Ed. Note: When we learned that PSIA was celebrating a 20th it seemed very logical to look back at its beginnings, just as we have with NSAA elsewhere in this issue. And for this assignment, who more logical than Doug Pfeiffer, known more recently as the editor in chief of Skiing magazine and as a contributing editor to Ski magazine, who was once the President of the Far West Ski Instructors Association and a driving—if controversial—force behind the founding of the Professional Ski Instructors of America.
The Professional Ski Instructors of America didn’t just happen. It was born of a struggle for identity and independence. At one point, it survived a major threat to its existence—a revolution in the palace—to emerge a better organization and to finally have the international identity and respect its original founders sought with such determination.
Now 20 years old, one wonders, can the PSIA sustain the pace of the next 20 while being responsive to the needs of today’s increasingly choosy market?
The motivating force behind the formation of the PSIA was Bill Lash, a sometimes abrasive and brash young certified ski instructor for Alf Engen at Alta, Utah. Without Lash’s near-obsessive drive, the original organization might never have come into being, or if it had, might have been as fractured and bumbling as the old United States Ski Association proved to be over the years.
This June marks two-score years since the day at The Big Mountain, Whitefish, Montana, when Lash in effect said to a national assemblage of U.S. ski teachers, ‘We’ve been planning independence and corporate identity for ten years. Now is the time to do it. We must incorporate as PSIA. Now. This year.”
Independence? From what?
From the National Ski Association and its divisions, that was what, and from threats by the United States Forest Service to do their own certifying. Until 1965, what is now known as the USSA was then the NSA. U.S. skiers had begun to interface increasingly with the national ski associations of Alpine Europe (thanks to Bob Beattie’s egodriven campaign to prove U.S. racers as good as Europe’s best), and the NSA’s handle began to be an embarrassment. National? Well, of what nation? As a result, those everwise solons of organized skiing came up with the USSA. But foreign detractors still snickered—the United States of what? Brazil or Mexico? (Today, maybe Phil and Steve Mahre have changed all that.)
If the NSA folk were embarrassed by their name and status in the organized ski world, we professional ski teachers were positively furious. Ever since 1937, when Dr. Raymond S. Elmer, Roland Palmedo, and others of the U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association organized the first certification exams among ski teachers, they made sure the pros would not be certifying themselves. The intent was to raise the standards of ski instruction, and to protect the skiing public from unscrupulous pretenders—those self-styled ‘champions” from this or that country.
So it came to pass that president Elmer of the USEASA appointed two venerables from Dartmouth, Ford Sayre and Charlie Proctor, to pass judgment upon the professionals. (Among the first certified, Roger Peabody.) Within a decade, other divisions of the NSA followed suit.
As the years wore on, some pros alleged that the amateur committee chairmen exercised powers of judgment superseding those of the professional examiners. No wonder we young bloods would exclaim with enough heat to melt the snows of winter, “How come so and so passed (or failed) the exams? It’s not fair.”
There were also the ceaseless battles over technique, the how-to of skiing, and of methodology, the how-to of teaching. Those of Austrian heritage of course plumped for the Arlberg or the Wedeln technique. Those of French persuasion argued for the Allais direct-to-parallel approach. Those of Canadian descent, like myself, argued for pragmatism and eclecticism—whatever works best for the situation, be it snow, terrain, or student. If words were dollars, the ski instructors would own the world!
Further threatening to melt our little world of snow, the United States Forest Service offered a few hot blasts. Around 1949-50, the USFS’s chief recreation officer John Sieker, offered this torrid gem: “(This)…is a warning about certifying teachers at public land centers. A cleanup is needed in the business of approving instructors. There is too much delay, too much red-tape, too many different methods of certifying and too much difference in standards. If this is not corrected, the Forest Service soon may do its own approving of teachers for centers under permit.”
He also took a fiery swat at ski area operators. Said he, “The Forest Service is also looking over—evaluating—lift and tow services. The complaint in general is that these services cost the public too much.” Sieker also rattled the cage of the ski-patrollers with these words: (“’. . . ski patrols are far from standardized . .. Some are highly efficient, but they grade down to poor. The remedy, we Foresters believe, lies in paid patrolmen. Paid men, responsible to forest administrators, must do good jobs.”)
Hot words, those, but the effect was chilling, especially in the West where 95 percent of ski areas were on land under USFS management. The USFS required that “… the ski school director and instructors teaching on forest service lands be certified by the National Ski Association or one of its divisions.”
Yes, that’s the way it was, prior to PSIA. The amateurs and the USFS had us by the beartraps, and it was a legally binding situation. We certainly didn’t need Uncle Smokey Bear breathing hot on our backs. Nor did we need amateurs passing judgment on the neatness of a would-be teacher’s tracks, the deftness of the pole plant wrist-flick, the punctilious placement of stemming ski, the “parallelity” of the parallel, the depth of knowledge about how to teach a body to ski. We wanted the right to certify our own, to raise our own standards, to control our own destiny.
In California, in 1953, Tommi Tyndall (founder of Snow Summit ski area in Big Bear Lake) drew up a proposal for a National Council of Ski Instructors which was more or less blown out of existence by the amateurs. In the next year or two Tyndall and I drew a constitution and bylaws for a National Professional Ski Instructors Association with our regional Far West Ski Instructors Association taking a lead role at first and gradually phasing out our importance as other regional associations joined in. The FWSIA board of directors even went so far as to allow $100 for legal fees. We were thwarted by that delightful scalliwag, president of the FWSIA Sepp Benedikter. (Remember him, holder of the rare diamond Sun Valley Sun, recent inductee to the National Ski Hall of Fame, longtime ski school director, one-time owner of Rebel Ridge, and would-be owner of a destination resort near Yellowstone?) Sepp withheld the funds, apparently not trusting the Tyndall-Pfeiffer motives for nationalization and independence.
So there we were, now thwarted by the professionals!
“Don’t give up, fellow,” wrote Bill Lash, Turned out he’d already been struggling the good fight for more than five years. Said he, in effect, “Let’s pool our resources and pull together.”
Pool and pull we did, along with many others. Lash was a full-time nation-wide traveling salesman for a rubber gasket company. Had his employer closely scrutinized Lash’s expense vouchers, doubtless he’d have found numerous lunches and dinners with Paul Valar, Herbie Schneider, Kerr Sparks, and Stan Heidenreich from the East; with Jimmy Johnston, and Otto Hollaus in the Midwest; with Willy Schaeffler, Max Durcum, and Curt Chase in the Rockies; with Junior Bounous, Dr. Chuck Hibbard, Don Rhinehart and Keith Lange around Salt Lake; with Buzz Fiorini and George Savage in the Pacific Northwest. My name must have figured in there for the Far West—know I didn’t pay for a lot of those dinners.
But of course we were all primarily interested in those rubber gaskets for jointing concrete sewage pipes. (For flushing ski technique verbiage, perhaps?), and secondarily in getting the PSIA off the ground.
Lash, in a clever ploy to avoid direct confrontation with the amateurs and the USFS, insisted, “this is to be an organization of individual instructors.” After five more years of annual get-togethers at Arapahoe Basin, Colorado, and Brighton or Alta, Utah, a certain mutual respect developed.
But it wasn’t easy. One of the facets of skiing—that of technique—was a real mind-boggler. The old Arlbergers were still down-stemming and rotating. The new ones were hot on wiggling with wedeln. The Swiss were strong on up-stemming, and counter rotating and up-unweighting. The French wanted to do it with legs together, and going down into the turns. And Americans like Bounous and Canadians like me were thick into tip-thrusting, foot-swivelling, and other exotica.
Eventually Lash’s insistence on business before technique, common problems in the search for identity and independence, prevailed. We gained the respect of the Forest Service, thanks to men like F.C. Koziol, John Herbert, and the late Slim Davis. We proved to the amateurs that most of us now had permanent addresses, knew how to read and write (sort of), and were genuinely interested in doing right by the skiing public. Eventually, even the tradition-bound East finally fought to independence and got their own Eastern Professional Ski Instructors Association. Ah, savor that word, professional, boys. It didn’t come easy.
And so it came to pass at Whitefish that day 20 years ago, when (like Brigham Young surveying the Great Salt Lake valley and exclaiming, this is the place!) Bill Lash announced, “Now is the time!”
The PSIA was on the take-off strip, roaring down the runway, about to fly. As a national entity (there were perhaps 1,000 certified and associated instructors around at the time), the PSIA gained recognition in the international community of ski teachers. An “American Technique” was fashioned, after the Austrian-Swiss methods. A demonstration team was sent to the Interski in 1965—the World Congress for Ski Schools.
But the organization never got off the ground with potential members despite nearly getting up to speed. Some of the organizing officers began to feel the organization was for them instead of for the membership. And the “American Technique” was already more than five years behind the thinking of many enlightened U.S. ski teachers even on the day it was first presented in 1963. The technique was turning out a generation of instructors and students who skied like robots, by the numbers, in a very unnatural, quirky series of “basic principles and final forms.”
So, came the revolution, led in the main by eclectic-minded Westerners like attorneys Jim Riley and Bill Lenihan, followed by a whole passel of disgruntled young Turks who knew for a fact that great skiers didn’t ski like the book said we were supposed to. (An aside—one of the more compelling motivations for yours truly to develop and promote freestyle competition was to show those rascal PSIA technicians that there was more than one way to bob a bump.)
This revolution among the palace guards was finally over by 1972. Some of the old guards took the struggle very personally and left the organization in a huff. Among these, Lash and Paul Valar. More’s the pity, since both still had much to contribute. Nevertheless, ever since, the PSIA has forged ahead, gaining speed, and finally to fly in the international community of ski teachers right there up front, at the head of the formation.
That the flight is reasonably smooth is a tribute to the organization and its administrators of the last 10 years.
But there maybe turbulence ahead. Increasingly, the PSIA is liable to be shot down on a matter of “technique”. There is danger that the obsession in recent years about the carved turn is replacing the old final form. ‘ When one watches the American millions out having a good time on the nation’s slopes, they obviously don’t seem to ski very much like your certified ski teacher. Is that to be expected? Has it always been thus? Or have the pros, in their zeal for perfection, simply split hairs so fine and so precisely that what they have developed is a fine system for the training of ski teachers? But are they really answering the needs of that ever present skiing public?
Time will tell. At least this writer is confident the that PSIA is now democratic enough and professional enough to address the issue in a reasonable way, and in all likelihood, will prosper for at least the next twenty years.
PSIA—you’ve earned your wings.
