Early in the 1948/49 season, I was sitting in one of Nelson Bennett’s log cabins on Trail Creek organizing my new shoelace business as I poured some coffee for a friend of mine who was on the ski patrol. He asked me if I was going to try to get a job working in the ski school.
Up until that point, being a ski instructor never crossed my mind. When he explained how the trial process worked, I thought, why not? Pay would be good, I would have a place to live, a free lift ticket and three meals a day. (Sounded just like the kind of scam that I would enjoy.)
Two days later I was making snow plow turns on the new beginner chairlift on Dollar Mountain. My only real experience in teaching skiing was trading lessons for a hand-knit sweater with a waitress in the lodge dining room.
Once I got over my nervousness of performing beginning maneuvers in front of Otto Lang, Sigi Engle, Sepp Froelich and others, I was pleased and surprised that I survived the first day’s cut. The next day I successfully demonstrated what I’d be doing nearly everyday until the lifts shut down in the spring. I would be teaching beginners how to walk in the flat, doing kick turns, and how to carry your skis safely from the bus to the ski lift.
When Otto Lang hired me, he said very simply, “Go get a haircut and some ski clothes without Army surplus labels on them and show up for work on Saturday.”
It was hard to believe my good luck in getting the job that paid $125 a month and included a place to live, three meals a day, a free lift ticket, and a new pair of ski pants and a parka.
In those days the Arlberg ski technique was so disciplined that I was not allowed to take my pupils onto a chairlift until they could do four or five linked snowplow turns without falling. Having to make the pupils climb up the hill right underneath the chairlift made no sense to me, but that was the rule of the technique we were teaching.
If you taught a regular ski school class for four hours a day, then you got to keep half of your private lesson money or $2 an hour. I quickly learned how to size up a potential private lesson pupil by how new their equipment was. I had from 9:30 a.m., when I first met them at the ski school meeting place, until noon to talk them into a one-hour private lesson during my lunch hour.
The winter of 1948-49 was the winter of great innovation in skis and all manner of ski equipment as the sport grew rapidly. This was one of the first years of experimenting with metal skis and they ranged from cast aluminum to aluminum and plywood.
One day in late spring a very tall, very bald man showed up in the ski instructor’s reception room and had 12 pair of skis that nobody had ever seen before. His name was Howard Head was not a very good athlete and was having a lot of trouble turning his long wooden skis. Being an engineer by trade, he reasoned that aluminum laminated with a wooden core would make a much better ski.
The following winter they went on sale at $85 for a pair of skis when the most expensive ski in the shop would be $29.95. It was a high price, but the skis performed remarkably better than wooden skis, particularly in deep powder snow and before long almost every photograph in all of the publications skiers were skiing on the new Head ski.
We’ve come a long way since the laminated hickory skis that I used in the Sun Valley ski school to a pair skis I saw on the hill yesterday that had retailed for $2,675. Remember those ski designers and manufacturers are selling you chance for freedom. It is up to the instructors like I used to be to teach you how to use them more effectively.