Culture

At a certain point in life, it’s best to reward joy, not athletic achievement. That way, you can never lose. 

Most of us these days refuse to accept the fact that our bodies are aging before our eyes. There was a time in college when I could play basketball for four hours straight and not get tired. I could paddle a hundred-pound redwood surfboard all day or ski summit to base from first chair to last and not take a break. As I look back on my modest athletic career, I realize that the way I measure success has changed as much as I have.

In 1962, after surfing for 25 years, I gave it up and started racing sailboats. I knew that racing my catamaran didn’t require the agility of a teenager. I raced sailboats for 20 years, until I found myself getting beat by people half my age. So I moved on. To windsurfing.

I even moved to Maui for three months out of the year so I could do as much windsurfing as possible before my body wore out. When I was 65, I surfed from Maui to Molokai. About the same time, I came to realize that I would never ride the giant waves at Hookipa. Slowly it came into focus that my pursuit of any particular sport was changing at the same rate that my body was wearing out. I finally gave up windsurfing because it was just too hard on my body.

A while back, I pedaled my mountain bike to the top of Vail Mountain and then coasted down. I didn’t enjoy going up, but I really enjoyed coming down. That was about the same time Vail announced its lifts would haul you and your mountain bike to the top for a few bucks. My wife and I did just that. We coasted from the top to Mid-Vail, where we had a nice lunch and then coasted on down to the village.

In route we passed a lot of sweaty people pedaling up. We also passed the bike patrol administering first aid to a tourist who had hit a tree. We coasted all the way back to our house without turning a pedal. We didn’t set any speed records, but I loved how the wind felt on my face as I careened down the mountain. Were we lazy? Probably. But at my age, I didn’t feel the need to tell my friends how fast I pedaled to the top. The first liar never has a chance in these kinds of conversations.

When it comes to skiing, I have long maintained that moguls on the hill are like heartbeats: You only have so many of them in your knees, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. My knees wore out a long time ago, and since bumps make you turn in specific places, I avoid bumps the way I avoid political discussions.

Yes, I would still like to be able to jump cliffs, but my body won’t do that anymore. Come to think of it, my body never did jump cliffs—I just filmed other people doing that. But because of advances in snow grooming and shorter, wider skis to match my wider body, I can still ski down a hill at a speed that gets my adrenaline going. It remains a thrill like no other.

Is there a moral to this story? No. There is a lesson, however: As you age, recalibrate your values to reward joy, not physical prowess. No one keeps score on what you’re doing except you. Are you the fastest person in the over-50 age group to run up Mt. Baldy in your underwear? Who cares?

As I get older, I measure my athletic achievements by the width of my smile. This won’t give you bragging rights around the dinner table with your grandkids, but it does keep life interesting. Don’t give up on athletics; just reset your standards—and definition of success.

Climbing Mt. Everest is very difficult. A few years ago, a young Norwegian rode his mountain bike from Norway to Nepal, towing all his climbing equipment in a small trailer. Then he climbed Mt. Everest alone. At the summit, he snapped a few pictures, climbed down and pedaled his bike all the way back to Norway.

There is a lesson in this story: No matter what you do, there always will be someone who does it better. So do everything for the fun of it, and never mind keeping score. 

This column was published in the February 2008 issue of SKI magazine. Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found, My Life Story, was published in 2016. He died in January 2018, at the age of 93.

Edgar Wittmark's bold, color-blast style hit the sweet spot for mass-entertainment pulp magazines.

This American artist grew up during the period when magazines published thrilling entertainment, including fiction and tales of high-action sports, for an increasingly literate population. Many stories, as this cover shows, were geared to youth. In 1910, 72 percent of American kids attended school. By 1930, all 48 states required students to complete elementary school. The newly educated readers bought these magazines with their bold illustrations and content varying from serious literature and reportage to pulp fiction.

Wittmark, born in New York City in 1895, spent three summers working on a farm in Montana, then served in France during World War I. He later studied at New York’s Art Students League and in 1925 returned to France to enroll in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. This school allowed students to experiment rather than follow the academic rules for painting enforced at the more famous École des Beaux-Arts. It was at the Grande Chaumière that he began to develop what critics later called his “retro-futuristic” style that promised “potential reality.”

When Wittmark returned to New York, his bold and colorful action paintings, usually in oil, became staple covers for the well-known American Boy, Collier’s, Outdoor Life, Saturday Evening Post and Scientific American magazines. He also did covers for pulp magazines like Adventure, Frontier Stories and West, probably echoing his farm life in Montana as a young man.

The 1937 cover illustrated here portrays a youthful, healthy, sporting male America getting out of the Depression, the “potential reality” of what was possible. Those with available wealth had a choice of two of the most physical and exciting sports then captivating a steadily recovering United States. 

It is unusual to choose a medalist as the subject for this art column. In this case, I’m not talking about an Olympic or World Championship medalist but about an artist who creates medals: Helmut Zobl, the Austrian who designed the 100-schilling coin, illustrated here, in commemoration of the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck.

Zobl was born in Schwarzach im Pongau, about an hour south of Salzburg, in 1941. His art training began in a Kunstgewerbeschule, the arts and crafts school in Steyr. From 1960 to 1965 he studied at the prestigious Akademie der Bildenden Künste—the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 1961, he took a summer course with Oskar Kokoschka, best known for his expressionistic portraits and avant-garde literature.

Zobl worked as an assistant in Ferdinand Welz’s medaling master school, a department of the Academy of Fine Arts. Welz was renowned for his many schilling coins and commemorative medals, and Zobl followed his master.

In 1970, Zobl started freelancing. The following year he joined the Vienna Secession group and about 20 years later he took membership in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medaillenkunst, the German Society for Medal Art. In 1976, he designed the 100-schilling coin for the Olympics. At the time, a 120-schilling ticket, for example, would get you up to Axamer Lizum ski area, 10 kilometers out of Innsbruck, to watch the men’s giant slalom.

Besides the lettering around the edge of the coin—XII Olympische Winterspiele 1976 Innsbruck—the face depicts a skier going full speed. The stylized figure is made more powerful by the well-defined “squares,” which give the skier solidity as he powers down the hill. It presages Franz Klammer’s wild ride in the downhill on the Patscherkofel at Igls, when he beat Bernhard Russi by a third of a second to take the gold medal in those 1976 Winter Games. 

The celebrity artist visited Aspen for more than 20 years.

Andy Warhol died in 1987. But his cultural significance remains white hot, as his obession with fame, celebrity and personal branding is more relevant than ever in today’s media–dominated world. Perhaps predictably, Warhol mania is on the rise, with plays staged in London and New York and the airing of the Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries, all exploring the man and the myth. What isn’t commonly known about Warhol is that he was enchanted with Aspen, bought property there and visited often enough to be considered a part-time local.

(Photo above: credit Mark Sink)

The man who deified Campbell’s soup cans (to his lasting regret, he claimed) had been coming to Aspen off and on for about 15 years before he even learned to ski. That happened in December of 1981, when he and photographer Christopher Makos decided to take a lesson at Buttermilk. As longtime Aspen instructor Gerry Bohn recalls, “I was a supervisor at the time, and we ran out of instructors, so I gave him a two-hour private.”

Warhol wrote in his diary about the Powder Pandas slope and its T-bar: “We did about two hours of zigzagging and going up the handrail and you just sort of sit on the thing and go up the whole hill and it was really fun.” He also mentioned falling three times, which isn’t bad for a first-time skier.

Denver-based photographer Mark Sink lived part time in Aspen then and worked for Warhol at Interview magazine. He remembers meeting Warhol and Makos at Buttermilk that day. “We just talked at the base,” says Sink. “I asked if he had tried the ‘flying wedge’ down; he thought that was a funny term. He was done for the day, hurt his hand in a fall on the baby hill. His Rolex hurt his wrist, apparently. I remember him talking about Reggie Jackson and other stars in the lift line. His star-spotting was amazing anywhere we went.”

On that same visit, Warhol and Calvin Klein met Paramount heavyweight Barry Diller and his ski instructor for lunch at West Buttermilk. Then Warhol went for dinner with Diller, Italian film producer Marina Cicogna and Diana Ross at Andre’s, where Ross, as Warhol recalled in his diary, was wearing “a cowboy hat and big white shoes” and danced on top of the table. A media star himself, habitually surrounded by celebrities, Warhol was as star-struck as any skier who drove up from Denver for the day.

Warhol first came to Aspen in the mid-1960s at the invitation of locals John and Kimiko Powers, major modern art collectors and some of his biggest patrons. John was running the Aspen Center for Contemporary Art at a time when it was one of the most important avant-garde art communities in the country. Warhol participated in several Colorado exhibitions sponsored by Powers. And in 1966 he guest-edited the third issue of an experimental arts and culture magazine called Aspen (also known as Aspen in a Box), founded by part-time Aspenite Phyllis Johnson, a former editor at Women’s Wear Daily and Advertising Age. Warhol’s issue, like all of them, was bundled in a box, which he had designed to resemble one of his trademark cultural references, a package of Fab laundry detergent.

Far from just a casual visitor, Warhol during this period bought land just downvalley from Aspen. In the early ’80s he also bought a house in Aspen and devoted a chapter of his book America to the town.

In the summer of 1984, at the star-studded Aspen Tennis Festival fundraiser for the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Educational Foundation, Warhol arrived on the back of a Harley piloted by Jack Nicholson. Warhol offered to do a portrait of the highest bidder at the celebrity auction, and it drew so much interest that he agreed to do four of them at $40,000 each, raising a quick and generous $160,000 for the cause. It would be his last trip to town before his death.

The Powers Art Center near Aspen, which showcases John and Kimiko’s collection, continues to regularly display many of Warhol’s works. And his only major museum retrospective in North America in 2021-22 recently closed at the Aspen Art Museum. The cliché about Aspen is that real locals came for the skiing but stayed for the intriguing people. For Warhol, it was always about the people, and the skiing was mainly a way to meet more of them. 

SNAPSHOTS IN TIME

1952 Voice of Experience
No one knew better than Coach Émile Allais what the team was up against. Once the greatest of all racers in Europe, he had lost his front teeth years ago at Chamonix in the French Alps and shared this deficit now with most of his boys who had lost theirs at places like Reno, Aspen and Whitefish, Mont. He not only knew all the tricks but invented most of them himself, including a special racing crouch, ventilated goggles that would not fog up and even a new method of skiing. — Marshall Smith, “Hell on Snow,” on the American downhill team training for the 1952 Oslo Olympic Games (Life Magazine, February 11, 1952)

1970 Timeless Tuning Tip
It’s a great day. Great snow. You feel great. But your new skis seem to have a mind of their own. So you tighten your boots, loosen your bindings, have your poles shortened. But your skiing is still going haywire. Before you pack the whole shebang into the attic, take a look at your ski bottoms. Minor problems there often cause major problems in your technique, even with new, high-priced skis. — Editors, “Sure, Why Not Blame Your Skis?” (Skiing Magazine, February 1970)

1974 View from Texas
The important point to remember about skiing is that until the basic skills are mastered, the sport is not to be enjoyed. —
Suzanne O’Malley, “Who is That, Lying in the Snow in a $200 Ski Outfit?” (Texas Monthly, December 1974)

1980 Not So Special
With the extreme specialization we see today, a good downhiller cannot be a good slalom skier the way it was when I raced. — Jean-Claude Killy, interview (Powder Magazine, September 1980)

1998 Mountains of Opportunity
Now at least I can get my vacuum cleaner fixed in Ketchum and I certainly couldn’t do that when I moved here 20 years ago. New entrepreneurs are filling up business niches I didn’t even realize existed. Tourism might just be a phase in the economic growth of mountain towns. —“State Rep: In Search of Common Ground,” Wendy Jaquet, interview (Snow Country Magazine, February-March 1998)

2000 Can You Hear Me Now?
I would like to ski in the fantasy land with the three gentlemen who wrote against cell-phone use on the slopes. I am lucky enough to live and work 10 minutes from a great ski area and if I can steal a few hours from work to go skiing, then the cell phone is a small price to pay. It sure beats being stuck at your office desk waiting for that one call that might bring in a huge deal. I would imagine that skiers—real skiers, anyway—will agree that skiing is better than working. I also enjoy calling my friends and telling them what they are missing. — Steven Strauss, Coplay, Pa., “Pro Phone,” Letters (SKI Magazine, May-June 2000)

Ruade Redux

The November–December 2021 issue’s “Whatever Happened To” explored the ruade technique, developed in France in the 1940s and introduced to the U.S. by Emile Allais. There is an interesting story about Allais, ruade and Sun Valley.

(Photo above: Emile Allais (second from left) at Squaw Valley, 1949, with instructors Dodie Post, Warren Miller, Charlie Cole and Alfred Hauser. Courtesy Palisades Tahoe.)

In 1947, Otto Lang became head of the Sun Valley Ski School. In his autobiography, A Bird of Passage, Lang said it was time to revitalize the ski school and it needed “a celebrity with the charisma of a superior ski racer who could also teach.” In 1948, he brought in four-time world champion and Olympic medalist Allais, famous for devising the French direct-to-parallel teaching technique, in opposition to the stem-based Arlberg system that was the mainstay of the Sun Valley school. Hannes Schneider, godfather of Arlberg, approved the hire, since “only time will tell which of the techniques deserved to last.” Allais worked out well and was a popular instructor.

Lang described ruade as “a christiania with the skis held parallel, and in order to initiate the change of direction, one lifted the tail ends of both skis off the snow and started the turn in midair to head the skis in the opposite direction.” He found it “a physically taxing maneuver, but very useful under certain conditions, such as a crusted or deeply rutted snow surface. The sight of a bunch of skiers doing the ruade reminded me of a flock of bunny rabbits hopping around and frolicking in the snow.”

That spring, Allais was hired to launch the Squaw Valley Ski School. When Lang saw Allais years later, he asked “What about ruade?” Allais replied, “Extinct as the dodo bird.”

John W. Lundin
Seattle, Washington

Cover Blurb Blunder

Ingrid Christophersen has delivered a valuable anthology to the international skiing community with To Heaven’s Heights. She deserves the recognition of ISHA’s Ullr Award for her extensive research and translation achievement and this addition to the skiing literature canon.

Readers of Skiing History also should know that the back cover of the volume highlights an entry by Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker best known for glorifying Hitler and the Nazi regime. The 438-page volume contains entries from 100-plus authors. Singling out Riefenstahl for the back cover suggests a naivety or tone-deafness, especially during this time of growing anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism. To the author’s and publisher’s credit, the Riefenstahl reference, included in the book’s early publicity materials, was removed from subsequent promotional materials when the issue was brought to their attention. It remains on the back cover.

Jon Weisberg
SeniorsSkiing.com
Salt Lake City, Utah

Correction

Due to an editing error, on page 20 of “The Legacy of Spider Sabich” (March-April 2022), the site of Spider’s first WPS race—and victory—was misidentified. The race was held at Buffalo, New York, not Hunter Mountain. A caption on page 22 misidentified the woman in the photo. It’s Missy Greis, Spider’s daughter, not her mother Dede Brinkman.

The highest price paid for a vintage find: $17,500.

Manhattan’s Swann Galleries offered a mix of classic and unusual American posters at its February 2022 vintage sale, along with a handful of blue-chip European ski posters that commanded high prices. The 45 posters, from countries as diverse as France, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and the United States, were the amalgam of artistic rarities, masterpieces and oddities that collectors have come to expect from this well-regarded auction house.

Among the American pieces was artist Jack Galliano’s “VIII Olympic Winter Games/Squaw Valley, Feb 18–28, 1960.” This was the second of two official posters designed for the Squaw Valley Winter Games (the first one had been issued before the exact dates of the Games were determined). It was printed in late 1959, and a map of the U.S. on the flag shows the location of Squaw Valley. With an estimated worth of between $1,200 and $1,800, the poster sold for $812 (including the buyer’s premium, which is 25 percent of the hammer price).

A “Ski Alta” poster from about 1941 depicted the Alta Lodge, with a block of advertising text promoting the Alf Engen Ski School and the resort’s location “Just above Salt Lake City.” “I stayed here when I was younger,” recalls Nicholas Lowry, president of Swann, head of the gallery’s poster division and an appraiser on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. “We’ve had this poster several times before. It’s not incredibly rare, but it’s rare enough. If you look closely, you can see that there’s a pasted tip-on that says ‘Alf Engen,’ who took

over the ski school in 1949. We did some research and found that his name was covering ‘Durrance,’ as in Dick Durrance, who led Alta’s ski school from 1940–1942. It was clearly cheaper to paste Engen’s name over Durrance’s and keep using this original poster.” The poster sold for $3,250, higher than its $3,000 estimate.

Two ski posters in the auction were created by the German-born designer Sascha Maurer, best known for his work for the New Haven Railroad, New England ski resorts and ski manufacturers. They included Maurer’s “Ski Stowe Vermont/ Ski Capital of the East,” late 1950s. “Maurer designed the Stowe logo, the swoosh ‘S,’” says Lowry. “This is wonderful, but I don’t believe this was its first appearance of the logo.” The poster was estimated between $1,500 and $2,000, and realized $1,188.

The second Maurer poster advertised Flexible Flyer skis (top of page) and had been overprinted for The Manor House in Kearsarge, New Hampshire. Estimated between $2,000 and $3,000, it sold for $1,690. “They printed a lot of posters in this fashion, leaving a blank space on the lower part of the poster for the name of the distributor or hotel,” Lowry says. “Just look at this happy couple, jumping together, their form is great. It’s so joyful—it’s one of his best posters. In fact, it’s a perfect ski poster.”

Another New England ski classic, “New Hampshire,” depicted an iconic image: a faceless skier and an enormous snowflake floating over a map of the state. It was the 1935 creation of Edgar Hayes “Ted” Hunter Jr., who skied in the 1936 Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and trained as an architect—at Dartmouth College and later at Harvard University—under Bauhaus master Walter Gropius. Hunter went on to become a notable designer of midcentury modern houses. Estimated between $600 and $900, the poster sold for $688.

An artist named D. Thayer was the creator of “Sugarloaf,” a circa-1955 poster for Maine’s largest ski mountain. The resort opened in 1953, and Lowry says that “I researched when the third chairlift went in, which is how I dated this poster. The artist gave us some telltale hints. When they draw something so specific as each chairlift, you know they’re working from either a photograph or real life. I’ve also never seen this poster before.” The sale price of $875 was below the top $1,000 estimate.

Sun Valley images are typically big sellers at Swann’s auctions. This sale included “Sun Valley/Round House on Baldy Mountain,” arguably the most famous of the bunch. The 1940 creation by Dwight Clark Shepler had a blank space at the bottom for a railroad company to leave its imprint. The $2,860 final price was just shy of the $3,000 top estimate.

“Ski World-Wide/Pan Am” dates from 1970 and shows a downhiller in full racing form. It can’t be a coincidence that the racer looks like Robert Redford, whose film Downhill Racer had premiered the year before. “I like the fact that it’s done in a cinematic way, with the repeating images of his poles and legs, so that it appears that he’s in motion and going very fast,” Lowry says.

Bidders liked it, too, driving the price way above the $1,200 top estimate to sell for $2,600. Speaking of ski films, a poster for Dick Barrymore’s The Last of the Ski Bums from 1969, with its Day-Glo colors characteristic of the era, jumped its top estimate of $600 and sold for $812.

One of the most unusual offerings at the sale, “Ski the Black Hills/South Dakota,” was created by an unknown designer from the late 1960s. Lowry guessed that the mountain depicted was Terry Peak, given its claim as the “Highest Ski Area East of the Rockies.” Mount Rushmore, also depicted, actually lies 36 miles to the south of Terry, as the crow flies. “It’s psychedelic in style, with that typography, the colors and even the skier’s sweater,” says Lowry. “It’s very groovy and the most unusual ski poster in the sale.” When it sold for $292, well below its low estimate of $400, it also proved a bargain.

When the auction turned to European ski posters, many far older than their American counterparts, the bidding was more fevered, often with higher prices as a result.

One of the great classics, “À Chamonix–Mont Blanc,” with a high-flying ski jumper, was one of five official posters for the 1924 Olympics in Chamonix published by the PLM Railway. Note that the event was designated an Olympics only after the fact. All of them were issued with text variants, sometimes promoting the Games and later on winter activities in the area itself. This version is dated 1927, repurposed to advertise Chamonix’s winter sports facilities. With an estimate of $3,000 to $4,000, it sold for $3,750.

“Bilgeri-Ski Ausrüstung” is an iconic image of ski poles, leather baskets and wooden skis with the then-new Bilgeri bindings. It readily appeals to collectors who seek posters of vintage ski equipment. The fact that artist Carl Kunz posed the gear against the Matterhorn doesn’t hurt, either. Even more striking about this image is the purple sky, with a

purplish cast on the snow. “I said, ‘Purple snow? Purple sky?’ when I first saw this poster years ago,” Lowry remembers, “but an artist friend has assured me that purple is the color that she and many others see at certain times of day in the Alps.”

One of the most astonishing images at the auction was a poster for Swiss ski resort Mürren from 1931, showing a skier plunging headlong down a piste with what appears to be the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau rearing up behind him. This eerie, dreamlike image by artist André Lecomte is “like an airbrush masterpiece—you’ve got the blur of the sky, the Alpine purple again between two flags and the mountains in the background,” Lowry says. “The text is also masterfully done.” Bidders appeared equally intrigued, and the $6,000 high estimate was easily surpassed, with the final sale price at $10,000.

“Klosters,” by photographer Andreas Pedrett, is “less of an accomplished photomontage and looks more like a colorized photograph,” says Lowry. The poster sold for $4,000, more than three times its top estimate. “It’s very unusual, and what she’s wearing is phenomenal ski fashion,” Lowry adds.

Another photomontage was Emil Schulthess’ 1937 poster for Pontresina. A black-and-white photographic background of skiers heading down the treeless pistes of Diavolezza is superimposed with a free-floating pair of glacier glasses and the reflections of a woman’s face. “I love it just because you get these reflections on glasses, which is odd because the glasses aren’t on somebody’s face,” Lowry observes. “These mysterious floating glasses reflect the image of a happy, smiling skier. It’s unbridled joy and happiness, and we all know that feeling on the mountain.”

The clear star of the auction: Martin Peikert’s deeply sensual poster for Champéry. This surreal fantasy from 1955 depicts a giant sleeping female skier, her curvaceous shape matching the bumps of the piste, as a tram whizzes overhead and diminutive skiers schuss beside her.

“Peikert has developed a cult following among collectors,” Lowry says. “Even his less good images sell for more than people expect. This happens to be one of his best images, the anthropomorphization of the mountain. The colors are great, the conceit is good, and the execution is fantastic. We expect it to go high for all those reasons,” he adds. Indeed it did, flying past its $10,000 top estimate and selling for $17,500.

Swann’s next auction of vintage ski posters will take place in February 2023. Visit swanngalleries.com.