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Feature - Heroes, role models and twinkies

Part II Legends of the fall-line

By G.D. Maxwell

On January 27, 1935, a massive avalanche struck the Kettle Valley Railroad near Romeo section house. The slide knocked cars off their wheelsets and carried several to the valley bottom. It was 10 days before rail service was re-established between Vancouver and Nelson.

In faraway Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Lorne McFadgen was born.

If you’ve been around Whistler any length of time, you’ve most likely heard the name. If you hang around Blackcomb at all, you’ve surely run into him. And if you’ve reached the upper levels of CSIA certification, he was quite possibly the guy deciding your fate.

But if you don’t know who Lorne is, you may be forgiven for failing to understand you are in the presence of a legend. For he will surely never tell you that himself. It’s not a legend in the Arthurian sense. There is no magic, no wizardry, no divine intervention. It’s a legend built of hard work, imagination, good timing and a single-minded dedication to an all-consuming passion: skiing.

There was, as well, a crazy decision forced on a 25 year old by a big company that just didn’t get it. It could all have turned out so differently.

Had the family stayed in Nova Scotia, Lorne might have become a hockey player. He could, as his father liked to say, skate before he could walk. But the family moved west and summer jobs took him into the Rockies and eventually to Vancouver.

At 20, Lorne landed a plum job with B.C. Tel. Around the same time, he was drawn to the glamour of skiing which was undergoing a renaissance, having passed through an unprecedented period of post-war growth. As is often true with good skaters, he picked up the sport quickly. He threw himself into it whole-heartedly. In short order, he’d been certified by the Professional Ski Instructors of America and was teaching whenever he could at Mount Baker.

Juggling a job, a hobby of growing personal importance, a wife and a baby daughter required a delicate balance. But passion is, almost by definition, the absence of balance.

"I wanted to see what skiing was all about," Lorne recalls. "I loved skiing, loved teaching and wanted to immerse myself more deeply into it. I asked the telephone company for a leave of absence so I could spend the season teaching. They wouldn’t give me one. So I left… quit. Some people thought I was crazy."

Whether you’ve got a young family or not, this scenario probably sounds familiar to more than a few people living in Whistler in 2004 and wrestling with how to follow their passion. In 1960 though, there were no "world class" resorts, no multi-path career streams in the ski industry, no myriad of spinoff jobs if skiing didn’t work out, no, well, no history of guys like Lorne who’d blazed the trail.

What there was was conformity, cheesy rock ’n’ roll songs about everlasting love, "good" jobs, a growing consumer culture and dreams of a bright future if only one were to keep one’s shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone. Guys born in the middle of the Dirty Thirties and weaned on World War II just didn’t toss over a good job for some crazy dream of sliding down mountains.

Well, at least not many did.

With nothing in particular to tie him to Vancouver – and the more populated, established ski resorts located in the East – Lorne moved his family to Mount Snow in Vermont for a season before heading north to Mont Tremblant. He was assistant ski school director there. The director, as fate would have it, was a man many consider to be the father of modern ski technique, Ernie McCulloch.

Working with Ernie was a mixed blessing. There was much to learn, much to absorb. It was full-immersion into ski culture at a time that culture was undergoing rapid change in equipment, technique, ski hill operations and popularity. Ernie was one of the transforming figures who seemed to grasp the importance of the moment and help move the culture along. He was also a formidable barrier to an ambitious young man. Lorne was an ambitious young man.

Compared to Tremblant, even the Tremblant of 1965, Talisman mountain is no mountain at all. It is another of the many pimples people in Toronto sublimate their skiing Jones on while dreaming of bigger slopes, none of which are, unfortunately, nearly as accessible as Talisman, Blue Mountain, Mount St. Louis, and the necklace of private hills punctuating the Niagara Escarpment and Beaver Valley, an hour or three north of the city.

Go West Young Man… Sort Of

Opened on Christmas Eve, 1963, Talisman offered 600 vertical feet of skiing across 350 acres of former farmland serviced by a T-bar and two chairlifts. A hotel room with a private bath set you back 10 bucks and a lift ticket was a fraction of that. Two years after it opened, Lorne McFadgen arrived to run the ski school and the retail shops.

When he left 25 years later, Talisman still offered 600 vertical feet of skiing across 18 runs. It had gained both another chair, a fixed-grip quad and a new owner. Jake Hammer, the former general manager, had purchased the resort when it ran into financial problems in the early ’80s. He saw the future and the future was real estate development and the familiar-sounding four-season "mountain" resort. Increasingly, Lorne, who was by then VP of operations, found himself at loggerheads with the new owner.

His accomplishments during that quarter of a century tell the story of an extraordinary man. Though not blessed with eye-popping vertical or memorable terrain, Talisman, under Lorne’s direction, distinguished itself as a place to go to learn to ski, much as Gray Rocks did in Quebec. Offering a nurturing family atmosphere and a no-nonsense ski school, neophytes would sign up for two hours of class in the morning and spend the rest of the day practising what they’d been taught.

Lorne, with the help of wife Barb, herself an instructor, ran the ski school and set the agenda. They also operated the retail shops while he managed the groomers and snowmakers, was in charge of lift ops, rentals, the nursery and human resources. As successful as he was at all those things, it was marketing where he was truly outstanding.

To say Lorne was a salesman of skiing is a bit like saying Billy Graham is a preacher of the Christian gospel. Both statements are true, as far as they go, but both men burn with an evangelical belief that distinguishes them from the run-of-the-mill thumpers. In Lorne’s case, that fire was fuelled to a large extent by his simple desire to "… find a way to make a living out of skiing."

That quest found form in shameless self-promotion. Anyone who skied and lived during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s in Ontario must have run across Lorne McFadgen. Quite simply, if it had to do with skiing, Lorne was there.

Every year, alright, most years, some time around late October or mid-November, Lorne would find a way to put Talisman front and centre in the minds of Toronto’s skiers. Quite often, this promotion took the form of a front-page photo in the Globe and Mail, a feat of legerdemain worthy of a magician. With nine inches of snow on a 600 foot hill, Lorne would somehow pull off a photo that looked like he was taking faceshots in hip-deep powder. The fire he stoked in skiers’ souls was further fuelled by personal appearances at ski shows, shopping centres, on radio and television, promotional events and things having seemingly nothing to do with skiing – the inauguration of Air Canada flights to Florida for example.

He was a tireless promoter of skiing. Noticing a lack of regular columns about skiing in Ontario’s newspapers, he became a columnist for the Windsor Star, the Toronto Telegram and ultimately the Globe and Mail. He wrote technical tips, answered readers’ questions, illustrated good form with photos comparing it to bad form and pushed the latest in technique and equipment.

In addition to his ski columns, he wrote for magazines and was the "go-to" guy for countless journalists when they had ski stories to write. He consulted with Rossignol, travelling across the country to train wholesale sales people, consulted with the National Ski Industries Association, the Ontario Government who made him Ambassador-at-large for skiing, Canada Ski Council, Air Canada, Coca-Cola and the Canadian Cancer Society among others.

On one cross country trip to promote skiing, Lorne travelled from Corner Brook, Newfoundland to Vancouver. In 12 days, he was interviewed by 36 radio stations, appeared on 20 television shows and talked to countless newspaper reporters.

"I was finding a way to make a living out of skiing. I’d go into the U.S., Cleveland, Detroit, areas with big ski shows and I’d be skiing on wet decks, rolling ramps, whatever. While I was there, during the daytime, I didn’t have much to do so I’d make myself available by knocking on doors of radio stations to see if somebody wanted to talk about skiing. I did a few tours across Canada, sponsored by Coca-Cola and Air Canada, that were professionally set up. I didn’t have to do any door knocking, just go from interview to interview. We did 24 cities in 24 days."

Standing 5’10" and a slender, well-muscled 160 pounds, Lorne was erudite, photogenic and passionate. He was a natural spokesman and became the face of skiing in eastern Canada and into the U.S.

The World Is In A Drop Of Water, Grasshopper

At his core though, he was still a ski instructor. An outstanding ski instructor. He caught the attention of the Canadian Ski Instructors Alliance executive whenever he appeared on course for another level of certification. He caught their attention as a member of Canada’s Inter-Ski demonstration team in 1965 and 1968. "Somehow in all of that, I garnered a lot of interest and eventually, some people put me forward for being (CSIA) president. I had no inkling of that at all but there were some people working behind the scenes and I wasn’t aware of it until somebody finally asked me to become president. I didn’t have any designs on that."

Planned or not, Lorne served as CSIA president for almost five years in the early 1970s. As president, and in two more turns as a member of the Demo Team, he carried the message that Canada was a forward-looking force in skiing to Europe. He worked tirelessly across the country to raise the professionalism of ski teaching and to move its pedagogy forward, keeping in step with the advancements in equipment, technique and understanding of the biomechanics of skiing.

After leaving the presidency, he was Chairman of the Technical Committee and a Director for another five years. His stumping for skiing and hard work landed him in the CSIA National Hall of Fame, the CSIA Ontario Hall of Fame and he was the first person inducted into Blackcomb’s Hall of Fame.

As a level IV instructor and examiner, and a Level II coach, he has trained and qualified more ski school teachers than most of us have ever met. And let’s not lose track of the fact he was still running ops at Talisman while all this was going on. Since this was a time before Talisman morphed into a four-season resort, he spent 10 summers as head tennis pro at a club in Parry Sound.

He wrapped up his formal CSIA board involvement in 1979 and focused on Talisman and making a living through the 1980s. As his differences of opinion with the resort’s owner increased, he thought about what came next. "I always had it in the back of my mind that when I was finished with that I’d like to teach private lessons somewhere out west."

Despite having spent most of his adult life in Ontario, he still considered himself a Vancouverite and was drawn to the Coast Range.

He’d first skied at Whistler in 1965. He and Diamond Jim McConkey were two of the featured skiers in a film Hans Gmoser – who later started Canadian Mountain Holidays – was shooting. "There were some lines being cut down at Creekside for the public. McConk and I were up on the mountain skiing some crazy lines when Jim said, ‘This’ll get your adrenaline going.’ I said, get it going? I’m drowning in the stuff!"

He appeared in several of the films Gmoser put together and spent some pioneering days in April, 1965, skiing with him in the Selkirks, shooting while Hans scouted terrain for his future heliskiing operation.

Ontario’s Loss; Whistler’s Gain

It took another 25 years of 600 foot vertical for Lorne and Barb to get back to British Columbia and make their move to Whistler but since 1990, he’s been a top dog at Blackcomb’s ski school, teaching sessions, qualifying instructors, leading by example and generally spreading an infectious enthusiasm for all things skiing. And as if the teaching day wasn’t long enough, Lorne found time to pursue his obsession with bootfitting and indoctrinate a generation of local bootfitters into the cult of proper fit and alignment.

A writer once asked Lorne how long he’d been skiing. "I invented skiing," he answered in a dry wit. Meant in jest, Lorne has in fact invented skiing for more people than he can possibly remember. It’s hard to get him to talk about himself, but in an unguarded moment, he’ll liken teaching skiing to sculpting, working in many cases with pretty raw material. "But for me," he says, "that’s the feel-good time. It’s an incredible pleasure to help people accomplish what they don’t think they can. I can’t elaborate on it to make it as exciting as it is."

And it’s an infectious excitement. "One of the richest parts of my experience is when Lorne used to come up and do sessions some mornings," Don Guthrie recollected. "It was very magical. When he stands on two skis and talks to people, he’s a different person."

" Do sessions?" Doug Dixon interjected. "He’s the guy who ran sessions. Listening to him talk about teaching is like raiding the cupboard. I can’t tell you what it means to someone like me to have someone like Lorne comment favourably on something I’m doing as a teacher."

"If I wasn’t learning myself by doing them," Lorne replied, "I’d probably quit teaching."

Which is a touchy subject. Someone meeting Lorne for the first time might be forgiven for not knowing and maybe not entirely comprehending the magnitude of his contribution to skiing. His salt-and-pepper hair has gone mostly salt, almost no pepper. He’s two inches shorter than he once was. His pace is slowed by an aggravating pinch somewhere along the length of his sciatic nerve that sends cascades of white-hot pain down his right leg and makes walking the distance from the parking lot to the daylodge a challenge some mornings and multi-day privates almost impossible. And his right hand trembles with the unmistakable signs of Parkinson’s Disease that started to make its presence known last October.

Still, he markets. Himself, skiing, a lifetime’s passion. He hand writes in excess of 100 cards to clients and friends before the start of each ski season. He’s not willing to give it up. I ask him if they’ll carry him out with his ski boots on, a question I’m certain he’d have answered in the affirmative a year ago. Now I’m uncertain whether it’s even an appropriate question to ask.

"I’m inclined to still say yes… but it seems a little ridiculous. So far, I’m okay dealing with it. But it’s been a very brief time. The thing that’s got my attention is not the Parkinson’s, although it probably should have; it’s the frickin’ nerve. The pain is affecting what I do. But I’m optimistic. When I believe I can’t go out and teach, that’ll be the time to quit. I think I can know that."

The popular ski media is, unfortunately, peopled with stories of 23 year olds whose athletic and gymnastic skills are prodigious and allow them to fly off cliffs and live to revel in the glory. I’m guilty of writing several of them – far too many – myself. The sad fact is that there is no market for stories about old farts who teach skiing, live skiing, and get their biggest thrill from helping other people tap into that most amazing passion. And that is truly a shame, for such stories hold a far greater potential to inspire people to get out and ski.

As far as I know, neither Doug nor Don nor Lorne can fly. They can come close on skis and doubtless, they’ve brought a joyous sense of flight-like freedom to the people whose lives they’ve touched in their years of teaching. They’re not Superman, but they are super men. And if I can be just a little bit like them and still derive anything like the enjoyment I’ve gotten from skiing big mountains when I get to be their age, that’ll do.



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