New Skis 1944 By Ott Gangl

BRAND NEW SKIS, 1944 BAVARIA

By Ott Gangl -- (c) copyrighted article

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Growing up in Bavaria, I remember that my parents gave me for Christmas 1944 my very own ski outfit, really just a note saying I could have it. So off to our village shoemaker I went, I was 12 then, and he made me stand on a piece of paper and drew my feet outlines on it, measured the instep height, etc. and said he would get right on them and I could have them in a week.

Then we went to the cabinet maker in the village and he knew how I skied because I had borrowed a pair from him belonging to his son, also my age, who had the luxury of having two pairs of skies, courtesy of his dad. The cabinet maker said he would also have them in a week since he had a number of pre steamed ash blanks, hickory is not known in Germany.

You can't imagine my heart pounding after that endless week of waiting when we picked up the brand new boots, all shiny and brown with the leather strap and a buckle across the front and the square toe. My new skies made me so proud, they had a lacquered top and the cabinet maker had even put the pitch base on them, all I had to do was iron on the wax.

Leitner may have invented the steel edges by then, but we didn't know about them or need them, we thought, not until we got them.

In the fall my father had cut some nice straight hazelnut branches for poles and taken them to the shoemaker who fitted leather straps to the top, which, along with the skis which had a through slot about a quarter inch by two inches for the bear traps, we took to the local blacksmith who measured the poles and cut them and fashioned a ferule and a square pointy point at the bottom, a hole was drilled where the basket would be and a quarter inch dried and lashed willow twig circle about six inches or so in diameter was fastened with two criss-crossed leather bands to the nail in the hole in the pole.

The blacksmith put the bear traps on by sliding a steel plate through the slot and bending both sides up to fit my boots, they also had a slot on each side near the top for the leather strap which holds the boot down and another pair of slots on the side for the heel binding, which were just leather straps with a buckle. The heel was free to come up and when the leather got wet the straps of the heel bindings would fall off and only the wedged boots in the bear traps would hold us in.

The skis would also get wet on every outing and had to be blocked with a wooden clamp at the tail and just before the bend at the shovel and a spreader block under the bindings and a tip spreader fork, held in place with nails through holes in the fork and the tip which had kind of a nipple on it.

Forgetting to do this one day after skiing would have you see a couple of flat boards the next day...

My new skis had a little problem in that, when blocked, one ski was almost straight while the other one was like a bow, which necessitated me taking them to the shed and wedging the assembly between three fence stakes until the curve was equal on both...

Suffice it to say that on my first day out with my friends I laid down beautiful s-curves which my friends made into figure eights and I never complained about my left ski being a noodle and my right one a two-by-four, I just adjusted my skiing to compensate.

Now to compare those skis to my 200cm Atomic Beta Carves 9.26: I lay down beautiful s-curves with my wife or my friends making them into figure eights...no real difference...

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Ott Gangl is retired as a PSIA Level-3 ski instructor after 25 years of teaching four times a week. He was a photojournalist for 35 years and his web site ( http://corrr1.com ) displays many of the classic images he has captured on film.