The Last Chairlift

5. BUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN ASPEN?

My mother must have known the seventeen-year-old girl who won the Women’s National Slalom Championship on Aspen Mountain in March 1941. Young as she was, Marilyn Shaw was no newcomer; Stowe’s “Snow Baby,” as she was called, Marilyn Shaw was the youngest downhill skier who ever made the U.S. Women’s Olympic Team. It wasn’t Marilyn’s fault that the 1940 Olympics were canceled because of the war in Europe. Yet my mom, who surely would have skied at Stowe with Marilyn Shaw, was not on a first-name basis with Marilyn—“the Shaw kid,” was how my mother referred to her, when she mentioned Marilyn at all, which was rarely.

They were both Vermont skiers; they had to have known each other. And there was more than the Mount Mansfield connection. According to my mom, they’d both been coached by Sepp Ruschp—an Austrian ski instructor. My mother adored Sepp Ruschp. “He took his exam at St. Christoph, under Hannes Schneider,” she told me.

“What exam?” I asked her.

“The official Austrian state-certified whatchamacallit, sweetie—his ski-instructor exam!” she exclaimed.

How could I forget the Hannes Schneider–Sepp Ruschp connection? The stem christie, the downhill turn that was the signature of the Arlberg technique—the turn that would replace the telemark turn. I can remember my mother saying, wistfully, how the stem christie itself would be replaced; gradually, it was. By the late 1960s, the parallel turn was more popular. I remember my mom telling me that my old-fashioned stem christie made me look like I was barely better than a snowplower. At the time, my turns were barely better than snowplow turns.

What would really kill the stem christie were the parabolic skis of the late 1990s—or so my mother always said. “Those new skis made parallel turns easy,” I remember my mom telling me. “Even for you, sweetie,” she added, squeezing my hand.

It was not lost on me that the Austrian Hannes Schneider came to Cranmore Mountain in North Conway, New Hampshire, in 1939. Sepp Ruschp, who had learned from Schneider, came to Mount Mansfield in Stowe, Vermont, in 1936. And one of Schneider’s former students, Toni Matt—the Austrian who schussed the headwall of Tuckerman Ravine (the glacial cirque on the southeast face of Mount Washington, New Hampshire) at an estimated top speed of 85 miles per hour—won both the combined and the downhill events on Aspen Mountain in 1941. Toni Matt had moved to the U.S. from Austria in 1938.

Yet my mom made little mention of Toni Matt that championship weekend in Aspen. Instead, I heard all about the “crude boat-tow ski lift”; my mother said the lift took you only a quarter of the way up. “You had to sidestep the rest of the way,” she said; she wasn’t complaining. Nor did she gripe about the fact that the participants helped to prepare the course. “Everyone pitched in,” was how my mom put it.

I heard so much about Jerome B. Wheeler, I was at first confused; I thought he was one of the skiers in competition. “Poor Jerome,” my mother usually prefaced what she said about him. From what I’d heard her say about Roch Run, the first ski trail at Aspen—a challenging run, named for the Swiss mountaineer and avalanche expert André Roch—I assumed poor Jerome was a skier who’d fallen and been badly injured on Roch Run.

But my mother meant “the Macy’s man,” as she also called Jerome B. Wheeler—she meant the actual president of Macy’s, the New York department store. Jerome B. Wheeler was a New Yorker who came to Aspen in the 1880s. Wheeler invested in the silver mines; he completed the first smelter. There was a railroad construction race, between the Colorado Midland and the Denver & Rio Grande—to see which line could beat the other to Aspen, across the Continental Divide. Wheeler put $100,000 into the Colorado Midland. And when prosperity came—when Aspen was a boom town—Jerome B. Wheeler paid for an opera house and the Hotel Jerome.

You would have thought my mom knew Jerome B. Wheeler, to hear how she talked about him. She was definitely on a first-name basis with him. “He was a Civil War hero, you know,” she told me. “Jerome rode with Sheridan. Poor Jerome was a colonel, but they busted him to major because he disobeyed some stupid orders!”

“What orders?” I asked her, wringing my hands.

“I have no idea—stupid ones!” my mother declared. “Poor Jerome crossed Confederate lines. He rescued a Union regiment—they were starving! Don’t wring your hands, Adam—they’re small enough already.”

“Poor Jerome,” was all I could say.

There were a few glory years for the Jerome, but the silver boom would go bust; upon the demonetization of silver and the crash of 1893, the mines shut down. Wheeler’s bank was forced to close. In 1901, Jerome B. Wheeler declared bankruptcy; he lost the Jerome for back taxes in 1909. The Wheeler Opera House caught fire in 1912. Poor Jerome died in 1918.

A former traveling salesman who’d been born in Syria became the bartender at the Jerome—this was in the “quiet years” of the grand hotel’s decline. Mansor Elisha, the Syrian American bartender, bought the Jerome for back taxes in 1911.

“It’s so sad!” my mom would exclaim—she meant poor Jerome and the fate of the hotel. “It’s become a shabby boardinghouse, but you can see what a swell hotel it was!” She declared that the Syrian family who took over the Jerome was a family of saints; she said the Elishas always welcomed the townspeople. “André Roch himself stayed five whole weeks at the Jerome,” my mother told me. She believed this proved her point: if the famous André Roch had stayed five whole weeks, the Hotel Jerome must have been swell.

During World War II, when the ski troops of the Tenth Mountain Division came to Aspen on cross-country maneuvers, the skiing soldiers slept on the floors of the Jerome. I learned, long after the fact, that many of Stowe’s male skiers joined the Tenth Mountain Division. Weren’t these men my mother would have seen on the slopes of Mount Mansfield? Maybe some of them were among that bunch of Vermonters she’d hitched a ride with, on her way to Aspen from Denver in 1941. She didn’t say.

Toni Matt was a Tenth Mountain Division man. A lieutenant in World War II, he was posted to the Aleutian Islands. Toni Matt wasn’t married in 1941, when he won two championships in Aspen. Matt was only a few years older than my mom—at the time, he would have been twenty-one or twenty-two.

I’ve seen photographs of Toni Matt; he looks a little like me. Actually, I think I look a lot more like Toni Matt than I do Alan Ladd, but my mother could not be persuaded of this.

“In the first place, Toni Matt has dark hair,” I pointed out to my mom, “and his face is rounder than Alan Ladd’s—more like mine. Furthermore, Toni Matt’s nose isn’t as sharp as Alan Ladd’s, and his eyebrows aren’t as thick—they’re more like mine.”

“Toni Matt was never handsome, not like Alan Ladd—not to me,” my mother added, with a dismissive shrug. “Not like you’re handsome, sweetie,” she told me.

Once, when I argued with my mom about Toni Matt, she just took my hand and squeezed it. Then she said—with each word, her eyes never left mine—“If you were Toni Matt’s son, you would love to ski. Toni schussed the headwall of Tuckerman Ravine,” she reminded me. She even knew Toni’s time for the four-mile race, from the top to the bottom of the ravine. “Six minutes, twenty-nine and two-tenths of a second,” my mom whispered to me; her eyes were locked on mine. “If Toni Matt were your father, no one could have kept you off skis. Leave your little hands alone, sweetie.”

But my mom must have been on a first-name basis with someone that weekend of March 8 and 9. She never varied from saying I was born ten days late—on December 18 of that year. You do the math. That weekend when Marilyn Shaw won the Women’s National Slalom Championship in Aspen, someone got my mother pregnant. Poor Jerome didn’t knock her up. That March weekend in 1941, Jerome B. Wheeler was already a ghost.