Skiing History Week Back on Track for December in Sun Valley

Skiing History Week, canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been rescheduled for December 9–13, 2020, in Sun Valley, in partnership with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.

Please join us at the 28th Annual ISHA Awards banquet, to be held December 10, 2020, at the Sun Valley Inn in Sun Valley, Idaho.

The event, originally set for March 28 but rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is part of Skiing History Week, December 9 to 13, held in partnership with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. ISHA’s tentative schedule of events is as follows (times are subject to change):

Wednesday, December 9
• Welcome reception (5 pm) Sun Valley Inn
• John Fry Memorial Lecture (6 to 7:30 pm) Sun Valley Inn

Thursday, December 10
• Retro ski day on the hill (9 am) Warm Springs
• Luncheon (noon) Roundhouse
• ISHA cocktail party (5 pm) Sun Valley Inn
• ISHA Awards Banquet (6:30 to 9 pm) Sun Valley Inn

Friday, December 11
• Historians’ Colloquium (7 am) By invitation, Sun Valley Inn

Saturday, December 12
• Hall of Fame Induction (Begins at 4:30 pm) Sun Valley Inn

Discounted lodging is available at the Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley Inn and at the Limelight Hotel in Ketchum. If you booked lodging for the March event, you may already have pushed your reservations back to December, or cancelled. If you cancelled your March reservations and wish to rebook for December, please call Sun Valley Lodging at 800-786-8259 or Limelight Reservations at 855-441-2250.

If you purchased a ticket for the March ISHA Awards Banquet and did not cancel, your ticket is valid for the December 10 banquet. If you do not hold a ticket and wish to book, please find information and book online at skiinghistory.org/events. At this link, you can also download a PDF of the awards booklet that features this year’s winners.

We all have been looking forward to gathering in Sun Valley and sharing our favorite winter pastime on their splendid ski slopes and in our social gatherings, and celebrating skiing’s history along with the authors, filmmakers, website creators and academics who are the winners of this year’s ISHA Awards. We intend to continue that tradition in both Sun Valley and Aspen/Snowmass in April 2021. We sincerely hope you will join us at both.

Thank you for your continued support of ISHA and its global mission—to preserve and advance the knowledge of ski history and to increase public awareness of the sport’s heritage. We look forward to seeing you as we launch the 2020–2021 season! —Seth Masia

ISHA Creates COVID-19 Archive

These are historic times for the ski industry and the world. During the most serious health crisis in our lifetimes, ski/snowboard gear and apparel companies, as well as resorts, are joining the battle against COVID-19. Companies are pivoting to create or source hundreds of thousands of surgical masks, resorts have donated food to furloughed employees, and a nonprofit called Goggles for Docs has provided 45,000 donated goggles to frontline health workers (gogglesfordocs.com).

In early May, the 30-year-old International Skiing History Association (ISHA), which has tracked the history of the sport dating back to 10,000-12,000 BCE, announced its plan to create a COVID-19 archive—a permanent repository that will document the industry’s response to the novel coronavirus around the world.

“Just as ISHA has archived the impact of wars, the Olympic movement, cultural shifts and technological change on the sport, we’re asking the ski industry, ISHA members, and consumers alike to share with us their stories of COVID-related events related to snow-sports,” says ISHA president Seth Masia.

Of particular interest are digital examples of COVID-related emails, advertisements, and photos of base lodge signage, ski retailer notices and masks. “These will become part of skiing’s largest online archive,” says Masia. He’s describing the ISHA website (skiinghistory.org), a free public resource that already contains thousands of historic documents, articles, videos, timelines, bibliographies and magazine indexes.

Material is being collected by ISHA business and events manager Kathe Dillmann and should be sent to kathe@skiinghistory.org. In a future issue, Skiing History plans to report on the impact of COVID on the sport. —Jeff Blumenfeld

ISHA Member Profile: Bob Soden

Bob Soden, who steps into John Fry’s shoes as a member of the ISHA Awards Committee, has been writing for Skiing History magazine (then Skiing Heritage) since 2002. He was elected to ISHA’s Board of Directors in 2014, and has long served as chair of the Board’s Ski Museum Outreach committee.

Bob grew up in Montreal, where he attended both French- and English-speaking elementary schools and skied a few times on local hills. When he was 13, his parents bought a house at Jay Peak, Vermont, and enrolled their four kids in a full-immersion ski school week. Bob loved it, and skied regularly with assistant ski school director George Stepanek, who lived in the Sodens’ caretaker apartment. In 1963, at age 15, Bob earned his teaching certificate and taught both part- and full-time in Walter Foeger’s Natur Teknik ski school for the next six winters.

Despite his passion for ski instruction, Bob managed to graduate from Marymount High School in 1965, serving as editor of the yearbook for three years. While studying structural engineering at Loyola College, and working part time as a draftsman, in 1974 he married Corinne Vaughan. They had four children: Jenny, Kit, Nicholas and Emily. Bob taught them all to ski at Jay, and three of the kids became instructors variously in Quebec, Lake Louise and Whistler.

After a successful career in the civil engineering field, Bob moved into mechanical engineering, with its many opportunities for field work. He became project manager on large industrial processing installations.

In 1997, Bob was in Montgomery, Vermont, near Jay Peak, trying to save an old schoolhouse from demolition. That project failed and the school came down. Bob realized that many in the Jay Peak area had little memory of the mountain’s history, so he sat down to research and write a history of Walter Foeger and the resort. Skiing Heritage editor Mort Lund asked him to expand the essay, and published it as the cover story in the June 2002 issue. A version appeared in the Collected Papers of the 2002 International Skiing History Congress. Bob has been writing for us ever since, and is working separately on his book-length oeuvre: Jay Peak—Once and Future. To support the writing projects, he has acquired a research library of about 400 books on skiing.

“It’s important to remember where we come from,” Bob said. “If you really want to understand the way we ski today, you need to see how our techniques and equipment evolved. Look back at the old photos, of the people who were the best skiers of their eras. We tend to assume that everything interesting was invented within the span of our own memories, but women competed in ski jumping in the 1910s, the ice skater Fritz Reuel invented the Reuel Christie on skis in the 1920s, and skiers did tricks on twin-tipped goon skis in the 1930s. We need to remember our own origins.” —Seth Masia

New Online Edition of Skiing History is Proving Popular

New format is more easily readable, text searchable and translatable

Beginning with the January-February 2020 issue, Skiing History publishes its online edition in web-page format. The new pages are easier to read than the original flip-page replica edition. Notably, the new format is text-searchable and can be read, like the rest of the skiinghistory.org website, in English, French, German, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish or Japanese. Like the older version, it’s accessible only to current members of ISHA.

The new format is already proving a success, with roughly three times the readership of the old flip-page format. When you receive e-mail notice that a new issue of Skiing History has been mailed, you’ll see a link to the new online magazine format. Or, on the skiinghistory.org home page, simply find the prominent box labeled “Current Skiing History Magazine.” At the bottom of that box, click on the link “Click Here to Read the Latest Online Magazine.”

Another way to find the new online magazine is to go to skiinghistory.org/skiing-history-magazine. You can reach that page from the skiinghistory.org home page: Just click on the tab “Skiing History Magazine” at the top of the page.

Once you’ve found the skiing-history-magazine menu, the current issue is prominent at the top of the screen. Recent issues can be found as links in the right-side navigation column. Just scroll down until you see:

SKIING HISTORY MAGAZINE
Volume 32 Number 2 March-April 2020
Volume 32 Number 1 January-February 2020

Then click on the issue you want to read.
There is a third way to find the digital magazine content. Go to the home page and scroll down to the menu titled “Explore Ski History.” Click on “Past Skiing History Issues.” That will bring you to skiinghistory.org/explore/issues with a list of online issues. For each recent issue, the gray link-bar goes to the new format online magazine, and the gold “digital flip-book” link goes to the older replica edition. If you use back issues of the magazine frequently, it’s a good idea to bookmark skiinghistory.org/explore/issues.

Questions? Feel free to email me (seth@skiinghistory.org). —Seth Masia 

Where’s My Magazine? Join Our E-Mail List and Get Alerts!

Every time we ship an issue of Skiing History to press, we send an e-mail notification to all ISHA members, letting you know a new magazine is on the way. But we only have valid e-mail addresses for a fraction of our members. To make sure you get these e-newsletters and other ISHA updates in your inbox, go to our homepage (skiinghistory.org) and scroll down until you see “Sign Up For Our Newsletter.”

Skiing History: Send it to a Friend!

ISHA needs more members, and you can help!

As an ISHA member, you certainly know other passionate skiers who would enjoy Skiing History magazine.

We’d like to send each of your skier friends a free copy of the magazine. We’ve learned over the years that when people read the actual paper magazine, there’s a good chance they’ll join our ranks.

To send a copy of the magazine to a friend, at no cost to you, just fill out the simple online form at our website: skiinghistory.org/send-friend-trial-membership#.

We’ll mail out the latest issue of magazine with a note that the recipient has you to thank for the gift. Thanks for your help! As a nonprofit, ISHA relies on membership dues and donations to share the history of our sport with the world.