BRATTLEBORO — At first it was the Norwegians, immigrants to the Midwest in the late 1880s, who had the passion for ski jumping.
Americans had never heard of the sport.
Some of the oldest ski jumping clubs in the nation were started in places like Red Wing and St. Paul, Minn., and in Ishpeming, Mich.
It's easy to understand the thrill of flying off a hill, or in the case of some of these jumpers at the time, large rocks. Human beings have always dreamed of flying through the sky. The Wright brothers wouldn't be up in the air at Kitty Hawk, N.C., for another 15 years, and so jumping off a hill wearing skis was the only way to fly.
Meanwhile, around the same time over here in Brattleboro, Fred Harris was born. Eighteen years later, Harris - who was a dynamic leader at a tender age - found himself at Dartmouth College in the winter of 1909. Harris told his classmates that he'd always had “skeeing on the brain.” He enjoyed fashioning his own equipment, making eight foot long skis out of ash or hickory and using them on the local hills and fields of Hanover, N.H.
When he was a junior, he wrote an editorial in the college newspaper, suggesting that during the winter, students form an Outing Club where they could all learn to ski and snow shoe, and that a Field Day be created to celebrate the skills the students would learn during the winter months.
The idea caught on. In 1911, Harris' senior year, the Outing Club decided to create a Winter Carnival that would celebrate all winter sports, and would also include inviting female guests, as Dartmouth was an all male institution at that time and women would not arrive on the campus as students for another 59 years.
Harris graduated in 1911. Nine years later, National Geographic would recognize his idea of a Winter Carnival as a first in the nation and dubbed it, “the Mardi Gras of the North.” The Carnival was filmed in 1939 and released as a major motion picture. Harris would go on to start the Brattleboro Winter Carnival in 1955, but that's another story.
Having experienced such great success incorporating his ideas into reality, it is no surprise that when Harris came home to Brattleboro, he would be looking to have his friends and neighbors involved in getting a ski jumping hill started in his home town.
Ski jumping fever began to spread throughout the nation. Even though he was successful in his career as a stockbroker, and was also known as a talented sailor and tennis player, he focused his efforts on creating the perfect (for its day) 270 foot, or 90 meter, hill.
This was the big time.
Back in Michigan in the 1880s a “big” jump record was 60 feet. Twenty years later, in 1889, that record had grown to 117 feet. By 1917, a Norwegian immigrant in Steamboat Spring, Colo., jumped 203 feet. As Harris constructed his hill, he could only have thought that jumpers would likely never be able to exceed the jumping limits of his hill.
By 1922, after spending just $2,200, Harris Hill had its inauguration. In 1923, Brattleboro hosted the Vermont State Championship and the Eastern Amateur Championship, and recouped the money spent to build the hill in a single day of receipts from an excited crowd.
It was the Roaring Twenties, and Brattleboro was living it up just like the rest of the country. In 1924, Paul Whiteman's Famous Orchestra played at the Ski Jump Ball at the Town Hall in downtown Brattleboro (torn down in 1953, now the site of Candle in the Night).
In 1927, Reginald and Carol Kendall of Norwich took a toboggan ride off Harris Hill and soared through a flaming hoop. Ski jumping records were being broken and the sport seemed to be taking off, and yet it was still in its infancy.
Enter Richard “Tink” Austin, who was born in 1923, the year of the first Harris Hill event, in Lyndonville, and moved to Brattleboro just after the flood of 1927.
“We lived on Horton Place and I walked to Kindergarten at Green Street School,” remembers Austin. “Not too soon after that, we moved to Myrtle Street, and of course, by the time I got to be 10 or so, Fred Harris was still fixing up the hill in the woods out behind my house. Me and my buddies Bud Thomas and brothers Art and Robbie Fairbanks who lived on Spruce Street, used to go up and jump on Haskell Hill (which bordered Spruce Street) and fly through the air in cardboard boxes. Now it's all trees, but then we could take off and sail quite a ways.”
And that's the way future ski jumpers in Brattleboro were raised. While young men were flying through the air off Harris Hill every winter, future athletes all over Brattleboro were building their own backyard jumps.
“I was 16 years old on my first real ski jump. My younger brother Ken had ski jumped, but he didn't really take to it. I remember one time at the foot of the hill, he just left one ski in the middle of the snow and he was done,” said Austin. “We started competing after that, but we really didn't have a sense of how new this sport was. We didn't realize we were really the second generation of jumpers, because we had grown up with it. The sport felt established to us, but really, it was still all pretty new. And we were just having fun, like when the three of us went off the hill at once.”
Austin is referring to a picture taken in 1946 when a young Austin said to his equally young buddies, Phil Dunham and Si Dunklee, “Come on, let's do a triple jump.”
“I said I'd go first and the other two got on either side of me, and there happened to be another guy who snapped the picture. They never allow shenanigans like that, these days,” says Austin with a broad grin.
How did they stay warm in an era when clothing for use in winter was also in its infancy?
“We wore mostly long johns and a gabardine or ski pants that floated in the breeze. They weren't really waterproof, but the snow wasn't all that wet, you got up as quick as you could to stay dry,” says Austin.
Though interrupted by World War II, Austin came back home and continued ski jumping.
“I went from flying on toboggans as a kid to co-piloting a B-17 bomber in Europe. I flew 35 missions over Europe in the Eighth Air Force. When I got home, I went right back to ski jumping and flying through the air. My first jumping skis were used and cost three dollars. One was six inches shorter than the other, “Austin remembers.
As the years flew by, Austin married and began raising a family, but he still managed to jump at national competitions. Later in the 1960s, he and friend and fellow jumper Alan Sergeant mentored elementary school jumpers.
His own son David won the high school championships in 1971, just as his father did before him in 1941.
The current record for distance in ski jumping is held by Bjørn Einar Romøren of Norway, who flew 239 meters, or 784 feet in 2003, 13 times the very first ski jumping record.
Today, Tink Austin contents himself with watching his ski jumping on television.
“The kids today now fly so much longer than we did. We were the start of extreme skiing, we just didn't know it. Can you imagine that?”