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BY AMANDA KUHNERT

Victor CotyStowe filmmaker shot rollsof early skiing, ski pioneers

There weren’t many cameras rolling in the early

1930s and ’40s to witness the birth of skiing in

America. At the time, skiing wasn’t exactly main-

stream. The sport attracted a smattering of foolhardy folks

brave enough to negotiate their way onto rudimentary

rope tows and down the icy mountain slopes in out-of-the-

way places, like Stowe, Vermont.

Stowe hosted America’s first ski race on Mt. Mansfield in

1934, the first single chairlift was installed in 1940, and peo-

ple soon started coming up from faraway places like New

York and Boston to try their hand at this burgeoning American

sport. Victor Coty, who lived in Stowe, made it his life’s mission

to capture on film these fleeting images of the early ski days

on Mt. Mansfield and resorts across the country.

Through the lens of his wind-up Bell and Howell 16mm cam-

era, Victor chronicled the evolution of American ski culture

and the wide range of skiers who mingled on the hill during

those early days, from the novice skier to the Olympian.

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The man behind the cameraA Princeton man, Victor, at age 41,moved to Stowe with his wife, Malli(known as Mimi), in 1942. Earlierhe’d worked for the family business,The Coty Machine, Co., inWatertown, N.Y. The Cotys boughta house just above Hob Knob Inn& Restaurant on the MountainRoad, a winding dirt road that ledup to Mt. Mansfield, which wasbeginning to gain serious momen-tum as a bona-fide ski resort.As a traveling photographer,

Victor spent a lot of time on theroad, but he shot the bulk of hisfilms on location in Stowe. Hisarchives are a time capsule of“old Stowe,” chronicling popu-lar events like the Easterparade; ballet, mogul, and aerialcompetitions; the Stowe Derby;the Sugar Slalom; and regularpeople hanging out at theOctagon eating picnic lunches.Victor began his filmmak-

ing career at the 1932Olympics in Lake Placid, andover the next 50-plus yearshe gathered enough footageto fill 500 45-minute reels, orwell over 2,000 hours, of

outdoor sporting scenes. He then edited andcompiled his favorite clips into a montageof skiing mishaps, tricks, and daring feats,mixing in some shots of fishing andwildlife, to create 90-minute movies thathe’d show for a fee at sporting clubs acrossthe country, including the Wilderness Clubof Philadelphia, the Boston Athletic Club,the Boys’ Club of NewYork City, to namejust a few. He identified himself on flyers as“America’s Foremost Outdoor Photographer,”and circulated six feature movies at a time.In his later years, Victor stayed closer to

home. If you lived in Stowe between 1946and the mid-1980s you could have gonealmost any night of the week during the win-ter months to the Akeley Memorial Buildingauditorium to watch Victor’s silent films,which he narrated and set to Bavarian music.This being the pre-television era, when

Coty fired up his projector the scenes thatunfolded on the wall revealed things peoplehad never seen before and places they couldonly dream of visiting.Along with the classic bloopers—people

falling off the lift or spectacular crashes onthe hill—he filmed many of the ski greats:Jean-Claude Killy, Othmar Schneider, FriedlPfeifer, Fred Iselin, Toni Sailer, WayneWong, and Pepi Gabl, to name a few, alongwith local legends like Sepp Ruschp, DonPost, Ruddie Alber of the Mt. Mansfield SkiClub, and ski acrobat Stein Eriksen.He also filmed cross-country skiing by

the Norwegian instructors at Trapp FamilyLodge, as well as Nordic ski legends like

In this still from one of Victor Coty’s films, Sepp Ruschp—both a former president of the Mt. Mansfield Co., andfounder of the Stowe Ski School—skis Nose Dive, 1940s. The photo was damaged after a fire at Victor’sStowe home in the 1970s. An undated photo of Victor boating with a canine companion. Next page, clockwisefrom top: Victor’s true passion—fly fishing. One of Victor’s Stowe movie posters. In an old series of photos, Stowephotographer Fred Springer-Miller shoots Vic during “a sandwich break to display three fish caught withincasting distance and within ten minutes of each other—from left, a rainbow, a brook and a brown.” To hisknowledge, Springer-Miller wrote: “Vermont’s Lamoille River is the only trout stream in New England whereyou can catch all three species—in abundance—in the same stretch of water.” A brochure from the NationalLecture Bureau. In another photo from the series on the Lamoille, the photographer says that the “pattern thatVic designed to catch brown trout in the stillwaters of the Au Sable River, the fly named after him, has provenconsistently the most deadly in the Lamoille.” Photos courtesy the Coty family; movie poster, Stowe Historical Society

victor

A news item from theBridgeport, Ct., SundayHerald, March 12, 1950.

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known by everyone for his love of life, andhad the most incredible joie de vivre ofanyone I've ever met. He would fill theroom with his joyful and full involvementin the moment. It was impossible to be inthe same room with him and not feel it. Hewas quick with a poem, a joke or a story,and also very romantic.“He was totally in love with my mother,

leaving notes all over the house for her!”But he also loved the solitude of a trout

stream, Anne recalls. “He told me it wasreally important for people to find some-thing that gave them pleasure, that renewedtheir soul. I sensed that the peace he foundon the trout stream enabled him to be sosocial and outgoing. Growing up, our housewas filled with people. My parents wereknown for their dinner parties, serving thepartridge, fish, and wild edibles they collect-ed. Their close friends Freddie Springer-Miller, Arthur and Olga Dana, and Fritz andMuriel “Moo-Moo” Wiessner all had somuch fun at our house.”Lew and Anne accompanied Victor on

many of his photo shoots, and did quite a bitof photography and editing for him. “Henever used exposure meters,” Lew remem-bers. “He could do it really well, but wecouldn’t. Sometimes we’d go through awhole roll.”When the snow wasn’t flying, Victor

spent much of his time pursuing his truepassion—fly-fishing. He even has a flynamed after him, The Coty Fly, designed byfishing legend Ray Bergman.Lew remembers heading to the Lamoille

River with his dad on more mornings thanhe can count. “We’d always go fishing andbird hunting,” he recalls.Fishing wasn’t Lew’s passion. “I don’t

have the patience for it,” he says. But heloved to ski. After years of accompanyinghis dad on photo shoots at the mountain,Lew was soon dragging Victor off-piste formore adventurous photo ops.“We were skiing the Chin before it was

mainstream,” Lew says.

A thirst for adventureLew knows every chute and glade ofStowe’s wintry backcountry, and stillspends the winter months exploring it onskis. When the snow melts, he straps onhis backpack and begins trekking intothe woods. Like his dad, he always bringshis camera.“It’s a way to share it,” Lew says. “I do

some pretty outrageous hikes; it makes themsensible. I always come home with at leasttwo or three pictures.”While Victor’s films capture the human

element of outdoor life, Lew’s pho-tographs are of nature itself. As a natural-ist, he sees the world and its most minutedetails through a zoom lens. An icicle on afrozen waterfall, animal tracks in thesnow, frost patterns on a window, a budopening in the spring.

Like Victor, Lew’s photos take you toplaces no one has ever been before, let alonephotographed. Every summer Lew heads tothe wilds of Newfoundland for a month ofcamping, trekking, and shooting photos.

Lew attributes his quiet, reserved nature tothe many hours he spent with his father out-doors. “I think it made me a bit of a loner,too,” he says.

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Per Sørlie, Sven Johanson, Joe Pete Wilson,and then 102-year-old Jackrabbit Johanssen.Although skiing was his mainstay,

descriptions on his movie posters reveal anexhaustive list of every imaginable outdooradventure performed in North America’smost beautiful places, from the CanadianRockies to the Dry Tortugas in the FloridaKeys, and seemingly every mountain, lake,and river in between.Some of the more outrageous titles

include “Skateboarding Down Colorado’sSteep Canyon Roads,” “Hang-gliding Offthe Chin at Mt. Mansfield,” and “Ice-boat-ing on Lake Champlain.”“He really loved the outdoors and that

came across in his films,” says Victor’s son,Lew, who lives in Stowe’s Nebraska Valley.“He had a great sense of humor and madepeople laugh.”A true pioneer in the ski photography

industry, Victor was one of only a coupleof other men who were out there filmingat the time. He predates ski filmmakerWarren Miller, who he often referred toas “Johnny Come Lately,” by more thana decade.Lew and his sister, Anne Steele, also of

Stowe, remember their father as a joyfulman. “He was always laughing andsinging,” Anne says. “In the car he’d alwayssing the old Princeton songs. Vic was

Freedle Coty with hisgrandfather Victor’s Belland Howell 16mm cam-era. Victor’s movies—

over 2,000 hours—are safely storedaway and await restoration, a verycostly proposition. Victor shot enoughfootage of the early days of skiing, plushunting, fishing, and other outdoorendeavors, to fill 500 45-minute reels.Two of Freedle’s photographs.

freedlecoty

Lew Coty backcountryskiing near the top ofMt.Mansfield. Lew fre-quently travels to

Newfoundland (right) to hike andexplore. For the most part, howev-er, his eye is drawn to the details.

lewcoty

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“He used to say, ‘It’s how I get back on thebeam,’ ” Lew says of his father. “It was his wayto rejuvenate. And I think it’s genetic.”

Lew will spend six hours hiking into a re-mote spot. “It charges a battery, that’s allthere is to it,” he says. “If I don’t get out intothe woods at least once a week, I start to wilt.Just like a plant. I don’t think I could gowithout it for very long.”

The next generationVictor and Lew’s pioneering spirit has trick-led down to the third generation of the Cotyfamily.

Freedle Coty, Lew and his wife Audrey’sson, moved west to Lake Tahoe after graduat-ing from Stowe High School, and immedi-ately began filming with Level 1, a skiproduction company. He spends the yeartraveling the snowiest parts of the globeshooting scenes for the production com-pany’s annual ski flick. This year Level 1’sfilm, Sunny, won a “hat trick”—Best NorthAmerican Film, Best Editing, and Best NorthAmerican Male, Parker White—at the Inter-national Film Festival in Montreal.

Freedle began skiing with Lew as a child,and then turned to snowboarding in his teenyears, about the same time his interest inphotography developed.

“I was 15 when I started filming,” Freedlesays. “I just happened to be part of this genera-tion when skiing had come very much backinto vogue—it’s called the freestyle movement.The winter of 2000 my parents bought me aSony Handycam. So that’s what I did. I imme-diately started filming all my friends and mybrother skiing and snowboarding.”

The genetic predisposition toward adven-ture didn’t escape Emil, Freedle’s youngerbrother, who is a freestyle skier and has skiedfor Level 1 in the past. Jake Blauvelt, asuper-talent in snowboarding today, lived justdown the street from the Cotys. So Freedlebegan filming him and other “really talentedskiers” in Stowe at the time. (See our featureon Jake in this issue.)

Whereas his grandfather’s films captureskiing’s more romantic beginnings, Freedledescribes today’s ski films as being “morelike a glorified music video” designed forthe short attention span of the video-gamegeneration.

Many of the ski scenes in Level 1’s latestflicks don’t actually take place on the slopes, butcapture young skiers sliding down stairways inabandoned buildings, “riding the rails” onfences and waterpipes, and taking “wall rides”along the sides of office buildings. The moreoutrageous, the better, it seems.

This is the new wave of freestyle skiing.“It’s taking skiing off the mountain and

into the streets,” Freedle says.Whereas Victor could go to almost any ski

hill and capture images on film that no one hadever seen before, Freedle’s generation of skicinematographers have to work harder to findthe new ski frontier. “The future is less aboutbold exploration and more about finding basicstuff that people can relate to,” Freedle says.He says the urban connection is growing thesports of skiing and snowboarding in placeswhere they’ve never been attempted before.

“It’s a take on skateboarding,” he says. “It’sso accessible. If you have equipment and youhave snow, you can do it anywhere.”

Fifty years ago, Victor caught on film the be-ginning of the freestyle movement, when hot-dogging, ballet, and mogul skiing were pushingthe edges of “extreme skiing.” Even though thestyle and medium of ski cinematography haschanged dramatically, Freedle feels that he andhis grandfather share a similar passion and mo-tivation.

“It’s not about the money—it’s about thelifestyle,” Freedle says. “It’s like you’re swim-ming up the river. You’re definitely on a differ-ent path. You get to explore but you also get toentertain with your final result. Ideally, you’reinspiring people to join in at some capacity.”

And like his father and grandfather, Freedlesees his photography as a way to share his ex-periences. “As soon as you pick up a camera,what you’re doing is sharing,” he says. “It’snever for yourself. If you want it to be foryourself, just use your eyes—that’s my philos-ophy.”

What happens next?Victor died in 1988 at the age of 87. “He wasborn at the start of trout fishing season, and hedied at the end of trout season,” Lew says. “I al-ways thought that was so fitting.”

Victor left behind a treasure-trove of earlyski footage. Some of the reels were destroyed ina fire that devastated Victor and Mimi’s home inthe 1970s. Although Victor had stored the filmsin a fireproof safe, water from the fire hosesdamaged a few.

The family would like to see Victor’s filmspreserved and made available to the public insome way, and Freedle is willing to donate histime to compile and edit the film, but first, theold 16mm films need to be transferred to HDdigital, which is costly.

There is one existing recording of Victor’slive narration that the Coty family hopes can beused, along with music, to give new life to theski movies for twenty-first-century viewers.

“It’s definitely a piece of this town’s historyand a piece of history, in general, in the skiworld,” Freedle says. “And it would be incredi-ble to show it again. It’s a window into anotherworld.” �

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