Eaglebrook School, where he had been the resident ski instructor and coach. He had qualified as ski patroller at Big Bromley, Vermont, as well. He had been certified as a U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association amateur ski instructor.
He even proposed to his wife-to-be, Licia, on the slopes of Mad River in 1955. The resultant family eventually numbered four daughters: Lisa-Lee, Sayre, Francie and Lorie—all good skiers in due course. By then Mason almost inevitably had left his beloved instructing behind to accept his father’s invitation to join Beekley Corporation.
The senior Beekley was a man who knew how to act on inspiration. He was an inventor who had held the patent on a noise-canceling differential microphone used to screen out noise during communications in World War II combat.
Now working on more inventions, he was also running a job-printing plant he had bought to see what he could do to improve the standard printing process.
As its mainstay, the Beekley press turned out hospital business forms. Next came the Beekley information retrieval system for hospital use. That led the Beekleys into business as hospital management consultants. The senior Beekley died in 1969.
Now came a challenge. The office computer loomed as a reality that would soon eliminate Beekley’s business forms market. A detailed understanding of the hospital business enabled Mason and his staff to come up with "a new language for radiology" consisting of small lead icons which could be quickly taped to patients to identify points on the body in reading patient X-rays. Mason developed the market through patient research on the needs of radiologists coupled with a painstaking follow-up and a sophisticated telemarketing to create a profitable market niche.
During the 1980s, Mason was able to indulge his penchant for nonprofit avocational projects, among them the founding of a preparatory school and the major fund-raising role for construction of the town of New Hartford’s state-of-the-art library. And, of course, to found I.S.H.A.
It had begun with books. Mason had started collecting old ski books as a boy. The first fruits of his business success gave him the means to build a big ski library, which soon became the largest private collection in the country, perhaps in the world. In addition, Mason built up a ski art collection that hung and stood everywhere in the Parsonage, the rambling spacious Beekley home just outside of New Hartford center.
In the course of building his library, Mason joined an informal group of seven ski-book collectors, among them Allen Adler, U.S. Ski Association National Ski Historian and chairman of the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame Selection Committee. Mason, Allen and the other interested collectors kept in touch to find out which ski books had been newly-bought, at what price, and where—and, naturally, who had which duplicates to trade. Inevitably, they reminisced by telling stories about the way skiing was.
It was here Mason had his germinal thought, arising in part from enjoying the correspondence and conversations within this group.
The Birth of a Library and Gallery
In 1990, Mason turned 63. The Beekley Corporation had been growing exponentially and so had his collections. The swelling shelves of books, upwards of a thousand, along with dozens of paintings and sculptures overflowed and seriously overloaded the upstairs Parsonage. It got to the point that Licia became adamant that something had to be done. Something was.
Mason consulted with an architect, Alec Frost of Avon, and with New Hartford contractor Ken Kimmerle. The three of them produced a design for Mason’s personal art gallery and library with second floor balconies, windows for lighting paintings on four walls, and a vaulted ceiling—to be constructed right next to the Parsonage. That would take care of the problem.
The Birth of the Concept
Mason now began to spend time painstakingly cataloging his books in preparation for moving them into SkiAerie, the name he gave his new outbuilding. He quite naturally began to envision periodically getting together with his book-trading group and other interested skiers at SkiAerie. The thought expanded.
Mason began to speculate on hosting a considerably larger gathering, to bring ski book collectors together with others who were intensely interested in skiing literature and skiing history. In fact, anyone who had lived through the Golden Age of American alpine skiing from 1930 to 1970 was a likely prospect for an invitation.
Most veteran skiers vividly recall this era, during which nearly all major innovations and the critical growth of the sport had taken place. Such skiers likely retained a keen interest in the era’s history, and in preserving the historical record of the period.
Mason came to the conclusion that he could convince a substantial number of longtime skiers, not only collectors and historians but ordinary skiers, to join an organization that would encourage and eventually record recollections of the Golden Age, to keep the mainstream history of American skiing alive.
Seized by this train of thought and to fix it in his mind, Mason devised the name International Skiing History Association. He foresaw a group that would meet to bring the shakers and movers of ski history together with ski literature collectors, museum staffs, veterans of the Golden Age, longtime ski journalists, and ski historians from the amateur to the professional, all bound together by an effort to disseminate, and enlarge the historical record and, not at all incidentally, to enjoy each other’s company.
Still occupied by these thoughts in midwinter 1990, Mason went on a customary ski vacation to Aspen, but this time hoping to get together with a Golden Age hero, Dick Durrance, then 76. Mason and Dick had never met but Mason’s idea seemed so intriguing that Dick invited Mason to his home in Snowmass to discuss it.
"I thought it was a hell of an idea," Dick recalls. " I told him I thought he ought to go ahead with it. I thought it was important that he carry on."
That was, as Mason more than once recalled, the "praise from Caesar" that decided him to embark on building an entirely new organization of a kind heretofore unknown in this country.
Jumping ahead a bit, what would begin as a group getting together for fun and camaraderie with some concern about the state of ski history, soon took on greater substance. The more the state of ski history was explored, the worse shape ski history seemed to be in.
A Cloth Full of Holes
Not to put too fine a point on it, ski history was full of holes. Not much was being done about it. Granted, there were one or two ski history books coming out every year, but almost without exception they were not well researched. There had been no concerted attempt to define the gaps and fill them. The exception was a recent history, New England and Thereabouts—A Ski Tracing, published in 1985 by Allen Adler.
One most neglected major figure was Charles N. Proctor, Dartmouth Class of ’28. Slalom was first developed in the U.S. at Dartmouth and spread to other colleges, much as football and basketball in the same era first developed on intercollegiate campuses. In skiing, Dartmouth took the lead when team captain Charley Proctor became the first to break free of the previous genteel technique developed in intercollegiate contest where style counted heavily and invented a technique aimed at getting to the finish line fastest, without regard to style. That made Charley Proctor a figure of importance in American ski history, one who had never had a biographical article published in a ski periodical
More Holes Found
Also missing was anything definitive on Otto Schniebs, an influential pioneer of the European approach to skiing. He had been the first to sum it up, saying, "Skiing is not a sport, it is a way of life." Everyone knew the phrase. But where was the biography?
Other missing persons: Sig Buchmayr, the blithe spirit who led the first New England alpine resort school during the 1930s at Peckett’s Inn, in Franconia, New Hampshire. And missing was Benno Rybizka, who brought the first official Arlberg ski school to the Northeast in the 1930s. Nor was there a biography of Otto Lang, the instructor who brought official Arlberg to the Northwest.
Also missing were major American transition figures: Barney McLean, Gordy Wren, Wayne Poulsen, and Alf, Sverre, and Corey Engen, tremendously talented athletes all, men who built the bridge from the jumping era to the alpine era. None of them had a good journalistic biography on record.
Equally grievous was the lack of a definitive account of Hjalmar Hvam, the inventor of the release binding. There was an adequate biography of Bob Lange, the most important boot innovator of the last half of the 1900s but there was no complete story on Ed Scott, the most important innovator in ski poles.
Nor was there a biography on two of the earliest and most influential international alpine competitors in this country, Dick Durrance and Gretchen Fraser.
John Jay, pioneer of the national lecture-tour ski film, had a sketchy autobiography but nothing to compare with his contribution to the sport. In the same vein, little had been done by any independent writer to set down the life of Warren Miller, who seized the torch as the sport’s finest promoter.
Enough. Enough. In short, in 1990, too many giants of the sport had gone largely unrecorded. And they were only the tip of the iceberg of unrecorded history.
Mason Gets Going
By the time Mason came back from his 1990 visit to Dick Durrance in Aspen, he had traveled, conceptually, from a homey coffee-klatcsh for ski book collectors to a visionary international organization designed to make itself felt in ski history scholarship and journalism. Now he showed why he rated as a cutting-edge entrepreneur. With the exception of the occasional secretarial help, he was going to start a new international ski organization—solo.
Immediately on his return, Mason figured out the specifics needed to get his first Associates under the I.S.H.A. umbrella. He picked as his first target Lloyd Lambert of Ballston Lake, New York. Lloyd had founded the very successful 70+ Ski Club to which Mason belonged—an organization of veteran skiers offering discount travel and regional get-togethers—that had mushroomed to a membership of seven thousand.
Mason arrived at Lambert’s doorstep on the third of April. Lambert agreed that Mason was on a good course, and consented to be the first to lend his name to the cause. He was awarded—in Mason’s newly-hatched scheme of things—the title of "I.S.H.A. Founder no. 2," right after Mason, that is.
Mason’s second goal was to enlist Allen Adler. Allen was easy, very encouraging and willing to lend his name. He became I.S.H.A. Founder no. 3.
Mason then traveled to New Hampshire to meet the continent’s outstanding academic ski historian, professor John Allen of Rumney. Professor Allen was impressed enough to give Mason the names of a number of colleagues in academic ski history circles overseas.
Enter Snow News
As fortune would have it, there existed just at this time a lively, eight-page ski quarterly founded and written by Glenn Parkinson of Gorham, Maine that had been published for about a year as a hobby. Snow News was an amusing mix of current ski news, history vignettes, vintage ads and cartoons. Glenn, a Vermont ski instructor turned investment advisor at a Portland brokerage firm, had teamed with his mother, Earline Marsh of Middlesex, Vermont, who did the computer layouts as well as overseeing printing and distribution.
Mason had been thinking about starting a newsletter. He realized from the beginning that a journal of sorts would be an essential element. Without it, any such new organization based on membership scattered all over the countryside would lose cohesion and stall. At about this point, Mason saw his first copy of Snow News. It was instant recognition—the right vehicle for I.S.H.A.
Early in April, 1990, Mason called Glenn and arranged to meet him in Portland. Within a short time, Mason had agreed to cover the costs of Snow News as the I.S.H.A. house journal to be sent free to those Mason signed up as founding I.S.H.A. members. The newsletter need had been answered.
Next came the manifesto. Mason had been working steadily to define his concept on paper. In April, he sent out his concept, Preliminary Draft to Prospective Founders. It was mailed mainly to prestigious skiers whose names he had obtained. Some recipients may have thought having an official group labeled "Founders" a bit strained. But Mason was betting that the idea of being a founder of such an organization would be attractive to many. And it cost nothing to get on the list. The operative paragraphs of the Preliminary Draft to Prospective Founders were:
Purpose: The basic purpose of I.S.H.A. shall be to encourage and promote sharing, organizing, preserving, archiving, collecting and disseminating every aspect of the history of skiing."
Initial Plan: In a few years, I.S.H.A. will have hundreds of members, representing interest in and knowledge of every aspect of skiing history. They will live in many countries. They will communicate through periodical publications and periodic meetings and activities.
No one knew of course how this initiative would play out. Mason Beekley was not a name in national ski circles. The result could have been a humiliating mass cold-shoulder. But Mason, acting almost out of the blue, figuratively nailed his manifesto on the door of several dozen living giants of ski history, as well as ski historians and journalists—and not only in the United States, but around the world. His covering letter was a challenge to join in as an International Skiing History Association Founder.
In early May 1990, Mason had readied a second-round follow-up mailing. He had refined his concept via a question-and-answer colloquy he called Visions and Initial Planning. It contained a more ambitious blueprint for the new organization than had the Preliminary Draft. The first paragraphs read:
Why I.S.H.A.?
The mission of I.S.H.A. shall be to preserve and proliferate, throughout the world, the history and heritage of skiing.
I.S.H.A. will act as a clearing house for information about skiing history and public and private collections in every country.
I.S.H.A. will encourage communication among people throughout the world who are interested in skiing history and provide a forum for them through its newsletter, and perhaps, gatherings.
I.S.H.A. will provide another means of skiing association and friendship, where the common bond is not only that of skiing but interest in the history and heritage of skiing.
Looking back at it after ten years, Visions and Initial Planning comes off as a remarkably accurate forecast. I.S.H.A. was never simply an organization that "just grew." It was, in retrospect, following a plan closely-scripted by Mason Beekley with remarkable fidelity as measured against the real world where the results often diverge drastically from the concept.
It worked. By November 1, 1990, Mason was able to announce that he had permission from 36 prestigious prospects who had let their names be inscribed on the Founders list.
CONTINUED IN RIGHT COLUMN AT TOP
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The Initial Founders
The initial Founders, in alphabetical order, were: Allen Adler; Ken Astrom of the Vasterbottens Museum in Sweden; Robert Baumrucker, Dartmouth racer; Burton Boyum, a director of the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame; Gloria Chadwick, former executive secretary of the USSA; Bill Clark, director of the Western Skisport Museum; Stan Cohen, author and publisher of Downhill Skiing; Max and Edna Dercum, pioneering Colorado ski lodge owners, instructors, and resort developers.
Also on board were Brooks Dodge, U.S. team member; Sel Hannah, pioneer trailmaker; Howard Head, breakthrough ski-maker; Antero Heikkine of the University of Joenseuu in Finland; Harold Hillman, notable early Dartmouth racer; Ted Hunter, another early Dartmouth notable.
Others joining were Elisabeth Hussey, secretary of the Ski Club of Great Britain; Robert Irwin, an outstanding U.S. ski book collector; John Jay; Lloyd Lambert; Otto Lang, the longtime Sun Valley Ski School director; Natalie Leduc, outstanding ski book collector (member of Mason’s book-tracing group); Bud Little, former director of USSA; Warren Miller; Dick Needham, former editor of Ski; Kazuo Ogawa, an outstanding Japanese ski journalist; Glenn Parkinson, of course, editor of Snow News; Doug Pfeiffer, longtime editor of Skiing; Friedl Pfeifer, founder of the ski resort at Aspen.
There were also Ranulf Rayner, outstanding ski artist; Carroll Reed, founder of the first official Arlberg school in the northeast; Gary Schwartz, notable West Coast collector of ski art; the Boston racer Al Sise.
Mason had also gotten a "yes" from Max Triet, director of the Swiss Sports Museum in Switzerland; Paul and Paula Valar, early Swiss and American ski racers and ski school directors; Betty Whitney, owner of Whitney’s, a pioneer New Hampshire ski lodge; Mary Bird Young of the first U.S. women’s team.
Mason had correctly identified the initial driving force, namely that "The Founders will give I.S.H.A. the initial credibility it needs to attract Charter Members." The support from an initial galaxy of ski stars made it convincing that I.S.H.A. was going to be a solidly reputable organization.
The Driving Force
But there was nothing inevitable about I.S.H.A.’s coalescing as rapidly as it did. In less capable hands, the organization could easily have lost its momentum. But Mason’s early decision to publish a newsletter began to do its job. Who could refuse a free newsletter on a subject of intrinsic interest? The 1991 Winter Issue of Snow News came out carrying a legend on its front-page, right under the Snow News name reading The Official Journal of the International Skiing History Association.
The lead article announced the newsletter’s affiliation with I.S.H.A. and recorded that seventy-five Founders had now signed up. This issue also carried a concise history of snow grooming by Glenn Parkinson. The journal had been given a dual purpose.
One was to entice skiers to sign up. The other to bring previously-hidden ski history to light—actually a second enticement giving everyone who signed up the chance to take part in a good cause. It was an offer hard to refuse.
Mason had set out to enroll a hundred Founders—skiers with at least something of a name in the sport. The next step was to actually translate an organization that existed only on paper into the world of human beings. Mason called for a Steering Committee, the body that would initiate legal underpinnings for I.S.H.A. by vote.
Mason found getting notables to sign up from the comfort of their own homes was easier than getting Founders to come to a mutually convenient place. But, eventually, six Easterners willing and able to come together under the I.S.H.A. banner conducted the first business meeting. They met on May 14, 1991 at the storied Hanover Inn in Hanover, New Hampshire—a center of early alpine instruction in the 1930s, home town of Dartmouth College.
A little more than a year after Mason’s talk to Dick Durrance, the convening Founders arrived for Mason’s lunch. They were Rick Moulton, maker of the first ski history documentary; Gloria Chadwick, onetime executive secretary of the U.S. Ski Association; Glenn Parkinson, founder of Snow News; Penny Pitou, 1960 Olympic silver medalist; Sel Hannah, pioneer trail designer; and Al Sise, early alpine team member.
Mason had now neatly finessed the chicken-and-egg conundrum. Penny Pitou says she probably came because Sel Hannah and Al Sise were going to be there. And, very probably, vice-versa.
A Goal Within Sight
At lunch, the group constituted itself as the I.S.H.A. Steering Committee and, after several hours’ discussion, issued a one-page Mission Statement affirming the principles of the Vision prospectus. Something solid had been born.
The Spring 1991 Issue of Snow News reported that the number of Associates had risen to just under a hundred. On June 3, 1991, the total number of Founders had now reached Mason’s goal. The grand total was 102. The roster included John Fry, editor of Snow Country, and previously longtime editor of Ski. It also had Dave Rowan, who had started at Ski in 1949 and was now publisher of Ski Area Management. It was hard to come up with the name of a veteran journalist or editor not enrolled.
In the Spring Issue 1991 of Snow News, Mason reported on the Hanover meeting to all Founders, adding that I.S.H.A. had opened a bank account with a contribution from Benno Rybizka of St. Anton.
On June 25, Mason began to implement the second stage of sign-ups by writing the current Founders asking them to enroll their many friends as Charter Members by simply sending him the names and addresses. On July 25, fifty-some of these new Charter members, enrolled by remote control, as it were, received a letter informing them of their status as Charter Members and the imminent arrival of their new newsletter.
At that time, I was a contributing editor to Snow Country and had a call from Mason. A very persuasive call. I was officially welcomed in a letter from Mason on July 3, 1991 and became Founder no. 105.
In 1992, I.S.H.A. went into its second calendar year. The construction of SkiAerie began in April, 1992 and Mason’s attention turned to his first membership get-together, one of the reasons for founding the organization in the first place.
In April, 1992, I.S.H.A. held its first Annual Gathering—at Whistler Mt., British Columbia. Mason set the meeting up to make good on his premise of camaraderie as part of the organization’s reason for being.
Among the Associates who came to Whistler were Kazua Ogawa, a ski journalist from Japan; Ekkehart Ulmrich, a ski museum curator from Munich, and two veteran national ski journalists—this editor and Doug Pfeiffer, past editor of Skiing. There were three North American Olympians: Andy Mead Lawrence, Penny Pitou and Nancy Greene. It was the first of—to date—ten Gatherings, all memorable events, thanks to Doug Pfeiffer, who arranged all the later ones. For a core group, the Gatherings have represented what I.S.H.A. was all about.
SkiAerie was completed in October, 1993. It soon housed, in magnificent manner, the Beekley International Collection of Skiing Art and Literature, an object lesson in the preservation of skiing’s heritage, of which art and literature were certainly integral parts.
SkiAerie was open to viewers by invitation only but it had many visits from Associates at their request. It served as the meeting place for the I.S.H.A. Executive Committee nearly every summer. It hosted a New England Ski Museum board meeting. Although it served as a kind of glorious affirmation of the material side of the skiing heritage, it was unique. There were thousands of ski artifacts—skis, boots, poles, clothes, —and fine exhibits in museums around North America but there was only one SkiAerie.
The Journal Transforms
SkiAerie was finished but the primary I.S.H.A mission was not. In fact it was becoming increasingly urgent. Two of the original Steering Committee—Al Sise and Sel Hannah—had already passed on, to the great sorrow of I.S.H.A. members.
The obvious need to record more ski history before it went into oblivion, along with those who knew about it, was to put ski history on the record faster. That meant beefing up Skiing Heritage (it had been renamed in 1993 at the suggestion of Associate John Fry, editor of Snow Country). It was a big step and called for at least one full-time editor who would be paid. And that meant the journal could not longer be a giveaway. I.S.H.A. would have to charge Associates a combination subscription-membership fee.
Mason invited the writer, who had already contributed several articles to Snow News, to go with him to the Lillehammer Olympics. On the plane, Mason asked if I would take on the job of editor full-time and expand the journal. I agreed to do it.
In 1994 at Park City, site of the third I.S.H.A. Gathering, the board of directors voted to charge everyone a membership and subscription fee and to produce a journal big enough to make a real dent in the mass of subjects that ought to be recorded as quickly as possible. Glenn Parkinson generously helped in the transition after stepping aside to allow me to start working. (Glenn is currently and deservedly president of the New England Ski Museum.)
After a short informal course in desktop publishing, given in impromptu fashion by another Associate, John Auran (a past editor at both Ski and Skiing), I managed to produce the Fall 1994 Issue of Skiing Heritage. It carried the journal’s first full-length article, a ten-page cover story on Gretchen Fraser by Luanne Pfeifer.
The eight-page Snow News gradually transformed itself into the present 36-page quarterly, Skiing Heritage. The majority of Associates were not ski book collectors, and did not come to the Annual Gatherings, they simply liked reading about ski history and liked the feeling of helping to inscribe more ski history into the record. These Associates signed up year after year to maintain the organization. From 1994 on, the success of I.S.H.A. became entwined with that of its journal.
Heritage became successful enough so that in 1995, Mason hired Allison Kimmerle to set up the I.S.H.A. business office and handle subscriptions and contributions that were coming in. Up to that point, he had been handling it all himself with part-time help. Allison quickly became an avenue of diplomatic communication, making sure everyone’s copies arrived in due time and that subscribers were reminded whenever their annual fees were late—in short, Allison became a pillar of the journal. Another was the loyal group on the editorial board who supplied correction and advice.
The success Heritage has had, of course, ultimately comes from Mason’s initial vision, his organizing genius in getting the earliest roster of respected members and his willingness to cover deficits.
Skiing Heritage in its enlarged version has generated a good deal of synergism in getting freelancers and journalists to publish ski history. Luanne’s story triggered her decision to do a full-length book, Gretchen’s Gold, published in 1996. Pfeifer’s imaginative promotion, with a boost from the article in Skiing Heritage, managed to meet the costs of the book and make a small profit—one of the few ski biographies to do so.
Heritage inspired another book as well the very next year. I.S.H.A. encouraged the publishing of Dick Durrance’s coffee-table autobiography, Man on the Medal by giving seed financing to the book, an expensive endeavor. Heritage published an excerpt of the work in progress in its Winter 1995 Issue to help boost the book’s success.
Encouraging Writers
The journal’s book reviews and its reporting of the annual I.S.H.A. book awards has done a good bit to encourage veteran ski journalists and freelance writers to write and publish books of ski history.
The Fourth Issue 2000 of Heritage carried a list of almost all the ski history books published in the 1990s, a review of several of the newest: Yosemite: Magic Winters by Gene Rose, Sugar Bowl Fifty Years by Robert Frohlich, For the Love of Skiing by Alan Engen, A Short History of Skiing in Tuckerman Ravine by Jeff Leich.
In its First Issue 2001, Heritage reviewed two books on Vail, Triumph of a Dream by Peter Seibert and The Inventors of Vail by Dick Hauserman, plus Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Ski Lodge by Neil and Catharine McKenty.
One section of Heritage that grew in importance rapidly was Readers’ Response, in which veteran skiers set down personal experiences. The letters often pick up on important, sometimes even startling insights on historical events. Response constitutes the kind of communication that Mason Beekley had aimed for in his original Visions statement ten years ago.
A glance at the page listing Skiing Heritage’s major articles shows that some of the gaps have been filled. The story of modern ski lift development was given a real beginning with a cover story on Ernest Constam and his J-bar-—built at Davos in 1934, the first circulating overhead cable in history, prototype for the chairlift. An entire outline of alpine skiing history has been published.
Gretchen Fraser has been given her due, along with Dick Durrance. The story of John Jay has been told in depth. In fact, the material published on John Jay has been brought together in a 28-page special John Jay issue, distributed in his honor to everyone at the 2001 award banquet.
Several skiers important in the transition from jumping to downhill have been given their first authentic biographies, including Wayne Poulsen and Barney McLean.
Mission Partly Accomplished
Tamara McKinney, our top-ranking woman racer, has gotten two-thirds of her story into print, with one part left to go. The story of the great reps, Hans Hagemeister and Wolfgang Lert, has been written.
And finally, two out of three parts of the Charley Proctor story, a story which had never been written and whose sources were disappearing, have been completed.
The first-ever histories of freestyle and speed skiing have been published. The history of ski cartooning has been pinned down. But, as they say on TV, there’s all this, and much more—to be done, that is.
The challenge has been to keep the subscribers interested. Straight ski history all the way through an issue may work for dedicated historians, but most Heritage readers are also looking for entertainment, so the issues provide healthy portions of light as well as serious stuff.
The most pressing goal for I.S.H.A. and Heritage is to double the number of subscriber-Associates. At that point, the journal could double the amount of the historical record that it manages to pull into the open every year. In the meantime, the journal presently depends on the contributions given by Associates over and above their membership and subscription fee and at least one major angel.
One function I.S.H.A. was charged with at the beginning was to make ski history data widely available. The launch in April 2001 of the I.S.H.A. and Heritage website skiinghistory.org has gone a good distance down the road of public access. Heritage has developed a different way to reach out that represents a great step forward.
Resources of the Site
The site indexes all the articles published by Skiing Heritage and much of the databank worked up by the editor and staff to research and fact-check more reliably. The Web site lists the contents of all the Skiing Heritage back-issues, offering any issue for sale at a reasonable price. Anyone may order directly from Allison Kimmerle at the I.S.H.A. business office as listed on the Heritage masthead (and on page 12 of this issue).
Access to the roughly one thousand published pages of Skiing Heritage is only one of the site’s gifts. The site offers the issue and page number of any particular story in the venerable American Ski Annuals, which predate all the popular ski magazines. Anyone on the site can find issue and page number of any story in Ski over the past 50 years.
Further, the website contains a timeline of hundreds of authentic dates important to the history of skiing. This constitutes an unduplicated source of authentic ski history data available to all who desire the facts. This holds for ski journalists, historians, and veteran skiers seeking to recall old times as they really were.
There are immediate plans to increase the amount of research data on the site, to include, for instance, the founding dates of all the resorts, existing or disappeared. There is a project for a databank of all the Olympic and World Championship medallists.
The journal is slowly gaining readers and setting a goal of two thousand Associates. Skiing Heritage will then be self-sufficient. Chances will then be excellent that what seemed like Mason Beekley’s wild vision, having been carefully tended ten years, will become an ongoing, sustained reality in the foreseeable future and the sport of skiing will be well on its way to having the history that it so greatly deserves.
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