blandford ski area 1965.
blandford ski area 1965.
home
the
springfield ski club circa 1965
my
earliest memories of blandford by jay pagluica
from
our email files december, 2002dear
blandford ski area, i enjoyed reading your glossary of blandford terms on
ssc's web site. it prompted some of my memories about skiing there in the '60's.
hardly a day goes by without thoughts of
skiing at blandford when i was a kid in the '60's. i remember starting on
schoolhouse. i had red dartmouth wooden skis (without steel edges), black
square toed lace up ski boots with a strap and buckle over the instep, dovre
cable bindings with a toe piece (the next wave of binding technology back then)
instead of bear traps, and bamboo poles with leather straps and baskets.
when i took the brave step to the broadway tow i felt like i was on my way to
great things. a few years later, i remember (as a time marker) standing at the
top of chrysler listening to my father with other grown ups talk about the cassius
clay fight the night before. i loved the big dip in the middle of the chrysler
slope. ultimately taking on the glade tow was a wild life event. i knew i could
handle anything after being successfully launched up that narrow icy track into
the woods. from the beginning, my parents insisted on ski school for
me, my brother and sister. ski school paid big dividends later in life, but i
didn't like it much then. i wanted to go straight to racing. one day when i was
10, my parents thought i was obediently in stem christie class. i managed to escape
and somehow swap my lesson ticket for the entry fee in one of the club
races. to me those races were like the olympics. but just as i was putting
my race bib on (trembling) in the old lodge i felt the presence of my mother standing
over me. i was back in ski school in short order. my only hope of escaping ski
school from then on was to learn my way out by mastering each level through parallel.
those lessons have become a life-time pass to a renewable source of happiness
for me for 47 seasons and counting. i'm sure i never came close to winning
a race at blandford, but the place helped imprint on me what my mother likes to
say is a "deep mania" for skiing. in addition to racing as young teens
we skied in the woods that are now put's peril and upper north slope, and into
the logged but un-cleared area that became si's run. i still dream about that
rough "back country" place as a gateway to vast secret and peaceful
bowls of powder out there beyond the rules and routines that seemed so overbearing
to me then. while i am absolutely sure that we were as annoying as young
teens can be while we were at blandford, i'm also sure that i learned what is
very good about being a skier during our years there. and whenever i can and wherever
i ski, i try to return the favor with a helping hand for a new skier, or with
a complement to a parent about how well their child skis. they beam with thanks,
but it's really me who feels best about it. thanks blandford! quentin
leo new canaan, ct
my,
how we’ve grown… jay pagluica, marketing director
ever
wonder how we got to where we are? some of our long-time members have been around
since almost the very beginning. they’re still up skiing almost every day we open!
heck, they remember being excited about the first building with indoor plumbing.
thanks to the dedication of folks like them, we have what we have today.
i
don’t go back quite that far but i do remember many wonderful winters as a kid
in the 60s skiing blandford with my brother, two sisters and my dad. i still think mom stayed home because it was the only quiet
time
she could get.
i
thought it’d be fun to look back and smile at what we used to have at blandford.
all 7 rope tows and 12 trails. i also thought it’d be fun to recall
some terms that may have fallen out of our snow-filled minds of the past. it is
in keeping with our tradition of attempting to preserve our history that we bring
you our... official
springfield ski club olde-timer’s ski glossary
rope
tow –
archaic device used to propel skiers up a hill. usually consisting of a glove-eating
3/4 inch fiber rope driven by an electric motor or internal combustion engine.
speed can vary from an “i can walk faster than this” to “whoa…hold on!”
hoop-de-doos – the name given to the bumps that
eventually formed in the towpath of a rope tow. usually grew in proportion to
the speed at which the tow moved. you could actually catch air on the faster tows.
great fun or incredible agony depending on your ability. towpath
– the place where hoop-de-doos grow. tow
grip – metal device that clamped or twisted onto the towrope to help you hold
on for the ride to the top. handy in that you didn’t have to hold the rope so
tight so your hands didn’t feel like they were going to fall off. dangerous in
that if you couldn’t unhook the thing before you reached the top, you found out
what the “safety gate” was for. they were outlawed around 1969. that’s one of
the big reasons we installed our first chairlift (glade) rope
twist – because of the way the rope was driven, it twisted and turned as
it wound its way up and down the hill, it often would slowly twist as you rode
up the hill. this wasn’t usually a problem unless you had a loose or open jacket,
a hat with long tassels or even long hair (ouch) that would have a tendency to
twist up in the rope by the time you got to the top. usually the safety gate would
trip to keep you from winding around the top pulley. you could pretty much write
off the jacket or at least a bit of hair, though.
arm-pull start – sometimes, as the ropes aged or
were damaged by the tow grips or from skiing over them, they would start to unravel
in various places. a quick fix could be had by wrapping the damaged area tight
with friction tape (kind of like black electrical tape with sand in it). this
would create an area a few feet long on the rope that could give you quite a quick
start if it passed just as you were slowly increasing your grip on the rope to
start up the hill. leather
gloves or mittens – worn so that the rope wouldn’t burn through your lightweight
gloves or mittens. not very warm so you usually wore a glove or two of cotton
underneath. no, gortex wasn’t around, yet. if you rode the tows a lot, you’d even
go through a pair or two of leathers every season. safety
gate – device - usually a rope or line - across the towpath just beyond the
unload point that would stop the tow in case you couldn’t release the rope for
some reason (see rope twist). waiting
for the grown-up – on days when there weren’t too many skiers on the
hill, you might be the only one on the tow waiting to go up. if you were a little
kid, that rope could be mighty heavy. in order to avoid the backbreaking task
of holding up the rope alone all the way to the top, you’d hang around the load
area “waiting for a grown-up”. of course you could then look like a real polite
kid and offer to let them go first.
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