THE INTERNATIONAL SKIING HISTORY ASSOCIATION

ANNUAL AWARDS 2004

Carson White

Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Carson White ranks as one of the nation's outstanding and most influential ski journalists in alpine skiing's formative period. Without his work, the California ski scene would have been considerably less vibrant and certainly less developed. Carson paved the way for the enlistment of the biggest state ski population in the U.S. He spent 60 years promoting the sport, efforts that resounded not only in California but nationally. He was the prime mover in founding the U.S. Ski Writers Association, forerunner of the North American Snowsport Journalists Association.

Born in Chicago, Carson came west with his family to Oakland where he took up ski journalism and the cause of the new sport of alpine skiing in the 1930s. From the beginning, fellow journalists considered Carson one of the best, and he certainly was one of the most influential. In 1937, as secretary to the Manager of Hotels, Restaurants and Dining Cars for the Southern Pacific Railroad, Carson became a prime mover in organizing the early Southern Pacific snow trains, a move that was essentially the beginning of serious alpine recreational skiing in northern California. As secretary of the railroad ski club, he checked out dozens of new ski areas for potential as snow train destinations. He scouted from Mt. Shasta in the north to Sugar Bowl in the south, reporting to skiers via his ski club newsletter.

In 1941, he enlisted in the Navy and became editor of the Navy's Guam News. In 1942, while still in the Navy, he married his sweetheart of two years' standing, Violet Hanson, known throughout California's ski world as "Vi." She was his partner and alter ego in dedication to the sport. After the war, he was elected president of the Oakland Ski Club and organized 22 clubs into the Bay Area Ski Council. In 1946-48, he headed the ski patrol for club members during tours.

In 1947 he covered the sport for the California Ski News, then for the Berkeley Gazette, the Sierra Sun and Sacramento Union. As ski editor for the San Francisco Examiner, he wrote daily columns during the season for 14 years from 1954 to 1968. He reported on the sport and was a contributing writer at Ski West and Ski Illustrated. Vi White recalls that he typed up race results balancing his portable on his knees while she drove him down the mountain on the old two-lane Highway 40 and finished in time to drop it off at the California/Nevada Ski News in Auburn.

Sensing the need for better communication among ski writers, he contributed time and money to organizing the California Ski Writers Association that grew into the U.S. Ski Writers (later NASJA), serving as president during its first two years. Moving from the Bay Area to Truckee, and later Auburn, he became the one-man public relations staff for Squaw Valley from 1965 to 1967. His reputation as a highly principled journalist recommended him to the International Ski Writers, an organization that elected him Vice President and a director of the board. In later years his enthusiasm for the sport was unabated. At 69, he joined his ski writer-friend Don "Snoshu" Thompson skiing 15 areas in a single day.

Carson was honored in 1965 by the Far West Ski Association for Outstanding Contribution to the Advancement of Skiing. NASJA named its prestigious Carson White Golden Quill Award after him. Carson passed away in 2001. Vi still lives in Auburn.

Martin Forstenzer

Ullr Award for Mammoth: The Sierra Legend

Martin Forstenzer moved from the University of California at Berkeley after graduation to Bishop in the Eastern Sierra in the mid-1970s and learned how to ski on the slopes of Mammoth Mountain. In 1983, he became the editor for Sierra Life Magazine and in the mid-1980s special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times covering breaking news and writing features on the Eastern Sierra region. He became the New York Times freelance correspondent for both sides of the Sierra as well as the Central Valley-the beat he continues to cover today. He interspersed his newspaper work with well-received articles for Sports Illustrated, Ski, Snow Country, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, Audubon, Outside, Backpacker and others.

Last year, Time Warner's Mountain Sports Press in Boulder, Colorado sought Martin to write a book on Mammoth as one of its splendid series of lavishly illustrated oversize books on North American resorts that have included Whistler-Blackcomb, Jackson Hole, Steamboat Springs, and Stowe. Martin had by then worked in the Mammoth area for over two decades and seen the village of Mammoth Lakes nearby grow from a small resort to a major ski town.

Martin had already written more than 85 articles on Mammoth Mountain, Mammoth Lakes, Mono County, and the nearby Owens Valley. He had previously interviewed Mammoth's founder Dave McCoy for Sierra Life and found the McCoy story gripping. He was ready and able to make the most of the opportunity to write Mammoth: The Sierra Legend.

To build his story, Martin interviewed Dave in his office at Mammoth Mountain for more than ten hours. He followed up with a series of telephone interviews with Dave, his family, friends, acquaintances, and fellow workers. He touched base as well with a good many skiers who had lived the history of skiing in the Eastern Sierra.

Martin also waded through Mammoth's massive collection of newspaper and magazine articles written on its rise from a rope tow area to a national destination resort before he sat down to put together a solid narrative. Mammoth: the Sierra Legend was well-praised in a long review in the Los Angeles Times, as well as by several regional papers and in a California National Public Radio review. It is fair to say that Martin has managed to have one of the most intricate and magnificent chapters of North American ski history captured between two covers of a book whose size and quality matches that of its subject.

Gary Schwartz

Ullr Award for Art of Skiing 1856-1936
and Skiing Literature: A Bibliographical Catalogue

Gary Schwartz organized a high school ski club in the 1960s, then at the University of Washington in Seattle organized full-fledged ski tours to the Rockies. Next he formed Schwartz Tours and pioneered all-inclusive ski packages, sending 200,000 skiers to destination resorts.

During the 1970s, he consulted in marketing to skiers at the Canadian Government Office of Tourism and at World Trade Fairs, as well as advising a number of television shows and several major U.S. ski resorts. He authored his first book, Skiers' Guide to Sun Valley in 1972.

By the mid-1980s, Gary had begun what became one of the largest private holdings of pre-1940 art and text on the sport of skiing. His collection consists mainly of books, periodicals, newspaper articles, magazine articles, photographs, postcards, magazine covers, advertising, and posters in the United States.

The Schwartz Collection is listed in the United States Official Museum Directory and totals more than 10,000 items highlighted by over a hundred historic books and prints published between 1500 and 1900. It includes a Sun Valley collection of nearly a thousand historic items from America's first national destination ski resort. The Schwartz Collection also contains vintage brochures and ski maps from more than three hundred different resorts. He has, in addition, compiled a database of more than a thousand ski films released since 1902, as a result of his extensive researches into the conjunction of Hollywood movies and the sport of skiing.

In 1989, Gary authored The Art of Skiing 1856-1936 with more than 250 color illustrations of popular skiing art, forming an illustrated social and cultural history of skiing as seen in commercial art.

Ski Magazine featured text and illustrations from the book in its April 1990 Collector's Edition. Gary wrote Hollywood Ski Movies for Skiing Heritage's Winter 1996 Issue, illustrated by stills and lobby posters from Hollywood's first-ever ski scenes: the 1932 The Hat Check Girl, the 1936 The Moon's Our Home (with Henry Fonda), Sonja Henie's first movie, the 1937 Thin Ice, and a lobby poster for She Met Him In Paris (Claudette Colbert and Melvyn Douglas).

In 1995, Gary completed a pioneering research effort with the help of contributions by Allen Adler as Associate Editor, a bibliography self-published as Skiing Literature: A Bibliographical Catalogue, the most extensive listing of ski books available, with nearly 3,000 entries dating from the 1500s on. The book has a fine illustrated introductory history of skiing literature. Gary digitized the text as a database that is available on disk.

Gary has served on the Voting Panel of the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame, has consulted for the Board of Directors of the Ketchum/Sun Valley Historical Society and belonged to the New England Ski Museum, the Utah Ski Archives and the Colorado Ski Museum. He currently lives in Tiburon, California, running PicturesNow.com, a leading classic image commercial website.

Sonja Oimoen Stalions

Ullr Award for A Rough Way to Ride Between Earth and Sky

A first generation Norwegian-American, Sonja Stalions had a lifelong desire to chronicle the life of her father Casper Oimoen, whose skiing career is part of American ski history now fast fading: the jumping era of American skiing. American jumpers in the top ranks like Casper Oimoen had an astonishing record, given the relatively few Americans jumping. The best were ranked with the best in Europe.

Sonja nevertheless grew up an alpine skier rather than a jumper and clamped on her first skis at the ripe old age of two. "It was love at first glide," she says. "Little Casper," as they called her, was more social than competitive, moseying down and visiting with the gatekeepers who were trying to convince her to move on down. As a teenager in Minot, North Dakota, she practiced at figure skating and dreamt of being the next Sonja Henie-for whom she was named. (The famous Norwegian figure skater and her father were members of their respective Olympic teams in 1932 and 1936.)

Sonja went to college and majored in early childhood education that became her passion and served her well after she married in 1959 and became a mother of three. She taught kindergarten and fifth grade in Ashland, Oregon. It was only after she retired in 1993 that she finally had time to research and write A Rough Way To Ride Between Earth and Sky, a telling portrait of her father as a competitor whom American jumpers truly held in awe. He won ninety-five percent of all the meets he entered.

Sonja captures the spirit her father and early-day Norwegian jumpers inherited, a reverence for the sport. It stood for valor and steadfastness, summed up in the word "idraet" or the discipline of the sport both in spirit and in body. Sonja grew up in that philosophy of striving to be strong in spirit as well as in body embodied in her father's saying, "It's the beauty of the flight, not the distance." Caspar Oimoen proved it, winning as many meets on points for his graceful flight as for distance down the hill. His philosophy undelay Sonja's lifelong appreciation that process is as important as product.

Throughout her life in Oregon, Sonja has been involved in volunteer work with the Oregon Shakespeare Theatre, the Britt Music Festival, and the PEO, a philanthropy for women's higher education. At home, she skis Mt. Ashland and Hoodoo near the family cabin in Black Butte, travels with her husband Larry, and takes an active part in the lives of eleven grandchildren.

Peter Shelton

Ullr Award for Climb to Conquer

Peter Shelton is a rare third-generation native Californian who started skiing at Mammoth with his family. He stuck to the Golden State for awhile, studying English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971. When he graduated, his uncle, the renowned ski resort mapmaker Hal Shelton, asked him, "Well, what do you love to do?" Peter loved to ski so he taught skiing for the 1972-73 season at Keystone, discovering the joy in writing (nonacademic) words, composing love poems secretly to his future wife Ellen-she was married to his ski school supervisor.

The two moved to Bear Valley, where Peter taught for three seasons. In 1976, Peter was hired by the school at Telluride and the next year, promoted to ski school director. After one year as director, Peter says, he realized that "the dreaded Peter Principle had kicked in," (he had reached his level of incompetency) and decided unilaterally to move on. That led to his happy rediscovery of writing as a reporter and jack-of-all-news-trades at the tiny weekly Telluride Times.

Two daughters, Cloe and Cecily, arrived and the family sought affordable housing with a yard-a luxury not possible on freelance income in Telluride back in 1980. They moved down the hill to Ridgway, where they bought a home and Peter began to practice freelance writing from a wood stove-heated shed under the cottonwood trees, composing on a Smith-Corona that his grandmother had given him for high school graduation, afraid that a computer would somehow steal his sentences.

Besides writing for Powder, he did assignments for Ski, Skiing, Outside, Men's Journal, Universal Press Syndicate, National Geographic Adventure, People, Life, High Country News, Aspen Magazine, Cross Country Skier, Summit, and Backpacker. In fact, he did so well in his ski writing that the North American Ski Journalists Association voted him Ski Writer of the Year four times. Along the way, he authored or co-authored six books, including The Skier's Bible (1991) published by Doubleday, Ski the Rockies (1994) published by Graphic Arts Center, and Aspen Skiing, the First Fifty Years, published in 1997 by Western Eye Press.

His latest book to engage the sport is his second attempt at history, Climb to Conquer, published by Scribners last year. There he took on the story of the 10th Mountain Division's extraordinary cast of characters during World War II and then in their post-war careers that so deeply affected the American sport.

His favorite writing assignments are his newspaper columns in various Telluride papers since 1983. Skiing remains a passion, especially backcountry skiing with its essential corollaries, snow and avalanche study. He is currently trying to figure out how to perfect the character of snowboarders by convincing them to take up reading, saving the environment and saving the country by understanding the international scene. His big success to date has been with two adult snowboarders, Cloe and Cecily-both now fit Peter's prescription for well-rounded boarders

Seth Masia

Cyber Award for skiinghistory.org

Seth Masia began skiing after he saw racers training at La Flegere while he was rock climbing high above Chamonix in the summer of 1968. He rented leather boots and wooden skis with cable bindings and spent a couple of days, as he says, "rolling around in the summer snow." He got hooked without breaking any bones.

He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1970 and went to work on the new Backpacker Magazine, publishing while still there Walks in the Catskills and Backpacking Equipment. He joined the staff of Ski in 1974, also serving as editor of Ski Business and managing editor of Cross Country Skiing.

He bought his first computer in 1983, well before email or the Internet was operating, and wrote a modem program that sent manuscripts to the Ski office from his apartment in Yonkers. The following year, he moved to Truckee, California as technical editor for Ski, a title he held over the next ten years. At the same time, he freelanced and taught skiing for the Squaw Valley Ski School, becoming certified at the age of 40. He says that may have made him the oldest guy ever to pass a Level 3 exam in California. His work appeared regularly in Outside, Men's Fitness and a number of other magazines. He published several books including Alpine Ski Maintenance, Nordic Ski Maintenance, Total Skiing, Terrain Skiing, and (with Peter Shelton and Lito Tejada-Flores) The Unofficial Guide to Skiing the West.

In 1994, after a stint as product manager at K2, Masia rejoined the staff of Ski and launched Times Mirror Magazines' first website. Working with a group of programmers at the New York office, he developed SkiNet.com, a website that ran daily news, daily snow conditions, original articles and articles from Ski and Skiing. It won several national awards and its audience grew twenty percent per week during its first two winters.

In 1997, Seth joined Microsoft Corp. as sports producer for MSN Sidewalk in Denver, creating an on-line ski resort guide to North America. He led a project to build the first on-line buyer's guide to winter sports equipment, which was Sidewalk's first e-commerce venture. He also taught skiing part time at Beaver Creek.

With the sale of Sidewalk to Ticketmaster in 1999, Seth turned to designing and managing other websites, first one for Intrawest. He also ran a daily web trade publication, snowtradenews.com, for the Time4 division of AOL Time Warner. In 2002, he redesigned the ISHA website, skiinghistory.org, adding an interactive bulletin board that attracts browsers with ski history questions to debate with other browsers and the editors of Skiing Heritage. The skiinghistory.org visits rose from 9,000 visits per month in the summer of 2003 to 20,000 a month in February 2004. Seth also redesigned the Colorado Ski Museum website and currently serves on the museum's board of directors.

Today he is the webmaster for the web ski news site he founded, snowindustrynews.com. He writes regularly for Skiing Heritage and Ski Area Management, and irregularly for Mountain Gazette. He currently commutes between offices in Boulder and Berkeley, almost invariably managing to ski seventy days a season.

Warren Miller received a Lifetime Achievement Award for journalism and filmmaking at the Warren Miller dinner. His biography is the cover story of the current Skiing Heritage.