She Skis for Fun

As far as her eyes could see in the clear winter air, the Alps of the Bernese Oberland stood in their snow-capped ranks, 12,000-foot peaks of glacial ice and stone.

Three thousand feet below, terrace on terrace, lay the storybook village of Grindelwald, famed as a skier's paradise. The girl whose level, blue-grey eyes surveyed this prospect may or may not have been awed by the majesty of the view. What she said was reverent, appreciative, American: "Scenic as hell!" Last week her interest in the Grindel-wald view was more technical than esthetic. She was looking at a slalom course: a series of precipitous pitches and inclines, outlined by guide poles, designed to test the racing mettle of the world's best skiers.

For the qualified citizens of the world of international ski racing must have two prerequisites: skill -- and courage. It takes courage to use skill, or to use it to that utmost which wins races. A watch-tick moment of bad judgment, a split second of uncontrol can send a downhill racer flying off the beaten track at a fatal 60 m.p.h. clip.*

Poised near the starting gate, awaiting her turn, the girl showed only one touch of tension: her classically lean features were set firmly as she clenched her jaw.

As the starter tapped her on the back, she was off, pushing furiously with her ski poles to gain the speed she would have to check, moments later, with a swivel-hip turn. She swept down the dizzying de scent with the verve and hell-for-leather dash of a man. Crouching, straightening, swinging her slim hips in an almost antic mimicry of a rumba step, she darted and danced through the multicolored flags that outlined the course.

The people who watched her snow-clouded rush down the mountainside were all, in a sense, mountaineers. In their world, from the Alps to the hills of Scandinavia, skiing is about the only sport worth mentioning; it is almost a way of life. And last week, with the winter Olympics in Oslo only a month away, it was getting close to the climax of the skier's year. The baggage carrier at St. Anton, the bartender at Klosters, the woodcutter at Sestriere, the gendarme at Chamonix, the hotelkeeper at Oslo were all reading the ski news: the results of the Swiss National championships. And this dark-haired, blue-grey-eyed American girl was very much in the news. Every skier in Europe knew her name: Andrea Mead Lawrence.

Andy Mead (the nick-and maiden names she is best known by) is the best U.S. Olympic skier. Last winter she won almost every major ski race in Europe--including the Arlberg-Kandahar downhill race, the unofficial world championship. At 19, she is a veteran of the 1948 Olympics and captain of this year's U.S. women's Olympic ski team.

"She Waits for Me." At Grindelwald last week, Andy was not quite the best; but she wasn't trying very hard, yet. While Austria's Trude Beiser Jochum, 1950 downhill champion, might grind through 50 practice runs, Andy would loaf through two, then call it quits. A tall girl (5 ft. 7 1/2 in., 130 Ibs.), but willowy and slim, Andy doesn't take training grimly: she drinks a beer with her meals, and is usually ready to join a friend in a cup of Gluewein (mulled red wine with cinnamon, cloves and sugar). She smokes a cigarette when she feels like it.

She sets her own fashion in other ways. She wears no lipstick; she has never been to a manicurist or a hairdresser. Her husband of ten months, Dave Lawrence, a strapping (6 ft., 185 Ibs.) alternate on the U.S. men's Olympic ski team, admires her style and her spirit: "I guess she thinks you ought to be the way God made you. Anyway, I like it." Dave, who is a first-class skier but not in Andy's class, is also an unvexed admirer of his wife's prowess. Austria's Christian Pravda once tried to needle Dave: "How horrible to have a wife who can ski better!" Said Dave, equally deadpan: "She waits for me."

At Oslo next month, the U.S. men stand far less chance of winning than the women. To most European male skiers, the sport is less a sport than a career that success can further into a profession; most U.S. skiers are college men with other careers in mind. Among the U.S. men, the best bet is Salt Lake City's Jack Reddish, on Navy leave, who won a fourth in the 1950 F.I.S. (Federation Internationale de Ski) world championships.

Trains & Tows. A better bet is Andy Mead Lawrence. At the Swiss championships last week, Andy swooped down the mountainside with the rush and sparkle of a Vermont freshet, and was right up with the winners: second in the tricky slalom (behind Switzerland's Madeleine Berthod); third in the daredevil downhill (behind Austria's Trude Beiser, the U.S.'s Janette Burr), where sheer speed is the payoff; first in the giant slalom, where both speed and control count.

Andy's one-two-three performance in the three events showed her remarkable versatility. But another U.S. skier, Seattle's Janette Burr, who stays in shape by water skiing in the summer, won the top title. Janette's second place in the downhill and her fifth in the slalom added up, on the basis of elapsed time, to a better performance than Andy's second and third places in the two events. Andy's victory in the giant slalom (Janette was tied for eleventh) did not count in the "combined" totals which decide the Swiss championship. For the combined title, Andy placed second.

Team Manager Gretchen Fraser, who won the U.S.'s first Olympic skiing gold medal in 1948, was exuberant: "This is the first time in history that American skiers have made such a showing [one-two] in international competition. We'll have a team to reckon with at Oslo."

Andy's and Janette's performances were a good measure of how much U.S. skiing has improved since the 1936 Olympics at Germany's Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In those sorry days, the best that the U.S. top skier, Dartmouth's Dick Durrance, could do in the "Alpine" events was tenth in the downhill, tenth in the slalom. In the "Nordic" events, the best U.S. jumper was eleventh, the best 18-kilometer cross-country man was 34th.

There just wasn't enough skiing in the U.S. to turn out champions. Not that skiing was unknown--California gold miners were using skis for transportation as early as 1857 in the "Lost Sierras." In Berlin, N.H., a handful of Scandinavians formed in the '70s what is considered to be the first American ski club, the Nansen. But until 1932 the sport was about as obscure as curling is today. About that time, the Alpine events of downhill and slalom, less exacting, less tiring and more fun than jumping and cross-country, began to get popular in the U.S.

In 1931 the first "snow train" was run by the Boston & Maine up to Warner, N.H. The Lake Placid (N.Y.) Olympics of 1932 lent an impetus. In 1933 the first ski tow was installed, at Woodstock, Vt. After that first crude tow, skiing grew by leaps & bounds--and Andy Mead grew up with it. In the 1936 Olympics, when Andy was only four but already getting used to her first pair of skis in her Vermont backyard, the U.S. women's squad paid its own way to Garmisch (and finished poorly).

But the sport had begun to catch on. Sleepy White Mountain innkeepers, accustomed to hibernate in the winter months, had their doors hammered on by eager skiers. Tows and lifts sprang up on rocky hillside pastures; trails were hewed on mountainsides. A new lingo, imported from the ski runs of Europe, came into fashion: "sitzmark"--the snow hole created by a tumbling beginner; "schuss"--a straight, speedy downhill run; "telemark" --a turn in deep snow; "christiania" or "christie"--a turn on packed snow; "gelaendesprung"--a jump, using poles. Sporting-goods stores were swamped with orders for ski outfits. In 1935, Macy's in Manhattan installed an indoor slide and taught beginners the rudiments on borax. Indoor ski jumping was a feature of Madison Square Garden's 1937-38 seasons.

Boom without Bust. The boom was on. Millionaires, infected with the skiing bug on winter Alpine vacations, saw their duty and did it. Manhattan Banker Harvey Gibson installed his unique Skimobile on New Hampshire's Cranmore Mountain, and imported Austria's famed Hannes

Schneider to teach his Arlberg technique; Joe Ryan,* with the enthusiastic vocal support of Broadcaster Lowell Thomas, built a whole village at Canada's Mont Tremblant; Averell Harriman's Union Pacific Railroad built a winter wonderland at Idaho's Sun Valley; Container Corp.'s Walter Paepcke turned the ghost mining town of Aspen, Colo, into a summer cultural center and a winter playground for expert skiers.

But skiing was expensive. It still is.

Total equipment, from boots to headgear, can add up to more than $300 (minimum, but hardly adequate: $75). The average U.S. skier, according to Ski magazine, travels nearly 2,000 miles a year, spends about $13 a day, and has an average income of more than $5,000. Winter skiing uses up eleven days of vacation time and ten full weekends.

In Europe, lodging, lifts, transportation and equipment are much cheaper. At Switzerland's Davos, ski lifts fan out into ten square miles of wide-open slopes. The Parsenn-Bahn offers a choice of skiing down to Jenaz, 18 miles away, or to the nearer villages of Saas, Serneus, Klosters or Wolfgang, each serviced by a whistle-stop railroad that hauls the skier right back to Davos. At Zermatt, in the shadow of the Matterhorn, a good skier can zip down to Italy for a spaghetti lunch and be back in Switzerland for dinner.

"If the Weather's Good . . ." During all the hustle & bustle at Cranmore, Mont Tremblant, Sun Valley and Aspen, Andy Mead was growing up. Her parents were as ski-crazy as anybody. Near the Vermont town of Rutland, Bradford and Janet Mead were building up a resort named Pico Peak, and incidentally raising their two children, Andrea and Peter--who is now wasting his early ski training in the Air Force. Ski enthusiasts with an independent income, the Meads made an annual spring pilgrimage to Switzerland's Davos. They brought up their children on a principle which the children thoroughly approved: "If the weather's good, you ski; if it's bad, you go to school."

In 1938, when Andy was six, the Meads brought a Swiss pro, Carl Acker, back from Davos. That marked the beginning of Andy's skiing education. She just watched Acker and her parents, and imitated them. She doesn't remember ever getting any formal lessons. "It seemed so simple. We just skied. If we wanted to go faster, we went faster. If we wanted to stop--well, we just stopped."

By the time Andy was a stringy eleven-year-old, she was competing with grownups. In the Women's Eastern Slalom championship, on her home course at Pico, she placed second. When she was 13, she knocked herself out for the whole season after the only bad accident of her skiing career: a leg broken* while she was dashing down the slopes to get a stretcher for an injured skier. She speaks of the accident now with the twangy taciturnity of a good Vermonter: "It wasn't much. A good skier's break."

Ups & Downs. When she was 14 she qualified for the 1947 Olympic tryouts at Sun Valley, and drove West with Dartmouth Dean Lloyd K. ("Pudge") Neid-linger, his daughter Sally Neidlinger (a member of this year's team) and North Conway's Paula Kann. Andy marveled at the wide-open Western slopes, a sharp contrast to New England's shut-in trail skiing. "I couldn't get over the idea I was going like crazy," she says. She did go like crazy: first place in the slalom, her favorite because "it's more of a problem, more of a test of skill," and second place (behind Gretchen Fraser) in the downhill. At 15, Andy was on the Olympic team.

The '48 Olympics brought her experience but no honors. And the next two years brought a series of adolescent ups & downs. At the 1949 tryouts for the F.I.S. team at Whitefish, Mont., she won both downhill and slalom. She hardly won another race all year. She fell in love; she had moods of depression; she almost decided to give up skiing.

It was at Whitefish that Andy met a blond Dartmouth skier, Dave Lawrence, 1949 U.S. giant slalom champion. They met the way skiers often do--suddenly. Dave took a header at Andy's feet, looked angrily up to see her regarding him with what he was sure was a "scornful expression." For her part, Andy didn't like the way Dave looked at her. Two weeks later they sat opposite each other at dinner, and Dave "kept looking at me in an accusing way and wiggling his eyebrows. It was absolutely infuriating." Being international skiers, they kept on meeting, and looking at each other.

"I Was Determined." But their primary interest, of course, was skiing. And Andy had her worries about that. She fell below expectations at Aspen's 1950 F.I.S. championships. She was sixth in slalom, ninth in giant slalom, twelfth in downhill. She didn't know what was wrong, but everything seemed to be. When the U.S. coach, Friedl Pfeiffer, suggested that she quit racing for a year, she thought nothing worse could ever happen to her. But "Friedl was right," Andy confesses. "I had been training for skiing night & day since 1947. I was losing the fun of it." Almost losing the fun taught her a lesson. She did not quit racing, but she became firmly convinced that she can't ski well unless she's having fun.

Lately, she has been having a lot of fun. Last winter the National Ski Association offered her--and Dave--a trip to Europe for pre-Olympic practice. A series of colds and spills wrecked Dave's trip, but Andy had one of the most fabulously successful seasons any skier could hope for. At Grindelwald she came in sixth in the downhill, second in the slalom, first in the giant slalom. Her confidence revived. Says Andy primly: "I was determined, and such were the results."

Emotional Pitch. A happy blend of determination and high spirits--Dave was touring with her and their courtship was progressing--won Andy the Hannes Schneider Pokal at St. Anton. At Chamonix (where nets are rigged to keep racers from going over precipices), she won the slalom. Then she went back to Austria and in five days won one downhill, two slaloms, and two giant slaloms.

At Sestriere, in Italy, Andy capped her season in the annual Kandahar race, regarded last year as the unofficial world championship. Andy schussed downhill like a spearheaded avalanche. She was sure she had made a good run. But when the times were announced, Andy was some 30 seconds behind the winner. Andy and Dave went off to swallow their disappointment in a cup of tea. Twenty minutes later they heard there had been a mistake in the timing: Andy was a clear-cut, two-second winner. Says Dave: "She didn't say anything, just grinned and kept on drinking tea."

Relaxed Hillbilly. A week later, Andy and Dave celebrated by getting married. The appropriate place was Davos, scene of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, where Dave had learned his skiing as a youngster. Their honeymoon included a trip West last summer, where Andy stayed in ski shape by heaving huge grain sacks, breaking a mare, and cooking chow for all hands at a Porcupine Gulch (Wyo.) ranch. Andy's admiring father-in-law, Laudy Lawrence, retired European manager for MGM, calls her a "regular hillbilly."

Dave and Andy's first investment after the wedding was a Chevrolet station wagon, and they have put it to good use, gadding about Europe. But they do not intend to spend their lives gallivanting around the ski world. Not that they intend to give up the fun of skiing. Says Andy: "We'd like to find a business where we are our own bosses. We're both pretty independent-minded. Maybe something like ranching or farming. Anyway, we'll settle close to good skiing."

Andy's immediate prospects are fun, too, but require determination if the results are to be such as she wants. She has met, and beaten, Europe's best women skiers. But she knows that any one of them can develop a winning streak, as she herself did last year.

Among the ones she looks at most thoughtfully: Austria's Trude Beiser Jochum, winner of the 1950 F.I.S. downhill; Austria's Erika ("Riki") Mahringer, Andy's best friend and, says Andy, "better than Dagmar Rom* ever was"; France's Andree Tournier Bermond, winner of last year's giant slalom at Mont Blanc; Italy's Celina ("The Tigress") Seghi, two-time Arlberg-Kandahar winner; and Germany's Hilde-Suse Gaertner, 1951 Davos-Parsenn Derby winner.

Any one of these girls--and others still unheralded--might upset Andy on any given day. Characteristically, she is more intent on doing her best than she is on winning. Says Andy: "I know it's the Olympics. Everybody wants to win. But honestly, I don't. I'd just like to do my best, that's all." Dave says: "I've learned never to wish her good luck on a race day. It just makes her mad. I just tell her to have fun."

* U.S. Olympic Skier Jim Griffith died last month as the result of a skiing accident while practicing at Alta, Utah. * Grandson of Millionaire Thomas Fortune Ryan. * Estimated chances against a break: about 800 to 1. *Glamorous blende Dagmar, winner of both F.I.S. slalom titles in 1950, has made two movies, and has reportedly "gone Hollywood." Austrians says: "She is no longer a mountain girl."

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