Tonight on New Hampshire Crossroads, a tale of Olympic glory as we meet the man who brought a gold medal home to Dixville Notch.

His event?

Cooking!

Then, over 50 years have passed since a man named Hannes Schneider introduced America to the joys of skiing.

Tonight, we present rare film footage that's almost as good as a trip on North Conway's legendary snow train.

And we continue with the Robert Frost series of poetry with the poem.

An Old Man's Winter Night.

Hi, I'm Fritz Wetherbee, and this is New Hampshire Crossroads.

Theme Music Presentation of New Hampshire Crossroads is made possible by grants from Weeks Dairy Foods, Incorporated, makers and distributors of fresh dairy products and premium ice creams for your family.

First NH Banks, serving the financial needs of individuals, corporations, and local governments throughout New Hampshire.

Continental Cablevision providing quality cable service and community programing throughout New Hampshire.

And the Union Leader Corporation, publisher of the New Hampshire's statewide newspapers.

We are right for New Hampshire.

Today we are at the New England Ski Museum, which is located right across from the tramway here at Cannon Mountain.

And currently they have this beautiful display of historic ski posters, some of them dating back to 1924.

Aren't they gorgeous?

And yes, they have some of them reproduced and they're for sale.

This beautiful poster, for instance.

What do you think of when you think of the Winter Olympics?

Oh, probably the flying camel and the luge.

And maybe the giant slalom.

But how about galantines and petit fours?

Now, galantine's and petit fours are, of course, foods beautifully prepared and displayed and judged at the World Culinary Olympics, which is held every four years.

Now, you say you never heard of the Culinary Olympics?

Well, let us introduce you to a gold medal winner.

I have a lot of horror stories.

A lot of them.

I can give you a list, and you can pick the one you want.

One was, we had a hard time with Customs, a refrigerated truck full of all our food and produce that we needed for the competition.

They were going to come up and back up to it and take the whole truck away before we even started.

We had four glass domes that were, as part of our display, the pastry chef display, that were worth $10,000 in value.

And they were all shattered.

Didn't make the trip.

I could give you several more.

One of our sayings, I guess, was: don't you worry.

So, that was pretty much our saying through the whole time.

Charles Carroll might well have worried.

At the age of 24, he found himself in Frankfurt competing against the best chefs in the world.

The pressure was on, and he knew it.

Come to find out, at the end of the competition, we were the number one regional team in the whole world.

So that was, it was a great, it was a great feeling.

I'm still getting goose bumps talking about it.

It was a, it was a really nice thing that happened.

We were the definition of team.

Charles, who likes to be called Chuck, began his cooking career in the fourth grade by making breakfast for his family.

When he was still in high school he joined the apprentice program at The Balsams in Dixville Notch, one of the most prestigious in the country.

Any questions up to now?

It is usually a three year program, but Chuck was able to finish in just two.

He then went on to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, which is the top culinary school in America.

If you get the impression he was something of a whiz kid, you're right.

(nature sounds) Certainly, much of Chuck's interest in cooking came from his father, John, who is now the maitre d at The Balsams.

When Chuck was growing up, his family owned and operated the Rabbit Hill Inn in Waterford, Vermont.

His father's cooking classes were well known.

One thing he’d do to inspire his students was show films of the Culinary Olympics.

That really caught his eye and really got his attention, and probably more than anything else, got him thinking that someday that he would like to be there.

And he certainly did get there.

On October 11th, 1988, Chuck and nine other competing chefs, five apprentices and advisers, left Boston with two tons of food, supplies, and lots of enthusiasm on a plane for Frankfurt, West Germany.

It was the experience of a lifetime.

It was a goal of mine.

I just never thought I'd be, I’d do it at this time.

I was extremely lucky.

I was the youngest guy on the team, which wasn't always easy.

But how did they feel their team would stack up against some of the teams from other countries?

After the first day of competition, we were pretty confident.

We worked two days straight just getting out the first competition.

And a lot of us were extremely tired and burnt out by that time.

But at 5:00 that afternoon, when the call came in that we got two golds and two gold clover leaves, it was, it took the pressure, it just, it boosted everybody.

And it was a real, it just got us all going again.

And then when we came, it's getting so, every day when we were bringing our food into the competition, all eyes were on us now.

And the judges would, they would send them over to our table to get it, to get a good idea of what a gold medal should look like.

We were getting the nickname of Golden Boys, and that was kind of it was a lot of it was really a lot of fun, it was.

The secret was our team, our team spirit, our team strength.

We were all extremely close.

Very, very close.

We're all like brothers.

And, there was no there were no heroes.

There were no secrets from one chef to another.

Once the five strenuous days were over, the team triumphantly returned with 19 gold, two silver, and one bronze medal.

No other team competing came close to their winnings.

Music After that high, Chuck has slowly worked his way back down to earth.

Currently, Chuck is the executive sous chef at The Balsams, which means he is first under the Head Chef in charge.

He is also the coordinator of the Apprentice Program, the same program that gave him his start.

I never thought I was going to be a teacher.

As I work with the apprentices, I think I'm teaching myself, how to come across to them.

The from step, point A to B. When I explain to apprentices, well you really can't do it that way, it’s because once before, I tried that.

So lots of the times, my explanation to the apprentices is something that I already had to figure out for myself.

Where does a gold medalist go from here?

Chuck dreams now of working in Europe and someday opening his own restaurant.

Stand in front.

That way.

He should stand in front of you.

As for his medal, it's being framed.

Yes.

They're going to put it in the dining room.

So I haven't been able to look at it for hold it for a while.

So, I'm sure it's still okay.

I have pictures I keep looking at.

I guess I used to wear it underneath my shirt all the time No, I didn't.

People always ask me where it was, and I said, I got it, I got it on.

But I don’t.

Chuck tells us that the challenge for American chefs is to create a dish that is both exciting and nutritious.

And by the way, since we taped that show last year, Chuck has been named the Chef de Cuisine at The Balsams, which means he's in charge of the entire kitchen there now.

And this year he entered and won the Best of Show in the Boston Food Show.

And currently, he is trying again to be on the national team.

In our next story, we travel just down the road from here, maybe two and a half, three miles to Clark's Trading Post, which is a New Hampshire landmark.

You know, a good deal of the land at Clark's Trading Post was sold to the Clarks by my grandmother, Hattie Hanson's brother, Ira Hansen.

So, so I have a personal stake in this story.

And besides, I like bears.

This is Clark's Trading Post in North Woodstock as it looks in the winter time.

The draw here is the steam trains and the trained bears.

No doubt you've seen the bears up on these posts as you drive by on the highway.

There have been bears here since 1935.

But what do the bears do in the winter time?

And the bear trainer, Murray Clark?

How about him?

Bears, of course, hibernate in the winter time.

We're going to find out what the bear trainer does in the winter time.

Oh, look here, look at this.

I thought bears hibernated in the winter time.

They do.

They’re smart.

Well, this one's not hibernating.

He's looking out.

He's looking out of his, his thing.

I’ll see if I can get him out.

You stay focused on him.

(banging noise) Yes.

Oh, he’s gorgeous.

Do you feed him during the winter time?

Oh no, no.

Oh, you feed him up in the in the fall?

The last meal was given here on December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day.

That's the final meal of the year.

What was it?

Oh it consisted of a little bit of dog chow, which is their main diet.

Okay.

And I don't know if I had a few apples left or gave them a little tiny bit of candy, but that was the last meal of the year.

And is there a bear in each one of these, or - One bear in this den, the center one is empty, and there’s two in that den on the left.

That’s a brother and sister in the den on the left.

He’s yawning.

They are in and out of sleep during the day, and even during the night, on occasion.

Okay.

But as the weather warms up, as the spring starts to come in and things start to melt in late March, they are, they're awake every day.

And after a while I just commence feeding.

Even though their cousins in the woods have nothing.

This one is called Topsy and she may produce cubs this month.

This is the month for cubs to arrive.

Oh.

Wedding season is the month of June.

How do they produce cubs during hibernation?

The same way all of us do.

Let us say that they married in June.

They were married in June!

They had their honeymoon.

The gestation period is six months.

All of that, all of that stuff was done last spring How can they have babies when they’re half asleep?

Oh, boys.

By the fireside somewhere I could explain it.

Music Murray Clark tells us that, because of the unusually cold weather this year, that his bears went into hibernation early.

In fact, they had their last meal on December the 7th, and they are currently sound asleep, and, he tells us, in very good health.

And one of his bears turns 36 this month.

Can you imagine sleeping through your birthday?

You know, back in the 1930s, there were two internationally famous ski resorts in America.

One was Sun Valley, Idaho, and the other was Mount Cranmore up in North Conway, New Hampshire.

Now, Mount Cranmore is noted for two things.

One is the ski mobile and the other is the man who started the ski school there, and his name was Hannes Schneider.

And this is his story.

Skiing en masse.

Ski larking at its best.

Music What you see here is history, but not just New Hampshire history.

It is, in fact, world history.

This is Hannes Schneider, the man who invented the modern ski school.

He is also the man who taught America how to ski.

And in his time, he turned Mount Cranmore in North Conway into one of the most famous ski resorts in America.

In 1989, Mount Cranmore celebrates its 50th anniversary.

It is also the 50th anniversary of the arrival of Hannes Schneider in America.

Schneider was 49 years old when he came here from Austria.

He had been teaching skiing in Europe since 1908.

With him, he brought his wife, daughter, and son Herbert.

They came here to escape the Nazis.

My father happened to be in Berlin at the time.

Hitler took power in Germany and he saw a few of these things going on, which he didn't like.

And he became very outspoken.

They invited him to take part or watch their parades that went on, so father did.

And when he saw, who all these people were, he just laughed out loud.

And they never forgot it, that he laughed at them.

And they were such serious about nationalism and so on.

So, when the Anschluss happened in 38, they arrested father.

They got him out of bed at four in the morning and put him to jail.

But Hannes Schneider was a famous man, and international pressure was brought to bear.

He was released from prison.

The Nazis then offered him a job teaching skiing for the Reich at Garmisch.

But Schneider wanted no part of it.

Meanwhile, in North Conway, a local boy was making big plans.

Harvey Dow Gibson.

He was the son of the local station master, who had gone on to become the chief executive officer of Manufacturers Trust in New York City.

Harvey Dow Gibson had made a bundle and Harvey Dow Gibson loved skiing, and he loved North Conway.

Now there were a dozen or so Austrian ski instructors already teaching in New England, and every single one of them was a former student of Hannes Schneider.

It was through these instructors that Mr.

Gibson made a generous offer to Hannes to come to North Conway and to start a ski school, and Hannes accepted.

Here is his arrival in 1939.

I hope to see you there very soon, and I hope you find good snow when you get there.

Good.

That much snow.

Much snow, much snow.

Good skiing!

Yeah, yeah, everything, everything.

A little more.

(speaking in German) Hannes Schneider fitted right into the scheme of things at North Conway and found his staff of instructors cheerfully awaiting his arrival.

Music In peaceful America, Mr.

Schneider found crossed ski poles and not bayonets the order of the day.

For Hannes Schneider, a new beginning in a new setting.

You will note that Mrs.

Schneider, Ludwina, was radiant.

On this day, there was no indication she would be dead of cancer in six months.

With Benno Rybizka, a Schneider instructor, and Mr.

Gibson, skimeister Schneider received his first scenic eyeful of Cranmore Mountain.

Music So Schneider and his staff of capable assistants write preliminary chapters in the budding American art of ski instruction.

Music That Hannes Schneider was here in the US was an irresistible story, and the press played it for all it was worth.

And overnight, North Conway became the ski Mecca of the East and launched something brand new.

It was called the Ski Train.

In those early days, they used to run a so-called Eastern Slope Express out of New York City.

It would leave New York City Friday night and stay here over the weekend and go back Sunday night so people could come up here weekend and be back at their job in time, because the train would get back to New York City around seven in the morning.

So put on their business clothes and they’d be in the office by 9:00.

The beginning of a healthful excursion.

And the novelty of the holiday is just what the doctor ordered for city cliff dwellers who crave a definite change.

Music Arriving at North Conway, everyone's eager to get going.

And there's snow enough to go around.

And then some.

Music And the destination for this crowd?

The destination was the ski mobile, the most romantic ski lift ever made.

And the most long-lived.

In fact, this is the oldest continuously operated ski lift in North America.

They did have other kind of tows back then.

I mean, yeah.

They had rope tows all over Europe.

Rope tows was the big thing in those days, Chairlift, that just started.

They they had a chairlift built over in Stowe, Vermont in 1936.

And that was the one up in Sun Valley.

Why didn't we do a chairlift here?

Mr.

Gibson had a little problem.

There was a Swiss by the name of Victor Constam, who owned all the patent rights.

And being a typical Yankee, he wasn't going to give anybody any money if he didn't have to.

And the ski mobile turned out to be so good that it is considered a national treasure.

And another national treasure was Hannes Schneider, who died in April 1955.

As a matter of fact, two days before he died, we went up on the mountain here, laying out a slope which we refer to now as East Slope and he laid all that out, and he died of a heart attack very unexpectedly.

Hannes Schneider died in his son's arms.

And now it's 50 years later, a long time from the bear trap bindings to the fiberglass wonders of today.

Some skiing techniques have changed.

But, you know, the Schneider teaching method is still used around the world.

And skiing, skiing has become just what Hannes Schneider predicted it would become, a great fast downhill sport, with millions and millions of people doing it.

And Cranmore, too, has grown, from a single lift to an enterprise worth millions.

They now have snowmaking and five chairlifts to the summit.

And on February the 11th, a bronze statue of Hannes Schneider will be unveiled, 50 years to the day that he arrived here at Mount Cranmore.

That day that changed skiing in America forever.

Music And here we are at Mount Cranmore, and this is the statue of Hannes Schneider that was dedicated last year.

A beautiful piece of work, isn't it?

By the way, the ski mobile itself is not running this year.

And that's because parts and labor and maintenance are so expensive that there is some question as to whether it will even survive.

Early in his career as a professional poet, Robert Frost began writing about the characters that inhabit the backcountry in northern New England.

An Old Man's Winter Night tells the story of a retired Yankee farmer living alone in a deserted farmhouse on a desolate winter's night.

Music (lighting a lantern) All out of doors looked darkly in at him through the thin frost, almost in separate stars.

that gathers on the pane in empty rooms.

What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.

What kept him from remembering the need that brought him to that creaking room was age.

He stood with barrels round him at a loss, and having scared the cellar under him and clomping there he scared it once again in clomping off, scared the outer night which has its sounds familiar, like the roar of trees and crack of branches, common things, but nothing so like beating on a box.

(no dialogue) A light he was to no one but himself.

Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, a quiet light and then not even that.

He consigned to the moon - such as she was, so late- arising - to the broken moon as better than the sun in any case, for such a charge, his snow upon the roof, his icicles along the wall to keep, and slept.

The log that shifted with a jolt once in the stove disturbed him, and he shifted and eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.

One aged man - one man - can't keep a house, a farm, a countryside.

Or if he can, it's thus he does it of a winter night.

The gentleman that you saw in that poem is Leon Briggs, who is himself a retired Yankee farmer living in northern New England.

And this spring Mr.

Briggs will be 96 years old.

Well, thank you for joining us.

And next week we're going to travel up to Pittsburgh, New Hampshire, and visit with a fiddler who is passing his talents on to the next generation.

Until then, for New Hampshire Crossroads, I'm Fritz Wetherbee.

Tonight's Robert Frost poem was made possible by a grant from the New Hampshire Humanities Council, connecting people with ideas, with additional support from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.

Theme Music Presentation of New Hampshire Crossroads is made possible by grants from Weeks Dairy Foods, Incorporated, makers and distributors of fresh dairy products and premium ice creams for your family.

First NH Banks, serving the financial needs of individuals, corporations, and local governments throughout New Hampshire.

Continental Cablevision providing quality cable service and community programing throughout New Hampshire.

And the Union Leader Corporation, publisher of New Hampshire's statewide newspapers.

We're right for New Hampshire.

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