SKIING HERITAGE: A Ski History Quarterly
	From Spring/Summer 1996 —Volume 8 number 2
	Skiing Down Those Golden Years With John Jay The First Man to Show His Ski Lecture Films, Coast to Coast, Year After Year
	by Morten Lund
	BEGINNING in 1940 and for the next thirty years—those decades which could be called The Golden Age of American Skiing—the nation’s skiers by the tens of thousands enacted an annual tribal ritual, "going to see John Jay." Seeing John Jay and his film was an occasion for a joyful if determined re-dedication to a sport rougher and more demanding for the average skier than the sport today, lacking—as it did—some of the amenities such as insulated parkas, release bindings, fiberglass skis, aluminum poles and plastic boots. And, of course, there was no grooming or snowmaking. The Eastern ski tribe could confidently expect much ice underfoot while the Western contingent could expect much mashed potatoes around the ankles. All skiers could anticipate as a matter of routine deep-frozen extremities, broken skis, splintered poles, flabby boots and the wearing of a plaster cast by spring—a one-inch sterling silver bone, shiny emblem of membership in the Broken Bone Club, was displayed on thousands of lapels and collars. Ski lifts were enough to anger a saint. The tow offered a minimum sixty seconds of painful grappling with writhing cordage—like holding a python trying to escape. As for the T-bar, well, any T-bar worth its salt ejected a passenger sideways into the snow every few minutes. The better-behaved chairlift, the luxury "upski" of the day, normally stopped short several times per ride and could be handily outpaced by any self-respecting turtle. The persistence of American skiers in that day fell short of the miraculous, just. The function of the annual John Jay film was to bolster the faint and confirm the brave, raising fond memories of precious moments during the season past when the skis were actually running down the hill. Why was this, then, a Golden Age? For one thing, expectations were being exceeded. Each year the sport made substantial and heartening gains: a score of new chairlifts, and at least one bonafide equipment breakthrough. Resorts sprang up like exploding popcorn and travel to exotic resorts became, increasingly, bargains. The sport was riding the wave. It was ahead of the curve. And John Jay every year brought the good news, presenting viewers with a spectacle of progress. Of course that was a goodly span backward in the time machine. Zip it forward to last December: see John Jay celebrate his 80th birthday with friends at home in the Whispering Palms enclave in Rancho Santa Fe, California (just north of San Diego). He and his wife Mary Margaret are midway through a ten-thousand-mile lecture tour on which Jay narrates the films live as always in the delicately understated Jay irony familiar to generations of skiers. Not bad for eighty. The Jay journey through the halls of time—have camera, will ski—began in earnest just fifty-six years ago with the showing of his 1940 Ski the Americas, North and South, a breakthrough film professionally edited in a time of amateur effort. Its narration was entertaining. Its debut launched the ski film-making profession in America. By its very success, it propelled Jay into the status of the first full-time American ski film maker. The Lecture Film in the 1940s Jay’s competition in the beginning included Victor Coty of Stowe, Vermont, Frank Howard of San Rafael, California, Sverre Engen of Seattle and Sidney Shurcliff of Boston—worthy amateurs all, but Jay alone earned a livelihood from film making and lecturing. Ski the Americas, North and South was the first draft of the adventure-travel ski film format, a format that has endured ever since, a format that takes the viewers to interesting and exotic skiing in the company of a very knowledgeable, decidedly witty fellow—the film maker himself. Warren Miller, current colossus of ski lecture film (having just narrated his 36th annual epic) says straightforwardly that John Jay "…virtually invented the ski film in its modern form." Those who followed in Jay’s tracks, besides Miller, were notably Hans Gmoser, Jim Farnsworth, Frank Scofield, Luggi Foeger, Sverre Engen, Hans Gmoser, Hans Thorner, Dick Barrymore, Greg Stump and Curt Miller—all of them paying the tribute of emulation. Today’s unknown with a ski flick brewing on the makeshift editing table may not have heard of John Jay. Nevertheless, almost certainly his film will give off distinct John Jay echoes. Jay’s career was phenomenal, in part, because by the time he showed his first film, Jay was already a seasoned film maker. And he had formidable intellectual equipment. In joining a decidedly fringe profession, Jay was going dead against the tide of a very high standard set by his ancestors, descended from five straight generations of distinguished businessmen and statesmen. And he was well along that road himself, having compiled an outstanding scholastic record at Williams College and before that at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. The First Ski Experiences But that was before Jay became mildly curious about an obscure winter pastime pursued by a friend and classmate, John McLane. It was called skiing. In the winter of 1932, when Jay was a lean, muscular, 16-year-old at prestigious St. Paul’s, an Eastern prep school, skiing came into his life and initiated what at first seemed only a small departure. It began one moonlit night when Jay persuaded McLane to sneak out with him to the St. Paul’s School golf course to try skiing. His schedule was so busy that this was his first opportunity. So it was there, in the flooding pale silvery light, that Jay donned skis on a gentle rise and succeeded in making his first snowplow turn. He was hooked. The timing was propitious. The year 1932 was a watershed year in alpine skiing. Skiing was an unhatched chick pecking at its shell. The first rope tow in the Western Hemisphere had been erected that very season—the winter of 1933—at Shawbridge in the Canadian Laurentians. Rope technology crossed the border the next winter and spread like crabgrass. Four years later, the first chairlift came into being. After that, the first T-bar and the first cable car arrived on U.S. snow. Jay’s initial skiing was in the archaic climb-and-run mode. As Jay recalls, "We used to herringbone up Mt. Kearsage—a four or five mile hike—and then ski back down. The challenge was to avoid killing myself." But a downside developed as Jay failed to rally his family’s sympathy for his new passion—on the one side was John Jay, Jr., an undergraduate and decidedly avid skier and, on the other, the John Jay, Sr. family ensconced in a spacious townhouse on 73rd between Lexington and Park, on New York’s upper East Side. Jay, Sr. was Chairman of the Board of Globe and Rutgers Fire Insurance, had been president of Pierce Arrow Motor Company in Detroit and was known for his ability to hold forth on any subject in an entertaining ironic tone which made him a sought-after speaker (the manner soon to be adopted by John Jr. as the tone of his narration). In the fall of 1934, Jay, Jr. entered Williams College at Williamstown in the Berkshires of northern Massachusetts and found friends talking about the East’s first rope tow, installed the previous winter at Woodstock, Vermont—within easy driving distance. Jay’s first chance to go to Woodstock, Jay did, his skis now sporting steel—the recently invented Lettner Edge. "Seeing the Wood-stock rope tow on Gilbert’s Hill for the first time," recalls Jay, "was like watching Chuck Yeager break the sound barrier. There was a new world out there. We went up and down that 500-foot hill all day." Jay, a master at handling many threads, managed a half dozen weekends between freshman hockey practice, game trips and extracurricular writing for campus publications, staying at "Ma" Hemenway’s Woodstock farmhouse where three dollars bought two hot meals a day and a down blanket on the bed; he loved every minute of his ski weekends. The First Ski Filming by Jay But Jay, Sr. was becoming distinctly uneasy. The New York Times’ ski coverage centered on the weekend jump meets at Bear Mt. State Park just north of the city. Jay, Sr.’s impression was that skiing consisted essentially of launching off a high trestle down a very steep hill—the whole thing looked positively dangerous. But Jay, the consummate persuader, won his father’s permission to prove that skiing was not really jumping and promised to provide proof positive by borrowing the family 16-mm camera—a sturdy spring-driven Bell and Howell with a chrome butterfly wind-up handle. In no time, Jay shot several fifty-foot reels of skiing on Gilbert’s Hill and planned to shoot farther afield during college spring break—at St. Sauveur in Quebec’s Laurentians. Jay’s parents again objected. Jay should be occupying spring break with mainstream doings, like attending East Side debutante balls where many eligible, socially acceptable young ladies would be in attendance, a kind who did not run around in the winter wearing lumpy boots and baggy pants doing god-knows-what off in remote mountain villages. But Jay begged off, promising to entertain the whole family, soon, with titillating scenes from exotic St. Sauveur. St. Sauveur was next to the very place the rope tow had first been installed in the Americas. (It was a dead heat with a rope tow driven by a motorcycle engine erected outside Zurich.) St. Sauveur scenes had a substantial part in Jay’s first film effort, finished that spring—a ski flick! He projected it in the Jay family parlor, before gathered friends and family, his narration accompanied by The Skater’s Waltz from the Jays’ console Victrola. The family was suitably impressed. Jay kept on shooting as he skied because he found he could trade showings of his latest footage for room and board at places such as The Eastern Slopes Inn near Mt. Cranmore in North Conway, New Hampshire. A high point of Jay’s young film career came at The Eastern Slopes Inn when Lowell Thomas dropped by—the world’s most renowned radio newscaster, a famous documentary film maker, and a dedicated skier. Thomas praised Jay’s show—to give the Jay ego a giant boost. In due course, Jay filmed both the Williams Winter Carnival and the Dartmouth Winter Carnival: Jay was already trying to find ways of making the scenes more interesting. His Dartmouth sequence opened with a shot of his girlfriend Lois Goodnow (from Norfolk, Connecticut) gazing at a poster of the carnival—it showed desire to do more than turn out home movies. In his sophomore year, Jay climbed Mt. Washington early in the spring of 1936 to shoot the Harvard-Dartmouth slalom under the Headwall of Tuckerman Ravine. "The Ravine was hot," recalls Jay, of that particular day. "The Headwall focused the sun’s rays like a parabolic mirror. We took off sweaters and shirts. And slathered on olive oil that we used for lotion in those days so that we smelled like tossed green salad." He managed to pan fast enough to frame Ted Hunter and other members of the Dartmouth Ski Team flashing by fifty feet away. By the time the next ski season rolled around, Jay had read about the new celebrity-filled resort just opened at Sun Valley out in Idaho and its newfangled "chairlift." The closest he came to celebrities was filming the Madison Square Garden Winter Sports Show in December, 1936. There his camera caught Hannes Schneider, the world’s most influential ski school director, inventor of the Arlberg System, skiing with his instructors now teaching in America—Otto Lang and Benno Rybizka—on the Garden’s ice-chip-laden indoor ramp: an act direct from St. Anton, Austria, world capital of skiing. But the real revelation was the ski film at the Garden: White Ecstasy, produced by German film maker Arnold Fanck: in it Hannes Schneider played opposite German actress Leni Riefenstahl in an alpine comedy plot, a skiing version of children’s "fox chase." White Ecstasy had much slapstick clowning and much straight-out great skiing by Schneider’s St. Anton instructors, the world’s finest group of skiers, veritable Lipizzaners of the sport. Impact of the First Ski Films In historical context, shooting on location was still new. Most films had been shot strictly inside a studio. Location filming had been pioneered by Lowell Thomas in World War I for his Lawrence of Arabia (which made Thomas a millionaire while still in his 20s). In the 1920s, Arnold Fanck carried location filming into skiing, the first European to bring a 35-mm movie camera into the mountains. Fanck shot at least a half dozen films in the 1920s starring Hannes Schneider; by the time White Ecstasy had been released in 1930, the films had made Schneider and Fanck famous the world over. The message to Jay: ski film making was respectable work, at least in Europe. In 1938, during Jay’s senior year, he took on what turned out to be an important extracurricular activity, for the Williams College News Bureau, writing up Williams sports. Some of Jay’s stories appeared in the New York Times, giving Jay the first taste of successful journalism. Graduating that spring magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in English and varsity letters in hockey, football and crew, Jay decided to go with journalism. He applied to Time Inc. in New York for a job as a writer. Jay’s father was perplexed. He was about to become president of Fifth Avenue Bank, and had assumed his only son, the great-great-great-grandson of the John Jay who had been George Washington’s first secretary of state and then the nation’s first Chief Justice would choose to have a solid career. Like law. Not journalism. But fifth-direct-male-descendent Jay (who closely resembles his illustrious ancestor) opted to take the only writing job open at Time Inc. at the moment, crafting scripts for The March of Time. The March of Time was a pioneer production company putting out short news films for movie theaters around the nation. Its prestige was considerable, and this was manifest in the oratorical tone of March of Time commentator Westbrook Van Vorhees resounding at the sign-off of each film, "Time…marches on!" As time marched on, Jay absorbed a valuable education in the art of the documentary, staying up all night rewriting scripts to fit the cutting and re-cutting ordered by Louis de Rochemont, America’s leading documentary film maker. Early on, Jay was assigned to the script for a segment on the Nazi German troops’ march into Austria in 1938—the Anschluss. As part of that, the Nazis arrested Hannes Schneider, sending a dozen disaffected Austrian ski teachers to asylum in the U.S. This raised instructor expertise considerably coast-to-coast—Schneider himself arrived in the U.S. to direct the ski school at Mt. Cranmore in New Hampshire in January, 1939. Early in the fall of 1938, Jay saw his first ski lecture film, Sidney Shurcliff’s Ski America First, at the New York Museum of Natural History. Shurcliff was a Boston landscape architect whose film featured well-known skiers on New England hills— interesting but, Jay thought, Shurcliff gave a really dull narration. He concluded he could have easily devised a better tone. Jay had no firm conviction that ski film was going to be his world, but by now was disenchanted with corporate film making—the grind of writing against a monthly deadline hardly gave him time to ski. He had become thoroughly nostalgic for the leisure of the academic life. Given the blessing of the Williams faculty, he applied for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College at Oxford University, England. The Rhodes Scholarship came through in December 1938: Jay’s boss at Time Inc. said, in effect: congratulations, you’re fired. That left Jay nine months before his boat would depart for Oxford. He skied a lot that winter and filmed, among other things, America’s first cable car, installed the previous winter at Cannon Mt., New Hampshire with the man who put in Cannon’s trails—Sel Hannah. Filming the Rockies in 1939 Spring 1939 approached: Jay thought of a way to hook onto some spring skiing. He walked in cold to the Canadian Pacific Railroad offices in New York and talked its public relations department into viewing some of his footage. Result: he was offered $500 plus expenses to film and produce a documentary on the Canadian Rocky Mountain powder skiing come April. Jay spent six wonderful weeks at Skoki Lodge, a 12-mile slog over the snow from Lake Louise railroad station. Skoki was heaven: the wild sweep of serrated peaks, untracked powder—exotic then. Skiing for the film were Vera Freudenfeld from Vienna (she had fled the Nazis) and Victor Kutschera, the Skoki guide. Every morning, Jay and his skiers trudged up the snowfields—sealskins and sweat to the top, but the powder was terrific. Jay worked on his camera technique: shooting while skiing behind his subjects, one eye glued to the viewfinder and the other looking out for rocks and stumps; filming while skiing backward and learning to stop on the spot if his subject’s expression turned to alarm. These now ordinary modes of filming were first used by Jay. He shot a grand total of 500 feet, and turned that into a 400-foot, twelve-minute Skis over Skoki, filled with skiers sweeping through powder panoramas—climaxing in a ski chase out of White Ecstasy. Jay had edited it in the quick-cut Louis de Rochemont style; it became one of six films at the 11th Annual International Show of Amateur Motion Pictures in New York honored by a "Little Oscar." This was heady stuff for a young man on his first film. Still six months to go before Oxford. Filming Skiing in South America in 1939 Jay then succeeded in connecting to the only lift skiing still available this time of year in the Western world, persuading Panagra Airlines and Grace Lines to put him on a Chile-bound freighter to immortalize the state-of-the-art rope tows of South America’s only winter resort, Farellones, two hours into the Andes from Santiago. The Andes scenics were equal to the Rockies. Farellones had a scattering of picturesque stone refugios offering spartan accommodations and meals. The ski school there was run by Luggi Foeger, Hannes Schneider’s top lieutenant who’d fled the Nazis. Foeger’s ten-man school had plenty to handle teaching naive Santiago pupils—many of them never having walked an inch outdoors sans either patent leather wing tips or high heels: it gave Jay his first chance to film impromptu comedy and he homed in on it. Catching skiers in a comic condition became a Jay specialty. And now it was September, 1939. Jay was homeward bound on the freighter Santa Clara with the exposed footage in his suitcases when he received an unwelcome cable from his father. England and France had just gone to war with Germany. World War II was on. Oxford had immediately shelved its Rhodes Scholarships for the duration, leaving Jay without visible profession. But then Williams College filled the gap with a job combining English teaching with making a promotional film. Jay’s Sons of Eph—Ephraim Williams had founded Williams with a bequest in 1793—is still shown at Williams as a period piece. The job gave him time to ski. Early in the winter of 1940, Jay stopped by North Conway to pay respects to Hannes Schneider at Mt. Cranmore and to ski its two-stage Skimobile, a tramway with little wheels running on planks. The upper stage had just been added that winter at Schneider’s insistence, his first question on disembarking at the North Conway station had been, "And where are the mountains?" At Woodstock that winter, Jay and fifteen friends formed "the Otto Club" whose members added the honorific "Otto" in front of their names. Serge Gagarin, exiled Russian nobility and onetime Yale ski team member, had a typical initiation: he was first told to ski through a moving tunnel formed by the legs of ten Ottos snowplowing down the hill in a curving rhumba line—and he did it. Then Gagarin was required to ride the Woodstock rope down Gilbert Hill. And he did that. But a suggestion he ride the rope backward up the hill was squelched by President Otto John Jay, who stepped in to congratulate Otto Serge Gagarin on his election. This sort of foolery was a way of ignoring a real world fast becoming grim. The United States had instituted its first peacetime draft in history and the need for war-readiness was confirmed by the Nazi German invasion of neutral Norway and Denmark in May, 1940. Jay’s number in the draft was due to come up the following spring. But there was something Jay wanted to do first. Jay’s First Lecture Film, 1940 By mid-summer, he had put together his epic Ski the Americas, North and South. He booked it into East Coast clubs and halls, mostly through a well-written, persuasive advertising mailer proclaiming the film "Tops in Two Hemispheres—from Banff to Buenos Aires" and quoted Lowell Thomas’ endorsement: "I got more laughs from your running commentary than from any theatrical production in New York this year." The success of Jay’s first film owed a lot to the primitive state of transportation in the 1940s. Transcontinental and international voyages were by railroad and steamship—too slow, or too expensive to fit handily into most people’s disposable time or income. (The vastly more convenient European prop-plane passenger service was ten years away.) The majority of skiers spent weekends at rope tows within a fifty-mile radius of home and perhaps took a skiing vacation at a chairlift resort as far away as two hundred miles. By offering to show the outer limits of ski adventure, Jay lined up more than fifty lecture dates for fall 1940 and winter 1941. During the tour, his lectures packed in 50,000 viewers and enlarged their traditional parochial conception of the sport as a neighborhood pastime. Ski the Americas, North and South was utterly convincing on the joy of combining skiing with seeing the world. The film began with Dick Durrance, America’s first international racing star, schussing Suicide Six, then came a cameo appearance by Sig Buchmayr of the pioneer Arlberg ski school at Peckett’s Inn, Sugar Hill, New Hampshire; and then a virtual ride up the nearby pioneer cable car at Cannon Mountain with Sel Hannah. Next, the film was off to Canada for the joys of Quebec snow at St. Sauveur; then back to New Hampshire for spring skiing in Tuckerman Ravine; then to Canada again for even later spring skiing with a ski chase through the remote Rockies; finally—who had ever heard of it?—summer skiing in South America! Boston landscaper Sidney Shurcliff was showing Ski America Third and Dr. Quackenbush Skis the Headwall but John Jay had already passed the competition. His jaunty, droll, fast-paced narration coupled with the fascination of far-flung and intercontinental travel essentially turned 50,000 viewers into ski flick junkies—and sent wannabe skiers flocking to the department stores in search of skis. Jay’s film had a multiplier effect as friends told friends. Very likely most of the roughly one million skiers residing within the U.S. heard about the film within days. Unfortunately, times were not auspicious for either the sport or filming it. President Franklin Roosevelt had just been elected to an unprecedented third term in November, 1940 and would soon set out to meet British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the Atlantic to transfer ships and arms to Great Britain as the bulwark against the Nazis. Naturally, Jay jumped at the chance for a last-ditch ski tour in the form of an invitation to an all-expenses- paid trip around the U.S in the winter of 1941, shepherding the national Chilean ski team during the team’s coast-to-coast goodwill tour of the United States. A Grand Survey of American Skiing, 1940 This grand survey of American resorts began at Mt. Cranmore, then went to Dartmouth for the Winter Carnival, then to Suicide Six in Woodstock, then Pico Peak in Rutland, Vermont; next, to Cannon Mountain in Franconia, New Hampshire, then Mt. Mansfield at Stowe, Vermont, where the East’s longest chair had just been erected (in the intense cold, the Chileans wore their ponchos in addition to the chairlift blanket), then Lake Placid in New York and finally Mt. Tom in Massachusetts. Then it was west to Winter Park, Colorado, staying at the Arlberg Club so that their guide, 1936 Olympic team member Don Fraser, could take them to the top of Mary Jane trail via the club "lift"—an hour-and-a-half ride in a sledge behind a tractor. After that, it was into Colorado’s back range at Aspen where—in the absence of a chairlift that was still six years in the future—the Chileans were driven up Aspen Mountain on a work truck to the Midnight Mine. From there, a mine tractor took them the rest of the way to the top, and they skied down to the start of Roch Run and survived the Corkscrew to reach the bottom where the derelict mining town of Aspen lay all around them, with empty lots going for back taxes. Then it was off to Alta, Utah, where skiing was curtailed by a storm: ski school director Dick Durrance entertained them by setting them a steep slalom in the blizzard. Skiing in California and the Northwest, 1941 Next, the chairlift at Disney Mountain in Sugar Bowl, Norden, California, where Hannes Schroll (who had come from Salzburg in 1934) ran the ski school and where Walt Disney, the largest stockholder, had already used the scene as a model for what must be the first cartoon on skiing. Next, south to Yosemite where Luggi Foeger reigned over the world’s boat-tow capital: four huge jig-back sledges provided thousands of rides a day up the slopes of Badger Pass—the nearest thing to a mass ski area up to that point in U.S. ski history. Finally, the Chileans were treated to America’s finest ski accommodations, successively at the government-built Timberline Lodge, Mt. Hood, Oregon with its mile-long chair already in place; Paradise Inn at Mt. Rainier, Washington (walk-up glacier skiing, three rope tows); and, of course, to top them all, Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho. They were welcomed by ski school directors Friedl Pfeifer and Otto Lang, both Hannes Schneider instructors who had found asylum in the U.S. Three chairs had been strung end-to-end to the top of Mt. Baldy—installed following Pfeifer’s design the previous winter: the world’s first multiple-chairlift system. And that was pretty much it: with few exceptions, fifteen resorts encompassed the entire sum and substance of the outstanding skiing in the U.S. in the winter of 1941. Now for Jay it was a race against time and his draft board. In New York, he worked day and night putting together his second lecture film from the footage of the trip. He wouldn’t be around to tour with the film but had arranged a 50-50 deal with his good friend, Debbie Bankhart, head of the Hanover Ski School at Oak Hill in Hanover, New Hampshire. Bankhart was the first woman to direct a ski school in the U.S., and had a wicked sense of humor to boot, a perfect choice. Induction into the U.S. Army, 1941 Jay was off to Fort Dix, New Jersey, in April; luck was in his timing: that very spring, skis and war met for the first time in U.S. history and Jay was assigned a substantial part in this historic American wedding of skis to arms. During the foregoing winter, the Army—at the instigation of Minot Dole, head of the National Ski Patrol System—had been training ski detachments as large as company-size (200 men) all over the northern tier of states. In the spring of 1941, the Army was about to focus its efforts in one spot, Fort Lewis, Washington, near the perpetual snows of Mt. Rainier. As part of this effort, the Army had already commissioned Twentieth Century Fox to do an official ski technique film. The assignment went to Otto Lang, fresh from shooting the ski scenes in Sun Valley Serenade for Twentieth Century Fox. Lang had also filmed the first theater-release ski flick in the U.S. (Ski Flight, in 1937). In sum, Lang was the best-known ski film maker on the continent. Meanwhile, at Fort Dix, John Jay had been almost instantly transformed into Private Jay, Signal Corps photographer and training film cameraman. He was forthwith dispatched to Sun Valley to shoot publicity stills for the Lang ski troop training film about to be shot that very month. Not a bad first assignment. So, while Jay shot the proceedings, and watched closely for tips on ski film making, Otto Lang shot a classic exposition of Hannes Schneider’s workhorse Arlberg Technique, set on the trackless spring snows of Galena Pass above Sun Valley, a panorama of snowy alpine beauty even in spring. Otto Lang’s Basic Principles of Skiing, 1941 The core of the cast was supplied by Capt. John Woodward from Fort Lewis: six soldiers from the 5th Infantry Ski Patrol. Lang drafted some of his Sun Valley instructors and Jay as well whenever his script called for more than six skiers. Lang’s The Basic Principles of Skiing was finished by mid-May, filmed so beautifully that, for years afterward, recruits to what eventually became the 10th Mountain Division complained bitterly that the ski troops were nothing like the movie. Jay wrote up the whole film making episode for the January 1942 Ski Illustrated—to give him something to do on the overnight train headed back East. Once back in the military scene, Jay was assigned to film some less glorious subjects—like pontoon bridge-building, a task which went on forever. The news from Europe, meanwhile, was all bad. In the spring of 1941, the Nazis over-ran France, Belgium and Holland to leave Britain the lone democracy in Europe. It was going to be a long war: Jay signed up for Officer Candidate School (anything but filming more pontoons). Three months later Second Lieutenant John Jay received orders to report to 1st Battalion, 87th Regiment at Fort Lewis—where else? Driving to Fort Lewis, Jay stopped by the newly-founded destination resort at Alta, Utah, long enough to catch ski school director and resort manager Dick Durrance, together with his wife Miggs Durrance and his friend Steve Bradley doing Durrance’s patented dipsy-doodle (history’s first rapid-sequence turning technique) down the narrow powder chutes of Alta. Meanwhile, Debbie Bankhart had been zooming about the countryside showing Ski Here Señor and handing out applications after every show to men who wanted to ski for the Army. What awaited Jay at Fort Lewis was an outfit consisting mostly of skiers and outdoorsmen, recruited through the efforts of Bankhart and the National Ski Patrol System. The 87th had the first battalion-size unit in Army history especially trained for winter warfare. Jay’s primary assignment was to the regiment’s Winter Warfare Board where his duties were to photograph and help evaluate field tests of equipment on Mt. Rainier. Jay was also the battalion publicity officer, a job that took on great urgency on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Immediately, the job of recruiting enough mountain troops to fill a division became high priority. The General Staff in Washington asked that the current flow of recruits be tripled. Jay’s efforts to get the 87th noticed by the media to attract recruits had an early success in March, 1942, when the censors passed the Tacoma Ledger News Sunday Tribune’s full page of stories on the 87th soldiers in training. One memorable sentence in the article read, "After only a short period of training in the rarefied atmosphere of Paradise Valley [on Mt. Rainier], the specialized troops glide easily from crag to crag on nimble skis carrying 50-pound packs, weapons and other equipment." As a description it was pure baloney, but it helped. Filming They Climb to Conquer, at Fort Lewis, 1942 In the spring of 1942, Jay insisted on making a rock climbing training film because—the 87th didn’t have one. The vertical work in They Climb to Conquer was expertly done by recent Dartmouth College ski coach and Swiss FIS World Champion Walter Prager, now a U.S. Army sergeant. Early in May, Jay was third in command of an eight-man detachment of the 1st Battalion making the first winter ascent of Mt. Rainier. Led by Peter Gabriel from the Mt. Mansfield Ski School and filmed by Jay, it went on for 12 days that tested equipment under the severest conditions: Jay won a commendation for his part in making it a success. In June, Jay took a train east to Norfolk, Connecticut, where he married Lois Goodnow and brought her back to Fort Lewis where they rented a house at nearby American Lake. But he wasn’t home early every night. Jay was now assigned to write the official report for one of the more hush-hush projects of the war: the six-month testing of the new Studebaker-built over-the-snow vehicle called the Weasel—on the Columbia Ice Fields off the Banff-Jasper road in the Canadian Rockies. (The Weasel worked out so well it became the prototype for postwar snowcats and groomers in all the major U.S. ski resort operations.) That August, Jay and Lois took a weekend off to climb Mt. St. Helens (the volcanic cone that blew its top a decade ago) in Oregon. The two brought just one pair of skis because Jay wanted to ski down and Lois volunteered to walk down carrying their cameras. Part way down, Lois lost her footing, fell, and slid right for a crevasse, with Jay chasing her on skis. He was knocked off his feet twice trying to stop Lois, then finally jammed two poles in the snow and caught her spinning body ten feet from the yawning crevasse, which fortunately made the incident into a great story instead of a great tragedy. In late August, the command staff of the 87th Regiment became the Mountain Training Center (MTC) and all 87th Infantry Regiment headquarters was transferred to Camp Carson south of Denver to oversee the expansion of the regiment to a full division to be based at Camp Hale, under construction south of Tennessee Pass, between Leadville and Aspen. Lt. Jay now became Capt. Jay, MTC Intelligence Officer whose primary job was to spread the mountain troop story to papers, magazines and radio stations to help recruit 2,000 men in three months. The Mountain Training Center moved to Camp Hale in November when there were just a handful of recruits in place. But Capt. Jay set up dozens of promotional radio broadcasts from the camp. He invited scores of journalists to visit and write stories. He wrote some stories himself and saw that they were printed. Jay’s Day in the Life of a Ski Trooper was published in the Boston Globe, and reprinted by publisher-editor Bill Eldred of Ski News in Schenectedy, N.Y. He called Jay’s story "…the best thing that has been written to date" on the ski troops. (Six years later Eldred founded today’s Ski Magazine in Hanover, New Hampshire.) Jay’s story was then reprinted by the ski editor of the New York Sun who declared it "as fine a piece of snow writing as I have ever seen." Life Magazine weighed in with a cover story in November on the 87th Regiment, shot in its final weeks of training at Fort Lewis. Life’s cover showed Walter Prager ice climbing with crampons: the rate of volunteers for the mountain troops climbed some more. In December 1942, companies from the 87th began arriving from Fort Lewis along with new recruits from all over the country, to begin a build-up that resulted in the 10th Mountain Division. Filming Ski Patrol at Camp Hale in 1943 Beginning in December, Jay shot—on his own hook—scenes of winter warfare training at Hale and began putting together his second Army film, eventually to be called Ski Patrol. (He had a small part in another creation which came out that winter: John Jay, Jr. was born on June 9, 1943 in a hospital in Glenwood Springs.) Combining this shooting with footage previously shot on the 87th training on Mt. Rainier, Jay turned out the punchy public relations film Ski Patrol in the fall of 1943. MTC ordered copies for itself and OK’d Jay’s private deal for a coast-to-coast tour in which the ever-sturdy Debbie Bankhart took Ski Patrol to ski clubs and civic organizations from sea to shining sea. Ski Patrol drew 75,000 viewers coast-to-coast in the fall of 1943 and winter of 1944. At the end of each show, Bankhart handed out applications for volunteers, producing a stream of recruits, as was noted by Boston ski writer Tap Goodenough who wrote that "Debbie Bankhart… ought to rate high in the recruiting office. She takes in prospects hand over fist with every showing." Jay was not only Camp Hale’s public relations chief but commander of the 10th Reconnaissance Group, "10th Recon" as it was called. In January, 1944, he led a detachment of 30 men from 10th Recon and from The Mountain Training Group—the division’s ski instructors and rock climbers—on a five-day, 60-mile training hike from Leadville across the Continental Divide to Aspen. He subsequently led an avalanche and cold weather survival training camp at Ashcroft in late winter 1944, during which he had the chance to film Cpl. Bill Bowes being carried downslope by an avalanche, arriving at the bottom unhurt. On the expedition, Jay also filmed the Army weasels schussing down the slopes above Ashcroft. By now, it was obvious the brass in Washington could not make up their minds what role to assign the 10th. By April, 1944, the invasion of Europe was imminent, but the 10th had still had no combat assignment. Jay was detached to The War Department in Washington, D.C. to write a history of the Mountain Training Center for future reference; he finished the report in three months. In June, 1944, the U.S. Army hit the beaches at Normandy and the 10th was transferred to the Texas desert to train as ordinary infantry—apparently its mountain days were over. Jay transferred to the Army Air Force to write survival manuals for the Air Force Arctic, Desert and Tropic Information Center in Orlando, Florida. The 10th Mountain Division finally did get back to the mountains. In December, 1944, the division moved up through the Italian Apennines, spearheading a fast and lethal advance north to the Brenner Pass until the Germans surrendered in May. Meanwhile, Jay had gone in the other direction to become Far East editor of Air Force Magazine, out of Manila and, finally, after the Japanese surrender in August, 1945, reporting direct from Tokyo. First Postwar Film, 1945 Jay wanted nothing more than to get back to skiing and filming. The time was ripe: Sidney Shurcliff had retired to landscaping and Frank Howard was not filming. Jay had the field to himself. Without regret, Jay abandoned his Rhodes Scholarship and used his terminal leave pay to bankroll his first postwar lecture film. Hickory Holiday made good use of Jay’s Camp Hale footage, including his sequence of the Army weasels schussing the slopes above Aspen. In his 1946 Skis in the Sky, he also caught the unofficial opening of the single chair at Aspen in November, 1946, shot only two years later than his weasel sequence—but oh, what a difference! Aspen was awakening from its long sleep and on the way to becoming the leading alpine center in the country. Jay and Lois took Hickory Holiday on an 18,000 mile tour, and as the winter of 1946 came on, Lois learned to shoot footage for next year’s film enroute. The tour wound up with a triumphant show for 3,800 members of the National Geographic Society in Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C. Jay was now on the road he would follow for the next 25 years, notching a film a year—an extraordinarily long and successful run. In all those years, Jay retained an athlete’s split-second reaction. All through his long film career, he collided with another skier only once, and was injured only once—in a fall. The unique collision came at Klosters. It happened right after Jay took the sharp right turn at the bottom of the catwalk coming off the Parsenn going into the tunnel under the railroad. Jay, going lickety-split saw, darkly, a couple standing at mid-tunnel in a clinch: it was too late to stop so Jay simply yelled, "Achtung! Achtung!" and sailed through the narrow gap left by the lovers hurriedly de-clinching, brushing them both in passing between them, dropping them right on their bottoms: exit Jay, shouting contritely, "Entschuldige Mich! Entschuldige Mich!" ("So terribly sorry! So terribly sorry!"). John Jay’s Guide Book, 1947 All during his career, to supplement income from film lectures, Jay ran parallel enterprises continuously. For starters, he wrote two classic ski books in addition to dozens of articles for ski and general travel magazines through the years. He also organized an annual luxury group trip to Europe for six years running. And he launched two national discount ski clubs. Jay’s initial extracurricular enterprise was his 1947 guide book and travel epic, Skiing the Americas, North and South. It sold 20,000 copies or ten times the 2,000 copies or less chalked up by 90% of all ski books published throughout history—only Arnold Fanck’s and Hannes Schneider’s 1925 Wunder des Schneeschuhs ever broke the million mark. Jay’s keen eye for opportunity supported a lifestyle if not opulent at least ample. In 1948, Jay, Lois and five-year-old John, Jr. went filming in Europe for the first time to shoot the St. Moritz Olympics. The only readily available way of crossing the Atlantic was by steamer—in this case, the Queen Mary. It was a nightmare crossing. The ship plunged through storm after storm. Once at St. Moritz, the trip went very well. Jay had credentials as the one and only official U.S. photographer and access to the U.S. team through Walter Prager, the U.S. coach and Jay’s old comrade-in-arms. Jay’s archives have the only shots available on this side of the Atlantic showing Gretchen Fraser running the St. Moritz slalom to take the first gold medal won, ever, by an American skier in an Olympic alpine competition. Touring Europe in 1948 After the Games, the Jays toured Europe, filming skiing at Davos, and covering the 1948 Arlberg-Kandahar held at Chamonix—this was the shoot on which Jay had his only accident. "At one point, the Chamonix downhill course made a big turn," Jay recalls. "The outside of the turn dropped right straight down three thousand feet into Chamonix. They had built a retaining wall of sorts with ice blocks spaced around the curve. I was filming the race somewhat above that corner and had just caught Steve Knowlton’s run when my feet went out from under me and I slid down the course on my back, pinwheeling. A racer crunched past me on the course shouting curses in French. Still on my back, trying to save the camera, I slammed into an ice block on the edge of the curve—saved me from going over the edge all the way to Chamonix." His cracked shoulder bone was the only notable injury Jay suffered in sixty years of skiing and filming. Before going back to the U.S., the Jays went to Arosa in the Bernese Oberland, visited the round skyscrapers ("silos") at Sestriere in Italy and skied Zermatt under the shadow of the Matterhorn, all contributing to scenes appearing on his 1949 Skis Over Europe. Jay edited the film that spring and summer while handling a regular nine-to-five job. He’d become Athletic Director of Williams College that year. "I took the job on the condition," he says, "that I could keep one hand on the camera." His job gave Jay time to tour with Skis Over Europe, drawing sellout crowds. The Alps were then the Promised Land, a far-away place very few had skied—that fairy-tale high country full of magic names like St. Anton, Kitzbuhl, St. Moritz, Cortina—frequented only by skiers who were very rich. That same year, 1949, was Warren Miller’s start-up year: a husky six-foot-two Californian, resourceful and hard-driving, a film maker to be reckoned with. Miller resolutely took on the job of playing catch-up even as Jay’s own reputation had begun to soar, coast-to-coast. That summer, Jay made his second trip to Chile where he got a marvelous shot of condors circling above a group of Chilean snowbunnies—as if just waiting. It became part of the 1950 tour film, From the Alps to the Andes. The 1950 World Championships In 1950, the Jays did not need to go abroad: the FIS World Championships came to America instead. European alpine countries had been impoverished by war— except Switzerland, which had just put on an Olympics. Aspen, Colorado, was chosen, the first alpine world championship ever held in the U.S. (It took 40 years before the U.S. snagged the next one.) The Aspen FIS was the core of Jay’s 1951 Skis Against Time, a film helped no end by racers at Aspen who had personality with a capital P—for starters, Zeno Colo, cigar-smoking, beer-drinking winner of the men’s GS and Downhill, and then a handsome youngster from Norway named Stein Eriksen who managed to take a bronze in the slalom. After the Aspen FIS, the Jays went on to California to shoot the brand new Squaw Valley, fruit of a short-lived partnership between Alex Cushing who raised the money, and Wayne Poulsen who owned the valley. (The two quarreled bitterly later that year and Cushing ousted Poulsen from the ski company.) In 1951, the Jays went overseas again—their third crossing, but this one by plane, taking with them their first travel group, twenty-two paying guests, via KLM, "at the time the biggest such tour in American travel history." "We usually took 30 people," Jay remembers, "and it was like a movable house party on skis. Romances developed. Everyone had a great time. Traveled mostly by train. One couple dallied in the bar car so long they were aboard when it was detached and they ended up in the wrong town." The Jays’1952 Alpine Safari, filmed on the trip, was spiced by two very unusual sequences: the first Jay shot from a tram above the slope, catching the hair-raising race of German ace Helmut Lantschner against twin converging avalanches roaring down the Parsenn to Klosters. The avalanches were closing in on Lantschner until he schussed desperately past the convergence point, ducked into the Klosters tunnel and came out the other side, smiling. The second sequence was of 18-year-old Finnish jumper Tauno Luiro, first filmed by Lois close-up as he stepped out onto the inrun of the Obersdorf ski-flying jump: gusts of wind had spilled the previous Italian jumper Bruno Dacol who’d been badly hurt: Luiro’s jump was caught by Jay filming in slow motion from the stands—as the youngster sailed on and on to a world record of 462 feet. In spite of occasional drama, and big names appearing onscreen, Jay’s strong point was that there is such a thing as ordinary skiers. Typical Jay footage managed to project a homey touch, everyday scenes with a connection supplied by the commentary. Jay gave introductions to skiers on the screen who were often just plain skiers, as if introducing ski friends; equally frequently, Jay would follow skiers having an ordinary good old time in their own sweet way, or zoom in on some unlucky soul inexorably caught up in the coils of trouble. Longtime New York ski journalist Kim Massie recalls Jay this way: "He stood by the screen at Hunter College in Manhattan and stood us on our ear with spare, wry comments as we watched his sequence of a terminally frustrated skier as the poor devil enters screen left on one ski in the process of throwing the other one away. After a couple of stumbling strides in the deep snow, he fumbles off the other beartrap and hurls his second ski into the trees with even greater fury. Now he flounders off, hip-deep, screen right as we, the audience, roll in the aisles knowing that John Jay is holding up a mirror to mankind and showing us ourselves." Hollywood Comes Knocking, 1952 Jay never hammered viewers with endless unrelieved sequences of skiers hurtling down the slope, whose viewing is like eating a box of chocolates, one after the other—the initial delight wears off rather quickly. Jay captivated without bludgeoning. His light touch won him the ultimate recognition from the ultimate professionals—Hollywood studios. Warner Brothers bought two Jay films and used them to create Winter Wonders, released to Warner movie houses around the nation in 1952. And again, Warner bought and released Alpine Safari without a change—except to retitle it Winter Paradise. The film was nominated for an Oscar and was barely nosed out by Walt Disney’s Bear Country. Think about it: a film shot, edited and produced by a team of several hundred was nearly beaten by a film shot, edited and musically scored entirely by two people named John and Lois Jay. The Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences voted it "One of the Five Best Short Subjects of the Year." Filming African Skiing, 1954 After his 1954 tour with Calvalcade On Skis, with its notable accordian serenade in the front of the Chesa Grishuna at Klosters, it was across the Mediterranean for one of Jay’s better brainstorms, a trek beginning with a short jaunt on camel-back from the caravan capital of Marrakech, Morocco; then a taxi over the torturous 45 miles up the ridges to Oukaimaden in North Africa’s Atlas Mountains at 8,700 feet and its luxury lodge, replete with French chef. From here, Swiss guide Bernard Julliard led the Jay party on the runs off the 2,000-foot cable tow from the highest peak, Mt. Toubka, 13,685 feet above sea level. The resultant 1955 From Ski to Sea had the most spectacular Jay itinerary to date. Jay and Lois initially shot 20,000 feet of film. This raw footage Jay transformed in his yearly editing marathon, the equivalent of two months of eight-hour days editing that pile down to 4,000 feet—his first cut was finished in July. He spent the next several weeks writing a narration to fit. And this narration was honed through a month of tryouts before Williamstown audiences Jay called "the Berkshire Critics Society." He thanked them all by letter: "Without you patient pre-viewers, much of our film success would not have been possible." Jay’s commentary was designed to elicit an optimum fifty laughs in 90 minutes—give or take a laugh. The art lay in giving the feeling the narration was spontaneous—just another jolly Jay patter—rather than the tight script timed to the split-second that it really was. (Reviewers were by this point comparing Jay to Victor Borge, the comic pianist whose patter was considered the show biz apogee of exquisite synchronization.) After From Ski to Sea was wrapped up, Jay turned to writing the printed program. The text was turned over to Ski magazine—whose staff did the layout and sold the ads. Pleasing the Film Critics, 1956 Jay was really hitting his stride. In 1956, he turned out Holiday for Skis, of which a Los Angeles film critic wrote, "This film is head and shoulders, and skis, above the ordinary sports feature for one reason—a disarming and thoroughly witty fellow named John Jay. This wit sparkles both in the exceptional camera work of Jay and his wife Lois, and in an on-stage commentary that is remindful of a windburned Robert Benchley." (Benchley was a well-known New York wit well-known for his hilarious solo film shorts.) Jay’s 1958 Ski to Adventure had possibly the funniest sequence filmed in skiing. Jay had penetrated darkest Japan by standing up in a train with Japanese packed in like sardines during a ten-hour ride. On the slope, the Japanese were hardly much more dispersed, colliding with the frequency of a crowd of billiard balls in a game of pool, each collision necessitating the collidees rising stiffly to their feet, bowing, then straightaway slamming into the next pack of fellow skiers. In 1958, the Jays headed for Bad Gastein, Austria, and the FIS world championship. After multiple misadventures, they arrived on time to record the cresting of Austrian power in the racing world as Austria’s Toni Sailer took three gold medals including combined; his teammate Josl Rieder took the other one, the slalom. Writing about the 1958 World Championships Jay wrote a long article on the trials and tribulations covering the 1958 FIS in the October 1958 issue of Ski magazine. The excerpt from the piece that follows is a good sample of Jay’s comic style, both in narration and writing: "It is now the end of January. You have been on the lecture circuit since October practically non-stop, covering thousands of miles from coast to coast. Behind you now for another year are the nightmares of incompetent projectionists, torn film, grounded planes, and endless late receptions after show after show after show. You have not even touched foot to a pair of skis; you barely have time to answer your relentless flow of mail as you sputnik about over the land." [Sputnik: the Russian satellite that had beaten the first U.S. satellite into space.] "But now comes your "holiday," according to your friends. ‘Off to the Alps tomorrow? How we envy you!’ "You give your last show—to a couple of thousand people in Grand Rapids Civic Auditorium, whose barn-like acoustics have been known to make strong men weep. Never mind, you leave tomorrow for Austria, to start filming the new show—when you really ought to be heading for a nursing home. You haven’t even been to your own home for over two weeks now, and you hope your wife has packed all the essentials, closed the house, turned down the thermostat, forwarded the mail, turned off the milkman and made the plane. "Meanwhile, you’ve got your own problems—freezing rain and fog all over the Midwest. After three passes, you make Idlewild [now JFK] on a wing and a prayer, only to be delayed by engine trouble on your overseas plane. The first race at the world ski championships in Bad Gastein starts in a matter of hours. All other flights are booked solid except one to London; you check… "Diverting to Shannon. London socked in solid." So you spend a sleepless night on an airport bench watching the clock. Removing the splinters for a pre-dawn takeoff, you make Zurich with some lucky tailwinds and the Bad Gastein train on a dead run, just in time to discover: (1) All slopes are north, and all races will be run in semi-darkness; (2) approximately 40,000 persons will be clustered around the course, skiing in Austria having the popularity of major league baseball in America; (3) the press passes that you had written for in quintuplicate a year before are nowhere in existence. "You spend your last remaining milligrams of energy shouting hybrid German into Austrian telephones, and scurrying from one crowded office to another. Then, when you struggle up the course, you find your press card admits you only to (a) the grandstand, where nothing short of the Palomar 200-inch telescope is adequate to locate the racers, or (b) a roped-off corral between the courses where about half the working press of Europe and North America are fighting for positions like steers in a stockyard. "You worm through the spectators at what looks like the best flush, send your wife down to cover the finish, and wait. The crowd starts tossing snowballs at you to move, shouting, "We have paid many shillings!" You offer to reimburse them, mentally wondering if this is deductible from next year’s income tax. More snowballs, which splatter your valuable lenses. You are not amused. "A guard pushes you roughly; you flourish your press card; he shakes his head, ‘Nicht gut!’ "You protest that you speak only English; instantly, a dozen interpreters pop up in the crowd around you. You beat an abject retreat, and climb an old pine tree already inhabited by two Russians, one Norwegian, and three small boys. "All of them protest this invasion in various languages, which you ignore; then the Russian climbs down from his branch and produces a rental contract for the entire tree, which he waves under your nose! (He had actually leased it from an Austrian farmer for the whole FIS.) "You start to climb down and then a roar from the crowd signals Bud Werner’s run; you swing desperately to film him just as he falls at gate 54—and the branch breaks, dropping you neatly into the snow and ending your filming problems with that camera for the next few days. Grabbing the little magazine camera you carry for emergencies, you film frantically for the rest of the race between 40,000 pairs of ski boots and pray that your wife is getting something—anything at the bottom…" "So you send your broken camera in to Salzburg…five days and 500 schillings later it returns—in worse shape than when it left you. Nothing can be rented…the men’s downhill coming up…you have Andy Lawrence and Roland Palmedo shooting for you with all your other spare cameras… so you march out and buy a complete Austrian movie camera, and spend the rest of the night translating the German instructions. Of course, it jams anyway during the race, but by now you are insensible, and well—do you still want to get into this life? What’s that? For the skiing? Oh…" It wasn’t all a piece of cake. In fact, the pace was often brutal. The wonder is Jay stood it so long. He needed it, is the only explanation. As he says, "I was born to achieve." And achieve he did. In 1960, Ski magazine helped out by selling the advertising for Jay’s printed program for the1960 Mountain Magic, a pivotal John Jay film, because it was composed as a preview for the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics. Mountain Magic showed some of Jay’s footage from the 1948, 1952 and 1956 Olympics. The film played to standing room only for much of the tour. At the 1,200-seat Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles, the show sold out completely four nights running in the land of sophisticated Hollywood movie-goers, one of Jay’s more memorable triumphs. Covering the Olympics in California, 1960 To cover the Olympics at Squaw Valley, Jay teamed with San Francisco film maker Marvin Becker who had bought the film rights. They hired a 24-man crew which turned out 40 hours of film. Each man made his own film from the footage. Jay expertly boiled all of it down to a single vivid hour for his 1961 Olympic Holiday. San Francisco movie critic Robert Wastage wrote that the "…much-praised TV coverage of the 1960 Olympic Games at Squaw Valley was beautiful and exciting but it was a blurred Brownie snapshot compared with John Jay’s action-packed color masterpiece shown last night at the Masonic Auditorium." At Squaw, the third man of the 1960s film lecturing triumvirate had appeared from the wings: a Los Angeles city fireman named Dick Barrymore, who was in the course of switching careers, shot enough footage of the Olympics on the sly to build a draw for his debut with the ski lecture film Ski West, Young Man; Barrymore’s devil-may-care commentary built an audience of younger viewers who stayed with him from then on. But Jay reigned as the country’s top ski film lecturer for another ten years—at his peak popularity in the 1960s, Jay was appearing in 100 cities before 250,000 people. In 1961, Universal Publishing and Distributing of New York bought Ski magazine from Bill Eldred and moved it to the city, so Jay hired veteran ski writer John Hitchcock of Williamstown to lay out and sell advertising for his printed program. Thereafter, anyone Jay did not want to talk to was advised to call Hitchcock, "my manager." It was an honorary title at best, but Hitchcock genially acted as a buffer. He was rewarded by being often invited to play tennis doubles at Jay’s house where, as Hitchcock recalls, Jay disliked losing to the point that, if the fourth was a stronger player than Lois, Hitchcock paired with Lois to avoid spoiling Jay’s day. In the 1960s, Jay’s films changed a bit. To meet the demand for ever more excitement—staying ahead of the curve as the audience grew more traveled and sophisticated—Jay filmed ever-more exotic locales using natural comedians like Fred Iselin, Don Powers and Ralph Jackson; or superskiers like Art Furrer, Toni Sailer and Stein Eriksen. Jay’s Only Film Drama, 1962 Only once did Jay change his format radically. He built in a dramatic plot for his 1962 Once Upon an Alp, which involved a comedy romance between Mad River ski school director Don Powers and Austrian women’s silver medalist Putzi Frandl. Powers played a Vermont farmer magically transported to the Swiss Alps where he destroys the peace of mind of the Flims ski school by mowing down several beginner classes and then comes a classic "fox chase." As a plot device, Jay’s drama worked fairly well, but Jay went back to the old format. In general, attempts to create a drama in an out-and-out ski film have not succeeded; Robert Redford’s much-praised Downhill Racer was not, of course, an out-and-out ski film. After the 1962 Once Upon an Alp tour, the Jays and a newly hired assistant cameraman, Don Rathbun, flew to Chamonix, France, and Zakopane, Poland, to cover the 1962 FIS World Championships. Behind the Communist Iron Curtain at Zakopane, the Jays were astounded to find out they were the only American crew allowed in to film—a clear scoop. In the summer of 1962, the Jays went Down Under, bagging another continent and bringing Stein Eriksen to the top of the 12-mile Tasman Glacier in New Zealand where they filmed him all the way to the bottom, using the footage in the 1964 Catch a Skiing Star. Stein never skied better. In 1964, in addition to producing one of his best films, Catch a Skiing Star, Jay broke into network television. ABC’s 1964 Olympic retrospective showed Jay’s 1948, 1952, 1956 and 1960 Olympic footage as part of its 15-week preview of the Innsbruck Games. That was the good news. The bad news was that Marvin Becker sued Jay for using the Squaw Olympic footage on TV. It cost Jay $16,000 in lawyer’s fees to win the case but he did have the satisfaction of watching the jury vote his Olympic film superior to Becker’s. Covering the Innsbruck Olympics, 1964 At the Innsbruck Olympics itself, the Jay cameras caught Jimmie Huega and Billy Kidd winning the first American men’s Olympic alpine ski medals. These historic sequences became part of the very successful 1965 Persian Powder, along with sequences of skiing in Yugoslavia, Lebanon and Iran. By now, Jay had doubled the raw footage shot per film to 40,000 feet, which he and Lois edited down to 3,600 feet by September. That summer, between film-editing stints, Jay collaborated with a couple of co-authors to finish up what has become a classic coffee table ski history book, Ski Down the Years. (Co-authors Frankie and Johnny O’Rear already had two ski books to their credit.) The final heavy editing on Ski Down the Years was done by John Hitchcock. It was published by Universal Publishing, owners of Ski magazine, whose editor, John Fry, commented, "Considering the number of cooks brewing this broth, it tastes pretty good." Jay’s 25th anniversary film was his 1966 Silver Skis, showcasing the 1965 Vail International Races followed by a retrospective of some of the more interesting skiers Jay had filmed through the years: Stein Eriksen, whose full layout somersaults presaged ski acrobatics; Art Furrer, whose trick skiing inspired ski ballet; Dean Billings, whose inside-ski turns moved him down Aspen Mountain like a waltzing skater; Japanese Olympian Chick Igaya who chased chamois over breakable crust, handling it like powder. Silver Skis climaxed with a trip on Europe’s Haute Route from Matterhorn to Mt. Blanc, topped by a flight through the peaks with glacier pilot Herman Geiger. After the Silver Skis tour, Jay took a two-year sabbatical from filming during 1967 and 1968 while still doing 40 lectures annually, showing past films. He also put out his first completely retrospective film, An Evening with John Jay. During the break, Jay capitalized on 25 years of hard work to sell two of his past films to Westinghouse’s Four Winds to Adventure, appearing onscreen introducing them and pushing Ski Down the Years. He and his films appeared on NBC’s Today show and the local Chicago TV show Passage to Adventure, plugging the book. Result: Ski Down the Years, sold 40,000 copies—this was a record for a U.S. ski book up to that time. That second sabbatical winter of 1968, Jay hired Ruedi Wyrsch to make a soundtrack for To Catch a Skiing Star in German and to tour it through Europe. Simultaneously, Jay had To Catch a Skiing Star dubbed in Japanese so he and Lois could tour Japan with it. While there, the Jays filmed Yuichiro Miura, whose claim to fame was he had schussed the entire side of Mt. Fujiyama on glare ice. While Lois was shooting him, Miura lost it just a little, careened past Lois close enough so his arm glanced lightly off the camera, breaking one lens in her dark glasses as he went. Lois thought it was funny. The Jays were back on the road for the 1969 winter with Head for the Hills, using footage they’d shot of Miura in Japan, plus film from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Mauna Kea, Hawaii, shot by Don Rathbun. The Jackson Hole take included a classic sequence of Ruedi Wyrsch skiing down while juggling a set of dishes. The Hawaiian trip starred Ralph Jackson, Aspen’s resident ski clown. On the first day of shooting in Honolulu, Jackson had been stopped by police in the middle of the International Market; Jackson, wearing top hat, bearskin coat, Bermuda shorts and carrying skis in the glare of the Hawaiian mid-day sun, said delightedly, "Officer, you are just the man I am looking for! Could you kindly direct me to the ski slopes?" The Final Film, 1970 In 1970 came the final annual John Jay lecture film, World of Skiing. It had shots of French Olympian Guy Perillat skiing at La Clusaz and English skiers on plastic chip snow at Folkstone (ski and chips). At 55, Jay had lectured in 30 countries on five continents before more than a million people. This last Jay ski lecture film toured exactly 30 years after Jay’s first tour with Ski the Americas, North and South in 1940. Middle-class America had grown rich and well-traveled in that time. Prosperity accelerated ever more in the oncoming 1970s and 1980s. Travel burgeoned so much that affluence posed a problem for young ski-lecture film makers: As Peter Oliver wrote in Skiing magazine "…by the time the 1980s rolled around, where could film makers go where no man had gone before? "The answer was to new locales—extreme locales—in familiar places, like Squaw Valley…Video-age film makers have found new angles…wild characters and big-hair types like Glen Plake to add another dimension. And irreverence—that’s something for which [Greg] Stump has a special flair." But Jay had not retired by any means. Although he filmed no new footage, he kept on getting requests for past films, filling 30 dates a year in 1971 and 1972. Then, in 1973, the team of John and Lois Jay dissolved in divorce and Jay moved to La Jolla, California, to indulge his passion for tennis. From his new home, Jay still responded to twenty requests a year for past ski shows, testimony to the fascination of Jay’s lifetime footage, which contained the stuff of epics. Among the great scenes were the come-from-behind slalom of Andy Mead Lawrence and her GS run at the 1952 Oslo Olympics; pre-World War II French world champion Emile Allais (possibly the greatest natural talent in racing history), running the slopes at Portillo; the slapstick sequence of the entire membership of the Mississippi Ski Club dissolving into "southern fried chaos" at Taos; Jack Rabbit Johannsen racing cross country at the age of 102; Olympian James Couttet and the French ski team leaping crevasses down the Vallee Blanche. It was endless. Switching to Travelogues, 1975 In 1975, Jay made a big change. He switched his film lectures to a more general format than his out-and-out ski flicks to increase his potential audience. He laboriously extracted four 90-minute travelogues from his storehouse of films, adding local color from his out-takes. He then hired an agent and set out to tour the year-round travelogue circuit. His audiences were bigger now but grayer. He still got rave reviews. "One of America’s leading stand-up comedians… A fascinating global trek with John Jay and his rib-tickling Yankee humor"—this from the Pacific Club. And from the Missouri Athletic Club: "Frosty Yankee Warms MAC." From the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club in Ohio: "I haven’t had such a bunch of belly laughs since I don’t know when." And from George Loubies Explorama, a top travelogue agency in San Francisco: "Our subscribers were ecstatic One said it was the most humorous and refreshing program you have ever presented." During one stop on his 1979 tour—at Carmel, California—Jay’s hosts produced a tennis partner named Mary Margaret Allan, otherwise "MM," who proved such an excellent match, the two married in June the next year. They moved to a home in Rancho Santa Fe, California, in time for MM to go on Jay’s 1980 tour. After the 1980 tour, Jay’s nose for opportunity twitched at an ad for the Royal Viking Line cruises. Within a week, he was named Enrichment Lecturer for Viking Star’s summer 1980 Caribbean jaunt, during which Jay’s seagoing shows became increasingly popular. At the final show, the ship’s captain himself had to order passengers to clear the aisles into which an overflow audience had jammed itself. The 1981 Travelogue Tour After forty years of it, Jay still loved traveling, just going somewhere. And loved charming new people. He never wanted to stop. For the 1981 tour, Jay and MM bought a fuel-efficient subcompact Fiat two-door hatchback in San Diego. A friend, horrified at the car’s small size, tried to dissuade Jay and MM "from driving all the way to the East Coast in that." But they took off merrily to touch down in 70 places like Iowa Junction, Texas, and Blue Earth, Minnesota, to which no airline ran. Jay kept fresh on the tour by pulling over and running clockwise then counterclockwise around the car every four hours. He and MM carried roller skates to race around hotel parking lots at each destination. Thus, they drove 17,321 miles in three months. Another year, another tour. Later that year, Jay and MM flew to Ishpeming, Michigan, for Jay’s induction into the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame. In 1982, Ski Industries of America gave Jay the annual SIA Recognition Award for his contributions to the sport. In 1994, before the Lillehammer Games, Jay’s footage on the 1952 Oslo Olympics ran on Norwegian TV through TV producer Steiner Hybertsen. The program gained the second highest documentary rating ever in Norway—beaten only by a film on the life and loves of Sonja Henie (whose short, sweet ski film career climaxed in 1940 with Sun Valley Serenade). This past year, Jay has pursued a tour of 30-some lectures, one of them given in the high school auditorium at Poughkeepsie, New York, where Jay commented, "I have been to Poughkeepsie four times. I shall probably not be back." The town had changed since earlier Jay visits; its once-busy manufacturing plants had closed, its middle-class population thinned, and its youth beleaguered. In the halls hung posters warning of the pitfalls of AIDS and drunk driving. But it was the same old jaunty John Jay who expertly coaxed his gray-headed audience into the laughter they rather seemed to need. In 1995, Jay’s Camp Hale sequences were heavily used by Beth and George Gage for their award-winning documentary on the 10th, Fire on the Mountain. Last January, Jay received the1996 Crested Butte International Ski Film Festival Ski Film Maker Legend of the Year Award. Nothing could have been more appropriate. Jay did have to endure a small disappointment at Crested Butte: the weather turned cold and windy one day and Jay could find no one who wanted to go out skiing that day. But when he showed one of his past films to the assembled journalists and film makers at the award banquet, the audience stood up at the end, applauding for a long time. Two thoughts are appropriate here. The first is that, one way or another, Jay’s films will endure. And the second is that the sport was lucky to have him. John Jay embodies, in a way no one else can quite duplicate, the spirit of The Golden Age of Alpine Skiing, an era he enriched with his work, a rich blend composed of imagination, humor, strength, endurance and spirit so remarkable it could only have come from a man who has loved skiing truly and well. GO TO TOP
			Jay filming the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics
				visit www.johnjayskifilms.com for a selection of his films on video avilable for purchase
				John Jay and Jr. in Davos 1948
				Jay travelgroup members load onto a camel outside Marrakesh, Morrocco in 1955