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Lifetime Achievement Award winner David Rowan
Short
skis, long life
Virginia 'Ginny'
Cochran, mother of four Olympians, remembered
David Rowan, editor and publisher, dead at 78
Reprinted from Skiing Hertiage website
David Rowan, founder of the industry’s trade publication Ski Area Management (SAM Magazine) died on Wednesday, June 8, from a rare cancer, mesothelioma.
Rowan started his industry career in 1949 when he joined Ski Magazine as editor, interim publisher and ad salesperson. Rowan stayed with Ski until 1961 when the magazine was sold to a New York publisher. By 1962, Rowan, along with Otis Ridge Ski Area owner David Judson, organized the first national association of ski area operators, the National Ski Areas Association, and launched Ski Area Management, the industry’s first trade publication devoted to the owners and operators of of ski areas, both large and small, in North America.
In 1964, Rowan rejoined Ski Magazine as publisher, all the while ensuring that SAM continue to grow. In 1973, Rowan rejoined the world of independent publishing and in the last 32 years has overseen the growth of SAM. Rowan stepped outside his role as publisher many times as a tireless advocate of the suppliers. Over the years, Rowan’s editorials have shaped the debate over almost every controversial subject in our industry. He never feared championing unpopular causes if he thought they were right. He also organized conferences, and with his daughters, created the SAMMY Awards andCutters Camp, and ensured that the editorial content of the magazine challenge, help and, above all, be true to its original mission statement: “Ski Area Management intends to be a forum for the exchange of constructive ideas between area operators.”
Because of his efforts, Rowan was inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame in 1996 as a Ski Sport Builder. Rowan was also the recipient of the NSAA Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Our father was a pioneer and we are so very proud and honored to continue to pursue the high standards that he set forth in SAM,” say Olivia and Jennifer Rowan, publishers of SAM. “His writing, his style, his grace, his wit and his wisdom were rare and we are fortunate as an industry to have benefited from his years of devotion and hard work.”
In David's own final words to his family he said, “My one over-riding thought seems so banal as I write it, but perhaps truth is banal. It seems to me "decency" is a human quality that should be pursued above all others. maybe it smacks a little of elitism, but I don't care. If people measured their actions against a standard of "what is the decent thing to do?" the world would be a much better place. Such a standard forces you to reach down into your innermost self and measure your action against your own innermost standard of right and wrong. No expediency allowed. Yes, an unsophisticated concept, but it has been a core one with me ever since I learned it as a little English schoolboy."
SAM Magazine will honor David in its September issue and a memorial service will be planned in the coming weeks. Outside of his passion for winter, David Rowan was an avid gardener and his love for the theater was fulfilled with many roles in local productions.
“Our father’s gardens are brimming with beautiful blooms,” say the Rowans. “We ask that in lieu of flowers, a donation can be made to his local theater.
Short skis, long life
Snowsports pioneer Clif Taylor, 1980 Golden Quill Award winner, died on March 6. The following is reprinted from the Summit Daily News:
He died a vindicated man.
Clif Taylor, 83, the 10th Mountain Division army veteran
who pioneered the virtue of short skis and who could teach a beginner
to parallel ski in "two turns," as he always said, died March 6 in
Evergreen, CO.
The Vermont native died secure in the knowledge he was right about
short skis and with two of the "Shortee" skis he invented in 1959 standing
against the wall of his room as a reminder.
Taylor's vindication was a battle he did not have to fight. In the last six
years, the ski industry figured out shorter skis helped people make better
turns.
"The public forced it," Taylor said in a 2001 interview at Copper Mountain where
he made his home until two years ago when ill health forced him to a lower
elevation.
Taylor started his short ski revolution in 1955. For most of the next three
decades he barnstormed the world to promote short skis and the Graduated Length
Method (GLM) of instruction he invented to go with them.
GLM took beginners to parallel skiing by using first
3-foot, 4-foot then 5-foot skis.
GLM gained ground before long, difficult-to-ski boards inexplicably, in his
mind, came back into fashion.
Taylor blamed the counter-revolution on the Professional Ski Instructors
Association. Taylor wrote in a 1999 edition of Skiing
Heritage magazine that
the association did not approve of lessons on skis shorter than 5 feet, nor
of the direct-parallel system of teaching.
In Taylor's mind, the regression was responsible for the abysmal ski school
failure rate where only 15 percent went on to embrace the sport.
He laid that fact at the foot of the struggling resorts watching their numbers
flatten or dwindle as baby boomers aged.
In the 2001 interview, Taylor said he felt like the ghost of telephone inventor
Alexander Graham Bell looking down from the heavens today at everybody talking
on a cell phone.
Nevertheless, Taylor's life work landed him in the National Ski Hall of Fame
in 1979 and the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame in 1999.
By 1989, Taylor had moved to Copper Mountain to make a
new life for himself in his beloved Colorado at a ski mountain he loved, one
that happened to be near his World War II training grounds, Camp Hale.
His colleagues tagged him "The Legend," his friend and co-worker Linda Simmons
said. Taylor, always a ham and a "shameless self promoter," as friend C.J.
Julin used to kid him, loved it.
In 2002, Copper Mountain and Intrawest threw Taylor a gala 80th birthday party
to celebrate his skiing life and his importance to the resort community.
"It is hard to express my thanks," Taylor said before leaping to his favorite
topic. "People could have been skiing on shorter skis 40 years ago. To see
these kinds of results is unbelievable."
Skiing clothing pioneer Klaus Obermeyer met Taylor in 1946 in Aspen when Taylor
launched a career in the fledgling ski industry.
"He had a vision and his vision was to make it easier for people to learn how
to ski," Obermeyer said. "He taught them to dance down the mountain."
Taylor joined what became the 10th Mountain Division in 1943, part of the core
of ski instructors and enthusiasts that formed the mountain and cold-weather
fighting division.
In 1945 in the Italian campaign, Taylor joined 1,200 other
men who scaled the cliffs of Riva Ridge in the dark, hard pressed to make the
summit by dawn when they would be visible to German gunners.
Taylor was an artillery observer, directing heavy guns. During the battle,
a German shell hit nearby Taylor's observation post, wounding him.
As of Monday, arrangements for Taylor were incomplete. Simmons said he would
be cremated and his ashes spread at Camp Hale. His friends at Copper will be
arranging a memorial service for later this month.
Timeline:
• Born Dec. 29, 1921
• 1943, joins 10th Mountain Division and goes on to fight in Italy
• 1945, shows GI buddies how to parallel turn in their combat boots while
glissading a steep slope in the Julien Alps — the shape of things to come
• 1946, teaches skiing in Aspen
• 1948, begins to tinker with short skis at Mad River Glen in Vermont
• 1955, teaches on short skis at Hog Back in Vermont
• 1959, manufactures Shortee skis and teaches the Graduated Length Method
of learning
• Publishes book “Instant Skiing” that officially launches the
movement
• 1979, inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame
• 1989, moves to Copper Mountain
• 1999, inducted into the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame
• Dies, March 6, 2005
Jim Pokrandt, Summit Daily News
Virginia 'Ginny' Cochran, mother of four Olympians, remembered
Ginny Cochran, winner of NASJA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, passed away on Feb. 5. The following is from the United States Ski Association:
Virginia "Ginny" (Davis) Cochran, matriarch of the renowned skiing Cochran family which saw her four children become Olympic racers, died Feb. 2 after a long illness. She was 76.
She and husband Mickey had four children - all of whom raced in the Olympics, with Barbara Ann winning the 1972 slalom title. The next generation of "Cochran Kids" - Jessica Kelley (Starksboro, VT), daughter of Lindy Cochran Kelley, and Jimmy Cochran (Keene, NH), son of Bobby Cochran - is on the U.S. Ski Team.
Jimmy is in Bormio, Italy, and will be racing in his first World Championships, competing in giant slalom. Coincidentally, his grandmother's memorial service is scheduled for the same day in Richmond.
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Ginny Cochran, right, receives her 2003
Lifetime Achievement Award from ESWA President Mitch Kaplan. At
left is Mary Kerr, longtime friend and NASJA member. Martin Griff
photoShe was Virginia Davis, a native Vermonter (from Hartland Four Corners - near Windsor) and a student at the University of Vermont when she met Mickey Cochran, quarterback on the football team and a semi-pro baseball player, during a car ride to Stowe in the late 1940s.
They married in 1949 and had four children. He was a high school science teacher in Windsor before they moved back to the Burlington area in 1958 as he became an engineer with General Electric.
In 1961, they bought a farmhouse on the Winooski River in Richmond, not far from Burlington, with a small hill in the back where the kids could ski after school. They installed a rope tow and he attached a spotlight to a corner of the house and pointed it at the hill so they could train at night.
While Mickey coached the kids, Ginny was "the glue keeping things functioning for the family," as daughter Marilyn once said. "She kept us going." They opened a small ski area, Cochran's, on the site and coached thousands of youngsters in skiing and ski racing for more than four decades; even today, about 800 kids ski at Cochran's each week. When Mickey, who also served a season as U.S. alpine director in 1974, died in 1998, she turned into a non-profit ski area.
All four Cochran kids raced at the Olympics - Marilyn, Barbara Ann and Bobby in 1972 in Sapporo, Japan, and Lindy in 1976 at Innsbruck, Austria. Marilyn Cochran became the first U.S. skier to win a World Cup title when she was crowned giant slalom champion for the 1969 season. In 1970, she was bronze medalist in combined at the World Championships. No. 2 daughter Barbara Ann was Olympic slalom champion at Sapporo, Japan, in 1972 after being SL silver medalist at the 1970 Worlds. All four siblings also were U.S. champions.
Jimmy Cochran spent the last two offseasons living with his grandmother when he wasn't attending preseason training camps.
"The Cochrans and their devotion to family and to skiing represent the very best of our sport, and by all acclaim, Ginny was the one who kept it all together. She was the rock everyone could count on. She was a great wife and an outstanding mother, and it was such a good feeling to bring her to the U.S. championships last March where Jimmy became the next champion from the family," said Bill Marolt, president and CEO of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. "We were honored to know Ginny and we send the Cochran family our warmest wishes and sympathies."
