Changing of the Guard
New faces at ISHA, and old friends retire.
A small nonprofit like ISHA depends critically on passionately devoted, hard-working directors and staff. We’ve been very fortunate to work with many experts over the decades. Three of our key folks stepped away this year, and we’d like to single them out for thanks.
Einar Sunde joined the board in 2003. A corporate attorney based in Palo Alto, California, Einar is a native Norwegian-speaker and, therefore, a lifelong skier and jovial companion. He’s also a bibliophile, with a library of well more than 1,000 volumes on skiing in many languages, including a number of valuable rarities. Einar was always ready to help the magazine staff by translating articles or scanning chapters of books for use in researching new stories. He served on ISHA’s Awards committee, sharing responsibility for choosing annual award winners. In 2010, he was elected secretary of the board and provided yeoman service in that post for 13 years. His minutes were accurate, clear, concise and timely; he knew our by-laws inside and out and, when necessary, had useful ideas on how to amend them to help ISHA run more efficiently. In 2022 Einar complained that he could no longer hear well enough to make sense of the babble at our board meetings, and when the babble didn’t improve, he stepped down as secretary. We’ll miss his broad, deep knowledge of ski history, his cheery volunteerism and legal-eagle attention to detail—and we’ll continue to ask him for help with reference materials.
Peter Kirkpatrick, an amiable, soft-spoken six-foot jock, was a prep-school pitcher and then played varsity hockey and football for Middlebury College. He wound up in the commercial side of skiing in 1975 as NASTAR sales manager for Bob Beattie’s World Pro Skiing in Aspen. Peter went on to sell sponsorships and advertising for SKI Magazine, Snow Country, SKI Business and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. He also became a devoted supporter of and donor to ISHA. In 2016, when Dick Cutler retired from the job, Peter stepped up to handle the association’s sponsorship sales. With a spectacular network of friends and clients across the spectrum of snowsports businesses, Peter was a whiz at the task. During the latter half of the Covid recession, he rapidly rebuilt the sponsor list to new record levels. In 2022 he suffered a mild stroke on the tennis court and had to slow down. At the close of 2023 Peter turned his files over to Executive Director Janet White.
Ken Hugessen, a Toronto-based cross-country ski racer, grew up to be a management consultant, with offices in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. He joined the ISHA board in 2021, specifically to help revive a program to support Canadian skiing-history research. Many thanks to Ken for personally underwriting that program.
New board members elected during the past year include:
Pete Asch, born in Montreal, won his first ski race at age six and retired from competition. Pete owns a thriving manufacturing business in Burlington, Vermont, with more than 400 employees. He serves on ISHA’s finance committee.
Lisa Ballard began racing at age six out of Lake Placid, New York, attended Vermont’s Stratton Mountain School and raced for Dartmouth and then on the pro tour. Lisa serves on the marketing committee and editorial review board.
Gunther Jöchl grew up ski racing in Austria and Germany and studied engineering in Munich. He settled in the United States, taking management jobs at Blue Knob, Pennsylvania and Sugar Mountain, North Carolina. From 1981 to 1995 he was the sole distributor of Völkl skis in the U.S. Today, with his wife, former U.S. Ski Team star Kim Schmidinger, he owns and operates Sugar Mountain. Since 2019, Jöchl has also served as mayor of Banner Elk, North Carolina.
After three years as ISHA treasurer, Bob Soden has stepped down to focus on historical research and writing (he remains on the board and serves on the Awards committee).
Wendolyn Holland has been elected treasurer. Based in Sun Valley, Wendolyn works for the U.S. Department of Energy on clean energy, sustainability and Native American communities. She raced on the Yale ski team, earned an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and a law degree at Georgetown. In 1998 her book Sun Valley: An Extraordinary History earned an Ullr Award, among other honors.