Skiing Heritage News

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Conniff, Fry, Jalbert, Leich, Lund
honored at ISHA Awards Banquet

Cal Conniff
Skade Award for Skiing in Massachusetts

Cal Conniff is a new voice in ski history journalism, fortunately he is knowledgeable in his sport’s rapid rise as America’s leading winter sport. He was smitten as a young skier, then stayed with the sport as a well-regarded eastern ski publicist, next as a longtime head of Mt. Tom in Massachusetts and finally as a distinguished mover and shaker on the national scene: chief executive of the National Ski Areas Association.

Skiing in Massachusetts is Cal’s first ski history effort (co-authored with academic ski historian John Allen), a book built on an extensive search through graphic collections as well as ski history literature. As he was collecting a library and papers and photos on his favorite subject, skiing in Massachusetts, Cal’s realization grew of the large gap in the ski history record on the role of Massachusetts in the development of the sport. “I thought it would be a crime if it wasn’t pulled together and set down in black and white,” says Cal.

In a typical Cal can-do fashion, he took it upon himself to fill out the missing segment as a labor of love: Massachusetts has been his home state since college days. “The reward of just knowing that I was documenting the history of a sport I really loved and making sure it was preserved, says Cal, “I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.”

The overall view of his career, just briefly, was expressed by ski industry public relations veteran Kathe Dillman saying that Cal “has been involved in countless projects for the betterment of the sport of skiing and the industry, Many of these have been in the areas of ski safety, risk management, skier education, ski lift standards, public lands issues, the Gold Pass program that has raised several million dollars for the U.S. Ski Team and much, much more.”

He has legitimately earned his name many times over as a man dedicaated to his sport. He was captain of his high school ski team, in Springfield, Vermont, close to the site of the first U.S. rope tow. He was also lucky. In a three-year hitch in the Army during the Korean War, his skiing career earned him assignment to Garmisch, Germany, where he worked as a ski patrolman and raced for two seasons, becoming American armed forces four-way champion in his last year.

Then at American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts, he again captained his ski team and won the Skimeister title in the New England Intercollegiate Ski Conference. But it was more than just racing. He wanted to share the sport and became president of his college ski club and gave members free lessons. He also made enough money by having the club sponsor John Jay and Warren Miller films to take the whole club on ski trips, a real organizer,

Graduating in 1958, he then experimented with a career combining TV and skiing, showing films on national and international racing on an NBC affiliate in Springfield, hosting a TV show called “Skier's Corner” that may have been the first regular TV ski show in the country. It had a good spot, coming on just ahead of the Huntley-Brinkley news report. Next, Cal got into his midlife career as vice president and general manager of Mt. Tom in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a resort that had one of the largest snowmaking plants in the country at the time.

He left Mt. Tom after 14 years to take on the job of President and Executive Director of the National Ski Areas Association, and raised it from its fledgling to a continental power in the ski business with member ski areas in nearly every state where snow fell. He was elected to the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame in the class of 1990.

Sixty years earlier, during the early 1930s as Cal was growing up, Massachusetts was where it was at for many skiers, the state that had the only southern New England class A racing trail—the Thunderbolt on Mt, Greylock—not far from Boston, the center of gravity of New England’s skier population. “Skiing got its early roots in Massachusetts, “ say Cal “That’s where an awful lot of things got started for the first time”

Among the first of a handful of ski hotels to stay open in the U.S. for the winter was Northfield Inn, Massachusetts, whose illustration in the book shows a women in front of the hotel in ankle-length skirts, standard feminine garb in the first decades of the 1900s, well before the famous Awahnee in Yosemite (built in 1928) was hosting skiers in the West.

The most famous early invention in the sport, the rope tow gripper that saved many a mitten from shredding—and saved many an arm from involuntary lengthening—was invented in 1939 by Clare Bousquet, who sold over half a million of them. This was after founding Bousquet's, the first two-rope tow ski area with a six-trail system, proudly bearing his own name, just outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The very next year, 1940, Jerry Ford, later to be the first alpine skiing president, then a student at Yale Law School, learned to ski at Bousquet’s in the Berkshires.

Cal knows the bygone Berkshire era in his bones. His delightful book reflects that feeling in a black and white wave of unbridled nostalgia centered on the Berkshires where for awhile was more skiing than elsewhere else in the East. There were ephemeral ski areas too, like Moose Hill, Worcester that did their part in training nobodies to become American skiers before winking out.

And there was the skiing hotspot of Greenfield, Massachusetts, thanks to the Weldon Hotel, one of the early open-in-winter hotels in the country where the great man was Strand Mikkelson, the national jumping titlist in 1929 who taught jumping from the 50-meter hill, and cross country until Arlberg came along and he switched to leading his troops down Greenfield’s 2,000 foot long downhill trail that dropped almost 375 feet,

All this is reflected in a historically correct exposition in the long picture captions describing this relatively obscure (because so little had been written) of the development of American skiing at that critical time from just before the first rope tows to those years when the likes of Teddy Kennedy, Massachusetts governors Sergant and Saltonstall, Senator Ed Muskie, and astronaut John Glenn skied the Berkshires, still live and kicking as a ski region through to the 1970s.

John Fry
Ullr Award for The Story of Modern Skiing

The biggest hole in ski history libraries until recently was the lack of a general history of skiing over the last fifty years. The only general history book that existed to cover previous century, John Allen’s classic From Skisport to Skiing, stops at 1940.

No one attempted to bridge the gap until John Fry stepped up to the plate and last year hit the ball out of the park with his The Story of Modern Skiing. It had been a tough challenge to say the least for someone like John Fry, who had never written scholarly history, to take on a task of this magnitude—footnotes and all. But the book surpassed expectations of its publisher, the University Press of New England (originally the Dartmouth Press, now a consortium of New England college presses). The book was greeted with exceptional acclaim all around.

Writing an acclaimed scholarly history as a novice was not the first tough challenge John Fry chose to meet. He is a step-up-to-the-plate sort. When half the staff of Ski defected to Skiing back in 1964, John, executive editor, stepped up as editor-in-chief until 1980, a run of 16 years. In 1987, the New York Times Co. decided to start a ski magazine from scratch, and up stepped John Fry as the first editor and made Snow Country a success.

Five years later John joined the board of ISHA in 1996. In 2001, its founder Mason Beekley, taken with a final illness, asked John Fry to take over as president. John ran ISHA without salary for two years until he had steadied it down on a new course. In 2006, still a member of the ISHA board, John brought history up to date with The Story of Modern Skiing.

It generated a degree of praise so far that can be judged by the rave review of Michael Berry, head of the National Ski Areas Association; he writes of the book that “It does not just set the record straight, its sets the record.” Billy Kidd writes, “Fascinating to read. John Fry put into perspective all of the aspects of the sport and the business of skiing."

The scope of the book is broad: John defined it in his preface as dealing with “the period after World War II when change came rapidly to the sport of alpine skiing. Especially in the period between 1950 and 1972, many of the sport’s enduring innovations arrived. Metal and fiberglass skis, plastic boots, and lightweight poles opened the way for revolutionary advances in technique.”

“Starting from a 1955 base of only 78 ski areas, over the next ten years the United States and Canada gained 580 new resorts having chairlifts and T-bars. Giant base lodges presaged the arrival of pleasure domes, dramatically different from the dark, dank, low-ceilinged base huts of the 1950s. The construction of the interstate highway system and the arrival of jet passenger planes gave rapid access to better, bigger, more distant terrain. Visits to U.S. ski areas soared from four or five million per winter to almost forty million. Spending on travel, equipment, and clothing rose above one billion dollars annually.”

The book breathes authenticity. Veteran journalist Charlie Meyers notes that “As we have found in such examples as Churchill or Bonaparte, histories written by notable participants sound considerably more convincing than those concocted a century later behind ivy walls.

“John Fry never won a ski race or built a resort. Yet as an editor, writer, and activist for five decades, he has impacted the sport more profoundly than many of the icons whose names leap from his keyboard. Such perspective allows Fry to grasp the essence of a sport that has changed character faster than a snow bunny switching from baggy pants to stretch. Metamorphosis fairly oozes through the pages—from skiing’s chrysalis years of the 1950s to the bright-winged butterfly of the 1970s to a mutant species in the new millennium.”

Actually John did win a race or two, having had a short happy racing career. John graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1951, and was a member of the Red Bird ski club, where he did enough racing so that he won every one of the numerous “fun races” in which resorts pitted slow journalists against each other. John was competitive to the bone.

As an editor, he required a high standard of work from his writers, encouraging them to develop new ideas even if they were cogent criticisms of the ski industry. He invented two yardsticks still used in racing, the NASTAR competition rules that handicapped the various levels of skiers so that a beginner could “beat” an expert, an invention that fostered racing as an integral part of the resort experience. The other was to have Ski give a Nations Cup to the team winning the most World Cup points during the World Cup season, measuring the progress one against the other, a prize that has been given for the 40 years.

More than that, John was interested in the personalities that graced the sport and in the social trends and the movements that drove the sport in one direction or another. He gave plenty of room to the freestyle movement, the arrival of wedeln or short swing as the dominant technique, replacing Arlberg, and again gave space to articles defining the anatomy of carving when that came in. He gave the first attempts to start a pro circuit sympathetic attention.

Under John Fry Ski followed the international racing scene closely, paying particular attention to the gradual rise of professionalism in the international scene and consequent diminishing of amateurism as the governing model. He supported the rise of freestyle even when the ski world in general looked askance at this sort of skiing. Ski profiled filmmakers John Jay, Warren Miller, and Dick Barrymore. In fact, the best and most frequent biographical stories published in the ski press anywhere until Skiing Heritage appeared were published in Ski on John Fry’s watch.

This broad coverage of the ski world has made Ski into a treasure trove for ski historians who took to researching the back issues for their material. A good many of the stories that are published in Skiing Heritage today would not have been possible without the resource of Ski’s back issues that covered the sport from every angle, not just new equipment and new resorts but from a human point of view as well. In that sense Ski is the father of Skiing Heritage and as well the source of much of the finely distilled ski history found in The Story of Modern Skiing.

As veteran skier and front-ranking ski architect Henrik Bull summed it up, “Fry’s…thousands of words brought back hundreds of memories…He has done a fantastic job of covering every aspect of the sport.”

Joe Jay Jalbert
Lifetime Achievement Award in Film

Joe Jay Jalbert’s film career began with a lucky break. After graduating from Washington University, he was picked by Robert Redford to double for him in racing sequences for Downhill Racer and ended up filming close-up action sequences used in the final film by carrying a hand-held camera at full speed. It was an extraordinary start in the filmmaking business for a young fellow from Mullan, Idaho (pop. 800) whose high point in life had been racing head-to-head against Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga for berths on the U.S. national ski team.

Joe Jay had begun racing at age eight, competing in regionals while his parents held multiple jobs to meet the expenses of packing three kids around to races all over the Northwest. His parents did whatever was needed to keep Joe Jay and his two sisters racing for junior glory. Joe Jay credits his father (a working miner), and mother as “the life blood that made this all happen.” Joe Jay soon stood at the top in his age group and stayed there, all while becoming valedictorian of his high school class. He was that rare phenomenon, a scholar-athlete.

He was a good bet to medal in all three events of the 1962 and 1963 Junior Nationals—but prior injuries took him out both times. Joe Jay entered the University of Washington in Seattle where his academic and athletic scholarships financed his entire college education. He captained the UW team that took the 1966 NCAA alpine championship. At the U.S. Nationals on Crystal Mountain that year, Joe Jay won the national alpine combined title.

Nationally he was ranked fourth in downhill—but Coach Bob Beattie took only the three top-ranked downhillers to the 1966 Grenoble Olympics. It was a disappointment that tore at the heart. Then—out of the blue—Robert Redford’s New York lawyer called him.

Joe Jay’s hometown friend, Jim Barrier, had gone from the U.S. team to Head Skis— and Head was advising Redford’s Wildwood Productions during the preliminaries for Downhill Racer. Within a week, Joe Jay was on the plane to Los Angeles (wearing the only suit and tie he had) to meet Redford and his film director Michael Ritchie. They were impressed, and offered Joe Jay what was to him a magnificent contract to give technical advice to the second unit action filming and to double for Redford on the racecourse; he was also cast as Tommy Erb, the Redford archrival: it was a triple role. Joe Jay added a fourth, this one critical to his future.

He proved himself capable of the unexpected when he showed Ritchie that he could carry the camera right behind racers at full speed, filming point-of-view action while pointing with a steady hand a fifty pound camera in an all-out schuss: he had won himself a substantial chunk of the actual shooting. “I did point-of-view hand-held shots at all the major European downhill races,” says Joe Jay. “I heard top French racers of those days agreeing that ‘This U.S. boy, Jalbert, he is crazy.’ ” He and Redford spent an entire season following the international alpine circuit from Wengen to Mégeve to Kitzbühel, stocking up on needed background shots and setting up crash sequences. It was a splendid winter.

Paramount, the producing partner, decided that Joe Jay’s strong personality made him the perfect emissary to send off on an 18-city press junket to promote Downhill Racer at TV talk shows and public events. The film premiered in Reno in late fall 1969—a great success for Redford, a life-changing experience for Joe Jay. He had been given a superb crash course (as it were) in filmmaking from some of the most professional filmmakers in the world. Joe Jay put the experience to quick use, filming, editing and producing a Redford-sponsored travelogue for the state of Utah in 1971.” This is truly when I became a filmmaker,” Joe Jay says.

“I then began to knock on doors in New York. Downhill Racer certainly opened a lot of doors. I figured out how to run through them. I was soon doing my own 16mm film projects, shooting segments for a variety of producers. Then, I basically decided to make whole movies. I started in a meager cubbyhole in back of the film archive, stacks of film reels at 1600 Broadway, and started producing films for ski industry clients.

“I did mostly ski-racing movies, and started building my reputation and library.” In 1972 he was primary skiing cinematographer and stunt double for Disney’s Snowball Express starring Dean Jones; in 1973, Between Chaos and Beauty, a documentary on freestyle; in 1976, Just A Matter of Time, on the Innsbruck Olympics, won best film in Jerry Simon's Ski Film Festival. In 1980, he produced the Lake Placid Olympics official film. From 1978 to 1985, he produced more than a hundred sports action ski films, events and documentaries for CBS, NBC, and ABC in addition to ski films for the industry. Now it was time for him to extend his reach.

“In 1986 after spending 14 years producing shows for other people to distribute, I decided I must figure out how to distribute my own product. I produced Ski Magazine’s America’s Golden Ski Anniversary, shot at Sun Valley during the celebration. We sold the show to sponsors, and I hired a person to syndicate the show to TV stations around the U.S.”

Today at JPI his staff in the full-service film production and distribution facility on Long Island numbers 15 animation artists, film editors, producers, writers and syndication salesmen. His daughter Jolie and son Jay work for JPI as writer-directors. His wife is secretary-treasurer. “Today,” Joe Jay says, “we film only in true high definition and have become a leader in high-end sports documentary production.”

By 1987, he had considerably broadened his work on subjects outside skiing—but by then he had produced three Olympic Winter Games official films —in 1980, 1984, and 1992; nine official Alpine World Ski Championships from 1978 to 1997; four Nordic World Championship official films from 1988 to 1989. In 2000, Joe Jay was named by the Fédération Internationale de Ski as the “International TV Journalist/TV Producer of the Year,” an award given less than a half dozen times. His latest ski film is King of Speed, the Daron Rahlves Story, an hour-long documentary showing this season on network TV.

Joe Jay Jalbert has produced more ski films (TV sports films included) than anyone else in history. In the process, he has added so much splendid, topflight, professionally made film to the historical record of the sport that it is almost understatement to say that Joe Jay richly deserves the 2007 ISHA Lifetime Achievement Film Award.

Jeff Leich
Curatorial Award for the New England Ski Museum

Jeff Leich was happily living the life of almost a hundred percent immersion in the world of skiing (present tense), until he answered a help wanted ad. Since then he has been kept much busier engaged in the much harder task of bringing to life skiing (past tense). Against odds, Jeff is now the very model of a multitasking modern ski museum curator. No museum can afford to hire separately a curator, CEO, fund-raiser, office manager and handyman. Who fills all these jobs? That’s the curator. Other museums have other titles but there is money enough for only one Central Person. Case in point: the New England Ski Museum’s Jeff Leich.

A displaced person below the Mason-Dixon line, he scrambled to get to ski country to fulfill his destiny. His foretaste was skiing at age six on an occasion or two when there was snow in Washington D.C., where his father was in exile from the snow, Dartmouth ‘29—the elder Leich had a fund of ski tales from the faraway land called New Hampshire that he told to the only offspring inheriting the skier-wannabe gene.

Jeff went to Dartmouth—embedded instructions—in 1967 and embraced skiing as the important thing in life (if skiing was unavailable, then mountains), during his eight semesters to graduating as a thoroughly addicted outdoorsman (winters skiing incessantly, summers packing supplies to Appalachian Mountain Club huts in New Hampshire/s Presidentials), then into the life of a high-level ski bum for a decade as—a ski mechanic and a regional ski shop manager.

Jeff then west as the manager of the Ski Rack at Alta's Peruvian Lodge. Utah snow was softer than New England's. Too soft: Jeff came back to direct the Wildcat Mountain ski patrol from 1994 to 1997. He first found an interest in history, writing articles on the history of the 19th century hotels of Mt. Washington for the newsletter of the weather observatory and for the Appalachian Mountain Club journal, Appalachia.

In 1997, Jeff blithely answered an ad for New England Ski Museum Executive Director and Curator. All his previous ski bumming experiences instantly became important prerequisites for the job, and he was hired to fill a small office at the bottom of Cannon Mountain, where he confronted piles of skis, clothing, books and papers that needed to be logged in and collections located in various sheds and barns throughout the state so he could begin curating, that is creating a coherent set of archives as research for the museum’s annual exhibit of ski history to create a sharpened rationale for keeping a museum going in the first place

The museum's board of directors were determined to have a more active museum, for which the first step was hiring Jeff as well as electing Glenn Parkinson president. Jeff, Glenn and the directors worked ensemble on the underpinning, the financial foundation necessary to make the museum a going concern.

The main sources of income were members’ dues and sales from the gift shop. The annual Hannes Schneider Meister Cup Race was invented. Jeff had the administration of the last two—the first two were his from the bottom and he shored them up. The first through curating with imagination in turning the annual exhibitions into long in-depth articles in the Journal of the New England Ski Museum exploring the history behind the exhibits.

Full days became full years of organizing and cataloging to build the archives, extracting from them the material for original and appealing annual exhibitions designed to inspire proud members to make larger contributions and to inspire onlookers to join and produce more income, the seamless joining of curating and commerce every successful museum must create.

“NESM Enters a New Era” was the article in the museum newsletter by Dick Wilson in the Fall of 1997 announcing the museum’s new initiatives. Jeff curated his first annual exhibit, “Over the Headwall: Nine Decades of Skiing in Tuckerman Ravine,” the conquest of Tuckerman by skiers (and occasionally vice versa), followed by a two-part series in the Journal’s Summer 1998 and Winter 1999 issues based on the exhibit. For the first time an American ski museum had launched a combination of annual exhibitions and publication of the history which gave rise to the exhibits as a permanent enhancement of the historical record.

In 2000 came “The Tales of the 10th Mountain Troops and American Skiing," paired with a two-part feature in the Winter 2001 and Spring 2001 newsletters that were then combined into a monograph in 2001, a format that can be kept in print.

The third annual exhibit in 2002 was the ambitious “Technology of Alpine Ski Resorts: Lifts, Snowmaking and Grooming.” The article that followed was an important contribution on the hitherto neglected subject. And the fourth: Highlights of New England Skiing” came in the Fall of 2003, followed by a three part series in what was now called the Journal of the New England Ski Museum. The fifth exhibit was“Winter Work, the CCC and New England Skiing,” again this was followed by a three part series in the Journal, the longest and most thoroughly researched piece on the work of the federal organization that kick-started resort skiing in the Northeast.

The sixth annual exhibit last year, “Hannes Schneider, Skiing Pioneer,” threw new light on the life of the most important figure in the history of alpine skiing, and the first instance of an exhibit coordinated with that of a European ski museum. Austrian ski historian Christof Theony organized an exhibit in St. Anton-am-Arlberg on the 50th anniversary of Hannes Schneider’s death. The European partner was the Ski-und-Heimatmuseum in St. Anton, Austria, where Schneider started his famous Arlberg ski school in 1919 that quickly became the largest in Europe and most influential in the world.

The exhibit in St. Anton consisted of four by three murals showing photographs and text on Schneider and his times. The murals were arranged chronologically on the approach to the museum, followed by panels inside, allowing the public to “walk through Schneider’s life,” mural by mural.

This exhibit's text and photos were transmitted through the internet in digitized images (zero transportation cost) from St. Anton to Franconia and the New England Ski Museum, again another first, this time the first exhibit traveling from a ski museum in Europe to another in North America, demonstrating the potential of future exhibits to be technologically shared between museums even half a continent and an ocean apart as an economical sharing between museums of the work of curators crossing the Atlantic in the form of digital transmissions,

That exhibit was a climax of the curatorial skill of Jeff Leich. His work broke new ground at the turn of the century in researching and mounting annual exhibits coordinated with subsequent published historical monographs: The museum’s exhibits are no longer forgotten after they are taken down but live on in the printed word and photographs of the special issues of The Journal of the New England Ski Museum.

The museum broke ground two years ago in pioneering the sharing of exhibits though digitizing both the text and graphic presentations, reconstructing them inexpensively in a second museum thousands of miles from the first. This past nine years marks the rise of the New England Ski Museum to a higher level of effectiveness.

The practical result of on the ground at the New England Ski Museum has been equally interesting: the membership of the New England Ski Museum has doubled since Jeff Leich, Glenn Parkinson, historian John Allen and the museum’s board of directors nine years ago framed its plan for a fresher, more immediate approach in educating the American public in the history of the sport.

Morten Lund
ISHA Service Award
Secretary, 1995-2006

Morten Lund became ISHA’s Secretary of the International Skiing History Association some three years after he was elected to the first board of directors during ISHA’s First International Gathering and Board Meeting at the Chateau Whistler in March 1992. These were years when the shape of ISHA was being determined, mostly by Mason Beekley, the founder. He had originally seen ISHA as a sort of extended club of ski book and ski art collectors and had expanded that notion to include skiers who had figured in their time as movers and shakers of the sport.

The members communicated through letters and articles in Snow News, a six-page newsletter edited by Glenn Parkinson and readied for the printer by Glenn’s mother, Earline Marsh, and sent to all members free. The idea of an organization focused on publishing a national ski history journal had not yet been conceived.

The board naturally named Mason as President, Chairman and Treasurer, Glen Parkinson as Secretary, an office hardly overburdened when the main business at the meeting was a reading of papers at a “mini-seminar.” Morten’s paper, The Forgotten Friedl, from his work on the autobiography of Friedl Pfeifer, was one of eight papers read at the meeting.

He already had a fair background in ski history journalism, having already written some sixty ski history pieces for Ski over the 30 years as a ski journalist. The editor to 1980 was John Fry, who had a deep interest in ski history but with Fry now editor of Snow Country, the space for writing ski history was disappearing. Morten welcomed ISHA as a wonderful idea and volunteered his time pro bono to edit an article by Bill Berry for Snow News’ August 1992 issue on the first ski tow in America.

During the following summer of 1993, Morten urged Mason Beekley to adopt a new concept, annual awards for a Lifetime of service in the cause of ski history. The first Eastern Meeting of ISHA was held in March 23 at Sugarbush, Vermont and drew 80 members, Lifetime awards went to Arnold Lunn, who was editor of the Ski Club of Great Britain newsletter for years in successful pursuit of making downhill skiing competition recognized the world over. One of Sir Arnold’s nephews attended to represent the family. The second award was to John Auran, longtime ski writer and editor for both Ski and Skiing, there in person to receive the award.

The next issue of the magazine came out on May 15, 1993, the first issue printed under the name Skiing Heritage, a changed suggested by ISHA member John Fry (then in his sixth year as the editorial director of Snow Country). When Earline Marsh decided to retire, Morten volunteered to take over her duties pro bono and keyboarded the entire text and assembled the layout in his Accord, New York home office. To fill it out he wrote his first story for Heritage, a four-page article titled "The Films of Hannes Schneider" that doubled the size of the issue to 12 pages. He wrote the front-page announcement headed “A Bigger and Better Heritage!” He had already envisioned a longer and stronger Skiing Heritage than the current model,

The next issue in September 1993 was the Constam issue. With Morten helping Paul Valar write the story, this became the first Skiing Heritage cover story. It was a re-discovery of Ernst Constam, who invented the first modern ski lifts, the J-bar and the T-bar. The other feature consisted of excerpts taken by Morten from John Allen’s new history of American skiing from the mid-1800s to 1940, From Skisport to Skiing.

Skiing Heritage’s Winter 1994 issue had a second cover story, The Winter Sport of Skeeing, the first how-to ski book, authored by Theodore Johnsen of Portland. Maine, and published in 1905. Glenn Parkinson, who had made the discovery, wrote the story. Morten contributed a four-page second feature on Ernie Blake and Taos to round out the issue that for the first time hit 20 pages, At this juncture, Morten had developed a strong enough vision to write a long proposal to Mason on the concept of Skiing Heritage as America’s first national ski history publication, a journal of 40 pages. Based on the proposal, Mason made an offer to hire Morten as a paid editor in a handshake contract. He agreed to work on a freelance basis to turn his proposal into reality. The move was seconded by Glenn. Morten’s full role called for him to be an active member of the Executive Committee, assemble the issues to print-ready status and become in effect acting Secretary, writing notes on the annual meetings as a basis for Mason’s report, and picking the winners for the annual ISHA awards.

The first issue under Morten’s editorship was the Fall 1994 issue in which for the first timed the masthead listed Morten as editor, but there was no masthead assignment for the roles of secretary or treasurer. Gretchen Fraser was the cover story, written by Luanne Pfeifer of Sun Valley. At ten pages it was the longest feature yet, a harbinger of the future. Dozens of in-depth lead features of America’s historical figures in the sport that were to appear in the journal. A six- page second feature on Charlie Lord, the man who cut the first ski trails on Mt. Mansfield in Stowe including the Nose Dive, was contributed by Earline Marsh. An excerpt from the newly published Nice Goin’, Friedl Pfeifer’s autobiography (written with Morten), pushed the publication to the promised total of 40 pages.

This was the first issue recognizable look-alike forerunner of Skiing Heritage as it is today: it was short only eight pages and two staff editors from today’s Heritage. Mason Beekley’s editorial set the bar high for this new venture.

“We hear the words ‘world class’ thrown around pretty loosely these days.” Mason wrote. Yet the most important decision made during the April board meetings at Park City was to declare our commitment to establish Skiing Heritage as the premier international world-class periodical of skiing history. Our Board developed some criteria of world class as it relates to Skiing Heritage The fundamental concept in striving to be world class is that the goal will energize Skiing Heritage to be perpetually pursuing ever-higher standards. Reach one level and the next one will appear.

“In that simple concept lies the power of striving to be world class. Heritage will always be striving to be the best. “The best” will be an ever-changing, ever-unfolding vision of what we are working to become, with a horizon that will be ever-receding, ever expanding.”

“The Dick Durrance issue” was next, for the Winter 1995 issue. Heritage had excerpts from Dick’s new biography, The Man on a Medal, and a follow-up story by John Jerome. The lead in the next issue, Fall 1995, was given over to the matter of the 10th Mountain Division’s huge influence on skiing. On the masthead, Morten Lund was officially listed as the editor and member of the Executive Committee and as the Secretary of ISHA. He has been pushing Mason Beekley’s vision for Skiing Heritage ever since.

JOURNAL OF ISHA, THE INTERNATIONAL SKIING HISTORY ASSOCIATION
The International Skiing History Association is a not-for-profit corporation, whose mission is to preserve and advance the knowledge of ski history and to increase public awareness of the sport's heritage.

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