Reviews: Three ISHA Award-Winning Books

Three of the ten books honored at the 31st Annual ISHA Awards Banquet

Heroes in Good Company

The newest addition to the vast body of 10th Mountain Division literature is Skyler Bailey’s Heroes in Good Company. It tells the harrowing experiences of a combat group within Company L of the 86th Mountain Regiment. The book may be short on the details of ski mountaineering and high-altitude military training, but its value to our community is an intimate account of the wartime tribulations of the very young soldiers who later became ski industry pioneers.

Among those are Bob Carlson, Ben Duke, David Brower, Norm Goldenberg, Jack Hay, Bob Johnson, Bill Morrison, Robert Krear (who wrote the book’s foreword) and Bill “Sarge” Brown, of Vail fame. The cast of characters also includes heroes who did not make it home, among them Stuart Abbot and Louis Wesley. Full disclosure: My uncle Norm Gavrin served proudly as a member of Company L of the 86th as well.

Bailey pulls no punches in describing the brutality of war, relying on the writings of the late battalion surgeon Dr. Albert Meinke and other physicians, medics and combatants to fill in the gruesome details of battlefield injuries, both physical and emotional. Nor does he shy away from the poignant stories of those left behind at home to worry and, sometimes, to grieve. One painful passage describes the fainting of Louis Wesley’s father when officers arrived at his house bearing the news of his son’s death. Even the strongest reader may bite his or her lower lip.

The details of the horrific actions on Mount Gorgolesco and in the tunnels above Lake Garda at war’s end are particularly welcome additions to the historical record. Bailey is forthright about the issue of SS troops being embedded within the German mountain groups to ensure that the vicious killing would go on until the moment of Wehrmacht surrender in Italy. Among the many who died needlessly, two days before the surrender, was Col. Bill Darby, founder of the U.S. Army Rangers, who joined the 10th as a replacement officer and led the final push into the Po Valley. The atrocities committed by SS troops against Italian civilians (including the children with whom the members of the 10th often shared their rations) could have been more directly focused upon, but that is a quibble over an otherwise solid historical effort.

How many more books do we need to recount the sacrifices of the U.S. ski troops? Heroes in Good Company answers that question bluntly: As many as it takes to educate new generations about the true nature of the sacrifices made by these very young skiers, mountaineers, scholars and athletes. Forced into a global maelstrom, their courage remains the bedrock upon which our own freedoms rest today. — Charles J. Sanders

Heroes in Good Company: L Company, 86th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, 1943–1945. By Skyler Bailey. Rucksack Publishing, 2022. 303 pages. Hardcover $35, paperback $25, Kindle edition $9.99 from Amazon, Winner, 2022 Ullr Award.

Ski Jumping in the Northeast:
Small Towns and Big Dreams

Ariel Picton Kobayashi’s Ski Jumping in the Northeast is a well-written and deeply researched history, augmented by her reflections on the present state of the sport.

The author was introduced to ski jumping in 1999, at age nine, by the Salisbury Winter Sports Association (SWSA). She later served as the jumping coach for SWSA, from 2016 to 2020. She clearly is in love with the sport of ski jumping and the communities that support it.

Part I begins with a quick introduction to the basics: what is ski jumping, why do people jump and how are ski jumps measured and scored, followed by a look at the history of the sport in the U.S.

Kobayashi describes the sport’s development in Norway during the latter half of the 19th century, a period that saw a major migration of Norwegians to the U.S. Most of those immigrants were familiar with the use of skis, and wherever they settled in the northern tier of states they built ski jumps. The Northeast was no exception.

The earliest ski club in the Northeast was the Berlin Mills Ski Club, founded by Norwegians in 1872 and later renamed the Nansen Ski Club. It hosted both the 1939 U.S. Olympic trials and the 1940 National Championships. Over the course of decades, hundreds of jumping hills, large and small, were built in the Northeast, including nine jumps within the New York metropolitan area. Festive competitions drew fans by the thousands.

The number of jumpers began to drop in the 1970s. Kobayashi highlights NCAA’s decision in 1981 to drop ski jumping as a sanctioned sport (which, in turn, led many high schools to drop ski jumping); the elimination of the all-around “skimeister” discipline, which honored the best four-way skier (cross-country, jumping, slalom and downhill); and ABC’s decision to showcase Vinko Bogataj’s spectacular inrun crash to exemplify the “agony of defeat” on the intro to Wide World of Sports.

But Kobayashi also focuses on the positives: the growth in the number of female jumpers, the International Olympic Committee’s inclusion of women’s jumping and the continued sense of tradition and community support. That said, she knows that while jumping has a strong and dedicated following in certain places, it takes constant effort to sustain that community.

To survive at the local and regional levels, clubs must continue to recruit volunteers, and everyone has to help out in all sorts of ways, from coaching to repairing facilities to preparing food at events. How organizers treat those volunteers will literally make or break clubs. As a member of the SWSA put it, “The community of ski jumping is a model of commitment and volunteerism. . . . Everyone pitches in to shovel, judge, pick up skis and support the jumpers. Giving back is part of the culture. The small, close-knit community supports all its members, no matter the competency or age.”

Part II consists of detailed listings and photos of, plus commentary on, active and dormant jumps. Kobayashi identifies 11 active clubs and jumping hills in three states and 17 dormant jumps in six states. A graphic appendix, by Walter Malmquist, shows active and dormant ski jumps by location and size. Sources are footnoted, and there’s a comprehensive bibliography. The book also includes excellent photo illustrations from individuals and archives. Locals interested in ski jumping will be well served by this book, and hikers will enjoy discovering abandoned and overgrown ski jumps hidden in Northeastern forests. — Einar Sunde

Ski Jumping in the Northeast: Small Towns and Big Dreams. By Ariel Picton Kobayashi, with foreword by former U.S. Ski Jumping Head Coach Larry Stone. Published by the History Press, Charleston, South Carolina, 2021. Softcover, 173 pages with illustrations, $21.99. Hardcover, $29.69. Winner, 2023 ISHA Skade Award.

Essays from the 2020 Neuchâtel Symposium

Surmonter les frontières à ski/Grenzen überwinden mit Ski (Overcoming Borders on Skis) is a worthy and timely addition to the ski history library. Thomas Busset and Peter Engel have done an admirable job editing this collection of 14 essays, the fruit of an international symposium held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in February 2020. The collection also represents a partial response to a study by the Swiss Federal Office of Sport that stressed the positive influence of skiing on the economy and region. Six of the essays are written in French, six in German and two in English.

The 14 authors—Susan Barton, David Bäuerle, Andreas Brugger, Thomas Busset, Sébastien Cala, Peter Engel, Steve Hagimont, Annette R. Hofmann, Christian Koller, Rudolf Müllner, Constance N. Pomp, Sébastien Stumpp, Christof Thöny and Laurent Tissot—address different aspects of the phenomenon of skiing (Busset and Engel’s paper looks at growth limits of the “flagship Alpine sport”), acknowledging that as an activity for the wealthy, skiing is challenged by slowing participation and environmental concerns.

Thöny (a member of ISHA’s board of directors) examines the early development of ski culture around Germany’s Lake Constance. Hofmann’s piece, “Collective Memory of Skiing and its Lieux de Mémoire,” looks at the sport through places, museums, films, ski pioneers, athletes, forgetfulness (memory), lost ski areas and forgotten women of the sport. She suggests we must re-examine places and groups that were formerly neglected. — Bob Soden 

Surmonter les frontières à ski/Grenzen überwinden mit Ski, a compilation of essays, edited by Thomas Busset and Peter Engel. Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Centre International d’Etude du Sport (https://shop.cies.ch/int/en/19-all-publications), 2021. 242 pages, softcover. 33€, Winner, 2022