Oh, My Poor Arthritic Ski Club

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK Miramar Ski Club members arrive in Vermont.

By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: January 6, 2008
Waitsfield, Vt.

ON powder days, Sandy Geiger waits for no one. There were five inches of fresh snow on the mountain at Sugarbush last Sunday, more falling, and a lightly tracked double-black-diamond run in front of him.

But there was one problem. He had had enough of the young woman with whom he was skiing. She was struggling in the powder, falling and continually stopping to catch her breath.

“Have a good day,” Mr. Geiger, a driver for the Board of Education in New York City, told her. He pointed his skis downhill and a cascade of white crystals rose in his schussing wake.

“I was shocked,” said the young woman, Farnaz, a pathologist. (She asked that her last name not be printed.)

Later, back at the spartan lodge owned by the Miramar Ski Club — which, for about $600, including accommodation, meals and lift tickets, had bused Mr. Geiger, Farnaz and 46 others to Vermont for four days of skiing — Mr. Geiger, 59, explained the simple logic behind his unchivalrous behavior.

“I live for powder,” he said.

Not every skier is part of a rich family on vacation at an $800-a-night slopeside condominium with a hot tub and butler service. The perception that skiing has become a sport only for the rich was reinforced this season when Vail, the sprawling Colorado resort, announced it was raising daily lift ticket prices to $92, a virtual guarantee that the $100-a-day ticket is on the horizon.

Yet, there are still vestiges of skiing’s past as a sport accessible to the working man. Starting in the 1930s, city-based ski clubs such as the Norway, Swiss and Miramar flourished. Many were formed by immigrants from ski-loving countries, or groups of neighbors who wanted the sport to be both sociable and affordable. They pooled their money and bought modest houses in ski towns like Ludlow, Vt., and Shandaken, N.Y., in the Catskills.

Membership is dwindling at the clubs that have survived. Many modern skiers find the idea of doing a few chores and sharing a bathroom with strangers, which many clubs require, as unacceptable as a T-shirt without a designer label.

Whether some clubs will last another generation is in question, said Bill LeSeur, a former chairman of the Metropolitan New York Ski Council, which advises clubs and negotiates group ticket discounts with resorts. It depends on whether they can recruit younger people who are willing to forgo luxuries and look past the gray hair of longtime members.

“Most ski clubs are running older,” Mr. LeSeur said. “Young people come down to a meeting, they see the older people at the meeting and they say ‘whoa.’”

The 1960s were headier days for ski clubs of all income levels. During that decade, Oleg Cassini and his brother, Igor — who wrote a gossip column under the name Cholly Knickerbocker — helped establish Ski Club 10, which owned a clubhouse at the base of Sugarbush. Members included Nan Kempner and the bandleader Skitch Henderson. According to a 2006 book, “The Story of Modern Skiing” by John Fry, Ski Club 10 helped earn Sugarbush the nickname “Mascara Mountain” in the news media.

During the same era, a founder of the Chalet Ski Club, Buddy Bombard, started a bus service from Manhattan to Sugarbush that for $25 included cocktails and dinner. In 1966, he told Ski Magazine what sort of bus he was running.

“We don’t want rude people, drunks, slow payers or terribly unattractive people,” he said.

Mr. Bombard might have banned some Miramar members from his bus.

Miramar was an offshoot of the Miramar Yacht Club in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn; members wanted an activity to fill the cold months. At first, they stayed in hotels, but in the early ’60s the club bought an old gristmill near a covered bridge in Waitsfield and began converting it to a lodge that sleeps 54. There is no hot tub or sauna. No on-site spa or massage therapist (although a lady can occasionally entice a gentleman to give her shoulders a rub).

But there is a bar, a fireplace and a dance floor with a small glittering disco ball in the basement. When the lodge first opened and for decades after, the seating in front of the fireplace was old car seats.

Just as the Swiss ski club is no longer limited to those of Alpine descent, Miramar is no longer bound by shared geography. Suburban contractors and city bureaucrats buckle their boots together. What the members do have is more of a psychological affinity. Although a few couples did meet in the earlier days, and some of their children are now members, a good portion of the current crop of “Miramartians,” as they call themselves, are not the settling-down type.

Miramartian Geiger, the powderhound, has never been married.

“These are people who do not sit at home,” said Sharon Lieberman, a club officer whose day job is personal assistant to the writer Joan Didion. “They’ve got plans for their next travel, their next adventure.”

As the years have unwound, the timing of a ski weekend has been distilled into a precise routine. The bus leaves Fridays at 6:30 p.m. from Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, makes another pickup in Ramsey, N.J., and arrives, if the weather is good, at the lodge by 12:30 a.m.

Wake-up with a cowbell is around 7:30 a.m. Breakfast is at 8. Bus to the slopes, 8:45. Bus back from the slopes, 4:30 p.m. Cocktails, 6 to 7. Dinner at 7. Dancing follows.

Everyone must sign up for a chore. Roslyn Beck, a member for about 30 years, was on garbage duty last weekend, dragging bags to the Dumpster in the parking lot. “Tie it up, take it out,” said Ms. Beck, who directed teacher education programs at Long Island University before retiring. “That’s it.”

(My chore was writing an article about the weekend for the club newsletter, “Lift Lines.” Beats Dumpster duty.)

On the last day, usually a Sunday, the bus leaves the mountain at 3:30, makes a dinner stop and, if roads are clear, arrives in Manhattan by 10:30 p.m.

Guests are welcome to take three trips before applying for membership. which costs $170 annually. On the bus ride home, they fill out evaluation forms. “I was out of place,” wrote Melanie Chirignan, 25, a substitute music teacher. “I would prefer a group that more matches my age.”

She also did not like how every time she accidentally broke a rule, like taking a communal plate of vegetarian food to her table, the correct procedure was explained over and over to her as if she were a child.

Many of the 29 ski clubs represented by the Metropolitan Council are trying to figure out a way to attract a new generation. The Garden City Ski Club, founded in 1934, is 30 percent smaller than 15 years ago, Mr. LeSeur said. It no longer runs every-weekend buses to its lodge.

Richard Huber, the president of the Edelweiss Ski Club, which was started in 1965 by families from the Glendale and Ridgewood areas of Queens, said that his club is trying to bring the children of original members into leadership roles.

Miramar, which distributes glossy fliers at ski shops throughout the city, managed to add 22 new members last year, many in their 30s and 40s, and some weekends sell out. All the lodge rooms have been freshly painted a cream color, a relief to Harry B. Miller, a member since 1967 and a former scene designer at CBS. He recalled poaching paint from “Captain Kangaroo” for the bedrooms.

“It got impossible to remember all the different colors I had used, and which ones I needed to bring more of when we were repainting.” Mr. Miller, 83, said while sitting in the lodge basement at cocktail hour after a day of skiing. “It became a lot of work.”

Most rooms have two single beds and are not romantic. Every two rooms share a bathroom. But some members, including Mr. Geiger, have managed to kindle relationships at Miramar.

Others, such as Becky Renaud, 53, an occupational therapist, said she is in the club for the mountains, not the men. “It’s a ski club,” she said before dinner Sunday, “not a breeding program.” And yet, after dinner, she could be found dancing madly.

Despite being left in the powder by Mr. Geiger, Farnaz, who is in her mid-30s and single, said she would like to join the club.

“It’s more interesting sometimes to hang out with this age group than with people my own generation,” she said. “Most of the guys I know, their biggest problem they talk about is, ‘Should I date a blonde or a brunette?’”

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