I attended Williston for my senior year in 1951-52 and became involved with the ski team there just before the start of the 1951 Christmas vacation break. Mr. Babcock, one of the team coaches, had a tradition of taking a group of student-skiers to Stowe [Vermont] for a week of practice during the break and I talked my way into the group, based largely on my life-long passion for skiing and previous participation in a ski camp run by Dartmouth’s famed Olympic skier Warren Chivers at Mt. Moosilauke. Based on my performance at Stowe, Coach Babcock convinced me to drop off the basketball team and join the ski team.
We had daily practices at the Williston ski area, located a few miles out of town on the western slopes of Mt. Tom. The area was fairly close to a main road as I recall, and consisted of a 20 meter ski jump, and a sloping pasture area where there was a 500-foot rope tow with a small warming hut/motor at the base. The slalom courses and general skiing area were in the pasture. There was a adjacent downhill course that started up on Mt. Tom and for the majority of the run was nothing more than a fairly flat & winding pathway through the shrubs and trees until it took a sharp turn right into a wide open and steep 100 yard run that flattened out abruptly at the finish line. It was a very short course and all the fun was at the end. There was no ski lift of course, so skiers had to trudge through deep snow and trees up the course. Timing was done by sending off skiers from the start at regular minute intervals and a listing of racer’s names, so if skier A left at 3:10:00 and finished at 3:12:15, his time was calculated at 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Obviously this system was fraught with opportunities for mistakes and uncertainly!
Cross-country skiing was done in the farm lands and pastures near the ski area. I remember we used cross-country skis with the three-pin bindings and most of us used our regular ski boots for cross-country as well as for alpine skiing by drilling holes in the boot sole. Back then ski boots were leather and not really very stiff so it worked fairly well. Cross-country skiing was only practiced on weeks when we faced an opponent who had a full four discipline team, like Mt. Hermon [School].
The jumping hill allowed one to jump 50-60 feet from the take-off lip onto the steeply sloping run out below. Again, since most of our opponents only fielded slalom and sometimes downhill squads, we only practiced sporadically. I had done some jumping on the jumping hill run by the local Swedish society in my home town of Holden, MA so I had some familiarity with jumping, but it was never my favorite.
The slalom event was the most popular since everyone could see the event and timing was much more precise. Because the ski area was out of town, we almost never had any spectators other than team members and coaching staff so the “road of the crowd” as never an issue. Our slalom hill was not very steep and fairly short so Coach Laurent or Babcock usually set fast courses down the fall line using multiple flush, hairpin, open, and closed gate combinations. Alpine skis were laminated ash and hickory and not everybody had steel edged skid skis; most skis were over seven feet in length and used cable bindings that didn’t really give great control. Slalom became my favorite event at Williston and later in college at Dartmouth.
Other team members I recall are: Jack Harrington, who was captain and later went to Middlebury, Larry Ball, Ted Bosworth, and Brad Milne. It was a fun group and skiing at Williston was a great introduction to ski racing for me and others.
Do you have favorite memories of a lost Williston Academy place? Let us know in the comment section below!