As the ski resorts began to be developed across America, it was necessary to have a famous ski racer or instructor from Austria hired as the head of the ski school.
By 1950 there were still less than 15 chairlifts in America.
Most of the Austrian instructors were able to escape from the German invasion, some less than a week before it happened. Hannes Schnieder was one of the last of them to escape and he established his first ski school in America at North Conway, New Hampshire.
Many people credit Hannes with the invention of the Arlberg technique and its teaching curriculum which features the snow plow turn, with ski tails far apart and tips together and with turning done by shifting weight.
Friedel Pfeiffer was a world-class ski racer and left Sun Valley in the winter of 1946/47 to build the first two single chairlifts in Aspen, Colorado.
When the Jackson Hole gondola was built, Pepi Stiegler had just won the gold medal in the men’s slalom in the 1964 Olympics at Innsbruck, Austria. Because of that gold, he got the job at Jackson Hole.
It is no longer deemed necessary to have big-name ski racers as the heads of the larger ski schools but more important is the quality of the teaching, which brings skiers back time and again to improve their ability to find more freedom.
One of the most famous Austrian ski instructors of the 20th century was Otto Lang. He was born in Bosnia. After World War I, in 1919, his family moved to Salzburg, Austria, where Otto acquired his first pair of skis. He stood at the head of a line under a small light bulb all night so he could be first in line to buy a pair of Austrian Army surplus skis from World War I. He paid the equivalent of 10 cents for them and his life was changed forever. He spent his teenage years in Austria as a ski jumper, racer and ski instructor in the Hannes Schnieder ski school in St. Anton.
Otto established his first ski school at Mount Rainier in Washington State in 1937 and then two more schools in the Northwest, Mount Baker and Mount Hood in 1938, running all three concurrently. He next was the ski school director at Sun Valley, Idaho.
In the fall of 1948, I was living in Sun Valley and just starting my nylon parachute shroud shoelace business when I heard that Otto Lang and his Sun Valley ski school was having tryouts on Dollar Mountain. I dug out my Army surplus white skis and my ski clothes that had the fewest holes and Army labels on them, and then showed up on Dollar Mountain and survived three days of demonstrating the Arlberg technique.
As a beginning ski instructor Otto paid me $125 a month, room and board and a free season ski pass for teaching six days a week.
When I went to work for Otto I had just spent two years living in a small trailer in the Sun Valley parking lot and I learned an awful lot of stuff from Otto besides how to turn skis.
As I spent that winter in Sun Valley I never saw Otto engaged in any impropriety or bad manners of any kind.
Unfortunately for me, Emile Allais was also teaching at Sun Valley that same winter and I had become very enamored with the French ski technique that was based primarily on side-slipping and rotation rather than the snow plow and weight shift. As a result of this conflict in teaching and my young age at the time I did get sideways with Otto a couple of times but everything worked out in the end.
Fortunately, Otto lived to be 97 in West Seattle and I had the privilege of spending a lot of time with him in his later years.
Otto often reminded me of the Hannes Schneider quote, “There would be no wars if everyone skied.” The world was a better place when Otto was around.