Skiing Heritage News

If you have bound volumes or collections of old ski magazines, please consider donating them to ISHA for inclusion in our reference libraries. A tax-deductible donation or bequest will help us produce a better, more useful, more entertaining magazine. Email seth@masia.org to arrange for a pick-up.

Scott Poles: 50th Anniversary

This is a letter from Ed Scott to John Fry, sent in 1986. It's been lightly edited for spelling and punctuation.

I grew up just outside New York City, on Long Island, from age 2. My father made me a pair of pine skis when I was 10 years ago, from a plan in The Boy Mechanic.

For Christmas 1932 I was given a pair of 8-foot Northland pine skis with a simple toe strap through a slot in the ski and of course no steel edges. I went to school in western Massachusetts. Wearing galoshes, we’d walk up a hill, set the skis down pointed down the fall line, kick our toes into the straps, and run straight down the hill balancing with our hands, like a tightrope walker (no poles, of course).

Then in the 1935 Thanksgiving-Christmas shopping rush I got a job in Macy’s ski department. After Christmas I switched to Alex Taylor and Co., an old New York City Ed Scott in Sun Valley sporting goods store that was New York’s leading ski shop at that time. They operated New York’s first ski trains, on weekends, running up into New England. We operated a ski shop in a converted baggage car. Once at the destination, the train parked all day and we employees go to ski, too.

I was hooked. Here was a new and interesting sport, in beautiful surroundings, and exclusive enough so that you would feel that you’d discovered a unique and private world.

The next two winters I worked at the ski department of Wannamaker’s Department Store, then in 1938-39 at Jules Andre’s unique and charming ski specialty shop near Grand Central Station.

When I first heard of Sun Valley, I went to the Union Pacific office in New York and was told that Saks Fifth Avenue ran the ski shop as a concessionaire. I applied for a job and was interviewed by Roberta Brass, the shop manager, whose family ranch had been bought by the UP for Sun Valley’s resort location. They chose to send one of Saks’ ski shop employees instead. A couple of years later I tried again and a Swiss, Fred Piccard, had taken over the shop at Sun Valley. I met him and was offered a job, including round trip rail ticket from New York.

But in the fall of ’39 my father died and I felt I should get into some permanent sort of work, so I resigned before ever seeing Sun Valley.

I went with Ford Motor Co., in an auto assembly plant, then to Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines, then back to Ford, on tank engines. They drafted me in ’42. I was in the Army, as a tank mechanic in Europe, until ’45.

I had traveled the West in ’32 and always thought I’d like living there. So I went out to California in ’46. In the fall I looked for a second job, nights or weekends, at my old trade of ski mechanic. There was not a single ski shop in all of San Francisco! I had to go to Berkeley. I met Bill Klein, who said he didn’t need anyone in Berkeley but needed a full-time man for the winter at the Sugar Bowl. I asked “What’s that?” All it was was the only ski resort in all of California with a chairlift!

I had a year-round job in a machine shop, so I turned down the Sugar Bowl offer. But driving home I thought “This job that I have isn’t that great, so why not try a winter in the mountains?”

Well, I found paradise. I was in skier’s Heaven. I got to make a few runs nearly every afternoon when the shop wasn’t busy, and on more of a mountain that I’d ever seen in the East. I enjoyed the people, and was filling a real need, so I decided that I’d spend the rest of my life at a ski resort, and that if I did it, it may as well be the biggest and best one.

Aspen had built its first chairlifts in that winter (’46-’47), and the choice was Sun Valley or Aspen. I drove to Sun Valley first, got a winter job at Pete Lane’s shop in the Sun Valley Inn, and found work on two new ski lifts for the fall. So I never went on to check out Aspen.

I worked at Lane’s in ’47 to ‘49 and then opened by own shop, repairs only, in nearby Ketchum. A couple of years showed no profit so I began adding unique and better items to retail -- foreign skis, boots, and bindings when the other shops offered mostly domestic brands. I looked for a really good metal pole but none were being made. All were too heavy and too flexible.

So I bought light steel shafts from Kroydon, a golf-shaft specialist who’d ventured into ski poles. I had Dartmouth Ski Co. make children’s size rings out of adult-quality materials, and thus had a small, light ring. I bought Vibram molded rubber grips with integral adjustable leather straps, and thus assembled a distinctive and better pole. I sold maybe 50 to 100 pairs per year.

One fall I ordered a bunch of shafts from Kroydon and was told they’d quite making them and had sold their tooling to Sigmund Werner Co. I wrote them and was told that they wouldn’t sell shafts to a potential competitor.

I’d seen a thin, tapered, light aluminum shaft on poles made by the Dale Boison Co. in L.A. several years earlier, but Boison had quit the pole business. I asked Warren Miller to locate the source for these shafts. He did, and I bought maybe 100 duplicates from the tube-tapering specialist, Le Fiell Mfg. Co.

Someone would buy a pair, go skiing, and come back with a friend that afternoon who had to have a pair too. They sold on “feel” alone.

Next year I had them use larger diameter tubing with thinner walls, which obviously would make a stiffer yet lighter shaft. These sold even faster.

Well, I knew I had a hot item on my hands. If I didn’t do something with it, sooner or later one of the larger firms in the ski industry would see a pair that I’d sold, realize the potential, and start making them.

I had absolutely no capital or facilities or experience in running such a business. What to do? Just bend my head down and start moving forward.

I took a couple of sample poles and a list of Head Ski dealers, and drove all over the West taking orders. I’d go in a shop and ask “What’s the best pole that you carry?” Invariably it would be Eckel, a nicely finished steel pole with a slender, buggy-whip-like shaft that was as heavy as a croquet mallet. I’d ask them to hold two of our poles in one hand and one Eckel in the other, and flick them back and forth. Their eyes would bug out. “Two of yours weigh less than one Eckel.” It wasn’t quite true, but it seemed so. Then I’d ask them to put one hand half-way down the shaft and flex each one. “And yours are twice as stiff.” That was true. So I’d say, “OK, how many do you want?”

It was literally that easy. I came home with initial orders for one or two thousand pairs, and figured I had it made. Went to the ski pawn shop that passed for a bank, and showed them the stack of orders. I was told “That’s just a stack of paper. We can’t loan on that.”

I managed to borrow a little, stretch credit to the limit, make and ship the poles. I couldn’t keep up with the reorders. It was an overnight sensation, partly because all other poles were designed stupidly and unimaginatively. What could be simpler than using aluminum tubing of larger diameter and thinner walls? Why hadn’t anyone stumbled on the idea? I succeeded partly because this was the year wedeln hit the U.S. People want to make short, quick, linked turns initiated by a pole plant. A light-swing-weight pole was the only way it could be done easily.

I made no profit on $16,000 gross. Next year I raised the price from $17.95 to $19.95 retail, sold $32,000 worth and still no profit. Next year, $21.95, $83,000 gross, still no profit. Next year, $24.95, $125,000 gross and still no profit. Next year we grossed $252,000 and still no profit.

We were spending about 10% of our gross on advertising and giving away almost 200 pairs to racers in each FIS and Olympics, which made the poles the best-known and most in-demand in the world, very quickly, but it wiped out any profit.

In 1965 Tom Corcoran, one of the best U.S. racers and a Harvard M.B.A., asked me how we were doing, and when I told him he bought out our largest stockholder (excluding myself), arranged for a large working-capital loan, and took an active and enlightened interest in the business.

Outsiders have always thought my business was bigger and more profitable than it was, and growing rapidly. Eighteen firms approached us, at varying level of seriousness, about acquisition. True Temper’s ski division, Shakespeare fishing equipment, Outdoor Sports Industries (Gerry), Browning Arms, Sea & Ski, Garcia, O.M. Scott (grass seed), Wilson Sporting Goods, Unitex Industries (Campbell chain), and others. I told all of them we’d sell, but not until we could have a big enough year to command a good price. I set this at $1 million first, and they all shook their heads. As interest heated up (I leaked the information about suitors to the trade press), I jumped it to $2 million. Finally, Kingsford Charcoal offered $1.2 million down and would make another $1.3 million available if profits could be increased over a five-year period. The down payment alone was 50 times our accumulated earnings over the 10 years we’d been in business, and 40 times our best year’s earnings, so it was too good to turn down.

Our largest stockholder and a lender of $100,000, which was long past due, was a wonderful sport and said “What kind of crapshooter are you? Why not hang on for a higher offer?” I answered that the conglomerate craze couldn’t last forever (it ended soon after), that Garcia has just entered the pole business and would louse it up (they did), and that the offer was far more than we were worth. So we all agreed to accept it, in March 1969.

I ran the company until October 1971 and was fired when we sued Kingsford for some added stock they owed us and were withholding.

The goggles came after that. I’d tried to get Kingsford to buy the rights to Bob Smith’s innovative and promising double-lens goggle, but they felt his asking price was too high for a product not yet well established in the market.

From 1971 to 1975 I was retired, then went into making bicycle brake parts, which I’m still doing. I was in the ski industry in the period when I think it was the most fun, and think that I got out at about the right time. I doubt that I’d function very well in it today.

ITEM: I did not pioneer or invent the aluminum pole—5/8-inch-diameter aluminum of a soft, low-strength, cheap alloy was almost universally used in rental poles because they rarely broke and could easily be straightened when bent. I had seen ¾-inch-diameter aluminum shafts on an experimental pair, in Alex Taylor’s ski shop in 1936.

ITEM: The contribution that helped and benefited more skiers than the pole, by far, was the ski boot re-shaping press that I designed and which still is in use in most good ski shops. It was first produced in the mid-1960s about when the craze for “cast iron” boots began (both leather and plastic). It made it possible for people to ski fairly comfortably in boots that were impossibly painful before the pressure points had been re-shaped. Without it, hundreds of thousands of people would have quit the sport, and other hundreds of thousands would never have taken it up. Light, well-balanced (low swing weight) poles would have been stumbled upon by others very soon after I did it, anyway.

Racing Activity:
This was the most fun that I got out of the ski business, as I enjoyed racing(at the Class B level only, loved to watch races, and had good rapport with the racers due to doing repair work on their equipment. In 1960, our first winter in the pole business, I ran a free ski repair service for all of the racers at the Squaw Valley Olympics. The loose rules under which we operated forbade giving away free equipment (though all mechanical work was free) to the racers, so we had to charge them for our poles and others that were in the shop. Exceptions: We had given free poles to the U.S. and Canadian teams a month earlier. Nevertheless, many top racers put aside the free poles they had, and bought and raced with ours. Word of this usage of a brand new product from an unknown manufacturer spread pretty quickly, and helped us a lot.

Two years later, at the Chamonix FIS, our poles were used by 13 of the 18 medal-winners and almost three-fourths of all the entrants.

At Innsbruck in 1964, under the watchful eyes of pole manufacturers who had paid thousands of dollars to racers for using their poles, we didn’t do quite as well but still had well over half of all entrants on our product.

In Portillo in 1966—the “Secret Race”—far from the watchful eyes of their patrons, the racers were free to use what they pleased and we hit an incredible 5 out of 6 of the entrants.

From then on it was all downhill, as the fees paid per racer became so high and the competition between pole manufacturers so keen (one U.S. manufacturer paid an Austrian $5,000 just before the Chamonix downhill to switch poles, and another U.S. manufacturer offered the Austrian team $5,000 for anyone who’d win a gold medal using his poles, then left Grenoble the day a girl won one) that our “no payola” policy reduced our statistics considerably. Still, we had 50% of the field at Val Gardena in 1970, my last year of racer promotion. In all that period we never paid a cent to any racer, coach or team, and only twice were we ever asked to. The racers respected our policy.

I think that no other ski product has ever dominated its segment of the industry so totally and for so long a period, and I find considerable satisfaction in having built it up without racer payola.

JOURNAL OF ISHA, THE INTERNATIONAL SKIING HISTORY ASSOCIATION
The International Skiing History Association is a not-for-profit corporation, whose mission is to preserve and advance the knowledge of ski history and to increase public awareness of the sport's heritage.

ISHA, 4582 South Ulster St., Suite 1340, Denver, CO 80237 303-893-0903
Skiing Heritage, 133 South Van Gordon St #300, Lakewood CO 80228 303-987-1111