Skiing HistoryWorld's leading website dedicated to the sport's heritage

By John Fry

It's official. The Beekley Collection - now a museum-size assemblage of ski paintings, posters, pins, magazine graphics and one of the world's outstanding ski libraries - will take up residence at Mammoth Lakes, California.

Agreement on the re-location of what is believed to be the largest private collection of ski books and art was reached in November by its owner, the Beekley Family Foundation, and the Mammoth Lakes Foundation. The Collection, which will be in a newly renovated hall on a college campus a couple of miles from the ski slopes, could open to the public as early as December of 2003.

Mason Beekley, who died in August, 2001, assembled the collection over a half century, eventually building a private museum in Connecticut, where viewing was by invitation only. In 1992, it led him to the idea of creating an association of people interested in preserving the sport's history. After starting the International Skiing History Association, Mr. Beekley funded the launch of a history quarterly, Skiing Heritage. (Click here for the story of the founding of the Association.)

Mr. Beekley became concerned about finding a permanent home for his Collection about five years ago. By then he already had 2,000 books, and was well on his way to amassing a collection of 625 valuable ski posters, 2,400 ski pins, 77 pieces of sculpture, and 197 paintings of skiers and ski scenes. To locate a future home for them, he initially focused on Aspen, but no one there was prepared to commit to the expense of creating a building to house the Collection, and of a curator and security needed to permit public viewing. Other resorts knew of it, but none was willing to make the investment.

"How many resorts would be willing to dedicate 3,000 to 5,000 square feet to such a collection?" asks Evan Russell, President and CEO of the Mammoth Lakes Foundation. "But it perfectly fits our mission. We are chartered to support the development of higher education and cultural enrichment in the Eastern Sierra, and it ties in with Mason's hope that his collection would be established in an environment of research and study. It is an excellent addition to the master plan for our overall campus, which will ultimately support 1,000 full-time students."

The Collection will be housed in a former college building, Edison Hall, located on 86 acres, given to the Dave McCoy-inspired Mammoth Lakes Foundation by the electric utility, Southern California Edison. As a museum/gallery, The Beekley Collection in Edison Hall will be open to the public six or seven days a week. Renovations are underway, and Russell hopes the doors will open a year from now.

The Beekley library contains books from 25 countries, published in 10 languages. The oldest book is the 1555 History of the Goths, Swedes and Vandals by the Swedish monk, Olaus Magnus, containing the first printed images of skiers. There are English and Danish editions of Fridtjof Nansen's account of his 1888 crossing of Greenland on skis, and of Austrian Matthias Zdarsky's 1896 Lilienfelder Skilauf-Teknik, the earliest influential book of downhill ski technique. There are books by Arnold Lunn, Hannes Schneider, Emile Allais, and by virtually all of the sport's creators.

The periodicals in the Beekley Collection are a unique resource for studying how magazines, over 165 years, portrayed skiing in warfare, hunting, fashion, adventure, romance, and even in social commentary. The Saturday Magazine, in 1836, published an article on "The Skating Soldiers of Norway." Puck's in 1911 commented on the faltering administration of William Howard Taft, showing the President as a skier about to fall. Skiing was seen as so alluring and popular in the 1930s and 1940s that magazines such as Country Gentleman, New Love, Collier's and Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Culture, commonly used it on their covers as a way to heighten newsstand sales. Mr. Beekley acquired the original art of the most famous of all ski cartoons, Charles Addams' drawing of a skier's tracks mysteriously going around each side of a tree, which appeared in The New Yorker.

The extraordinary assemblage of original paintings gathered by Mason includes a rare watercolor by Andrew Wyeth, a work "Vail" by the sports artist Leroy Nieman, and several large canvases by the renowned painter of clouds and mountainscapes, Eric Sloane. There are original illustrations by Laurent de Brunhoff of the nursery book elephant, Babar, on skis.

Mr. Beekley's collection of ski posters, from 17 nations, date back to 1890. In the 50 years that followed, resorts and railroads relied heavily on posters to attract customers, employing specialized artists and printers. European posters, especially, were sophisticated works of art, promoting events, travel and resorts. Mr. Beekley began acquiring ski prints in 1949. They span every variety of the printer's art, from silk-screens to linocuts. Some 400 images by photographers include the work of Ansel Adams, Leni Riefenstahl, Ray Atkeson, Toni Frissel and Winston Pote.

Mr. Beekley purchased an extraordinary array of 2,700 ski pins of 52 countries, from the Toronto collector, Bruce Carnall. He also bought the stamp collection of former SKI Magazine editor John Henry Auran, who had 585 postage stamps from 53 countries, bearing the images of skiers and skiing.

An index to the Collection's contents should be accessible to students of ski history some time next year.

In accepting Mr. Beekley's collection, Mammoth has made an extraordinarily astute decision, in my opinion. The resort - one of the nation's ten largest ski areas -- has long been perceived as "west coast" -- not as central to the national ski culture as an Aspen or a Stowe. Opening its doors to a collection of international stature will help Mammoth alter that image. The Beekley Collection is not another museum of ski equipment and clothing, but a multi-media representation of the sport's history.