Indoor Winter

Last year the U. S. discovered winter. Snow, for centuries man's enemy, became suddenly his friend. Skiing, for years a nonsensical fad, became overnight a national sport. Last week, not content with moving himself outdoors, man moved winter indoors. Hirelings in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, accustomed to the endless transformations of this chameleon edifice, stood aghast as they watched it become something it had never been before : a snowy mountain top. From the centre of the arena floor to the top of the gallery--so close to the roof a skier had to crouch so as not to bump his head-- stretched a 152-ft, 45-degree ski slide, covered with artificial snow. Set in the white pavilion of the arena floor were two miniature skating ponds. It was New York's first wintersports show, patterned on wintersports shows in Boston last year and last fortnight.

In some respects the stage setting of a wintersports show is more remarkable than the show. A good deal of what the 12,000 winter-famished New Yorkers, who packed Madison Square Garden every night, watched last week they could have seen gratis on many a country hillside. Skiers shot off the slide in jumps about one-half as long as good outdoor jumps, gave demonstrations of rudimentary turns. Department store models tried and failed to live up to their skiing costumes. Fancy skaters whirled on the miniature rinks. In the steam-heated cellar below the snowdrifts, agents for innumerable winter resorts and ski-supply houses set up booths. Bug-eyed at these goings-on, spectators reserved special awe for the two items of the wintersports show that really explained why it was there. One was a snow machine, the other Hannes Schneider.

The snow machine was the contribution of Walter Brown, coach of the 1936 U. S. Olympic hockey team and son of George V. Brown, who runs Boston's Garden. Obsessed by the idea of a wintersports show in his father's amphitheatre, Walter Brown was foiled by the problem of how to get snow indoors without importing it at prohibitive expense until one day, passing a Boston fish store, he noticed a handsome cod packed in ice that was chopped up so fine it looked like corn snow. The fish dealer's iceman showed him his ice-grinding machine. Walter Brown ordered bigger copies that would grind ice smaller. Last week it took 500 tons of ice fed through grinders to keep the floor and ski slide snowy. During performances of the show, spectators were spellbound when workmen fed one of the machines 50-lb. chunks of ice, which it chewed into flakes, spewed out of a six-inch hose, as glittering, precious Snow.

If the Brown snow machine made the wintersports show possible, Hannes Schneider was what made it profitable. To him, as head of the famed Arlberg Skiing School, more than to any other single person in the world, is attributable skiing's current world-wide boom. In Stuben, Austria, near the Tyrolean border, Hannes Schneider grew up when Alpine skiing, imported from Norway where it had become a major sport 20 years before, was in its infancy. Norwegian skiers skied standing up straight. After he had learned to ski on barrel staves, used them to win a race for which the prize was his first pair of real skis. Hannes Schneider decided that, for long, steep, irregular Alpine slopes, standing up straight on skis was impractical. He started to ski in a crouch. In the next 30 years skiing in a crouch not only became the accepted way to ski but, by making skiing easier, made it popular all over the world. Hired as a ski teacher by St. Anton's Hotel Post when he was 17, Hannes Schneider taught the hotel guests to ski in a crouch. During his ample spare time, he gave free lessons in skiing and crouching to St. Anton villagers. During the War, he served with the Austrian Army, first in Russia, then in the Alps. Officers whom he had taught at St. Anton got him the job of teaching skiing to officers in all the Alpine regiments. During the War, Hannes Schneider perfected his own technique in new directions. Favorite turn of Norwegian skiers was the dignified Telemark, executed standing upright, with the paunch extended, shoulders back. Hannes Schneider elaborated the racy Christiania--executed in a crouch with the shoulders forward, paunch tucked in.

By 1920, recognized as the best Ski-meister in the Alps, Hannes Schneider was hired as leading man in the German Film The Wonders of Skiing. The picture popularized skiing in Central Europe, made Hannes Schneider grand wizard of all Europe's ski wizards. Back in St. Anton, he opened his Arlberg school. First month he had 100 pupils. The next month he had 200. The St. Anton natives he had taught free were useful to Skimeister Schneider. He hired them as associate professors. By 1925, Hannes Schneider's Arlberg Ski School was winter headquarters for most of Europe's outdoor-minded royalty. Enrolled in his classes at various times were the late King Albert of the Belgians, Rumania's Prince Nicholas, Spain's King Alfonso, Yugoslavia's Prince Paul. No king is a dignitary to his ski teacher. When Prince von Starhemberg got in the way of other pupils on a practice slope, Skimeister Schneider shouted: "Hit him on the head!"

In the Schneider ski school, Skimeister Schneider has had as many as 3,000 pupils a year, 400 a day. The school has 25 assistant teachers. Fee for pupils is $5 a week, for four hours a day six days a week. The pupils live in hotels, assemble on a level field each morning, pass examinations in stemming and turning to pass from one class to the next. Having put St. Anton and Arlberg on the map, Hannes Schneider, son of a goat-herder, owns the biggest house in the village (13 rooms, two baths), which he built largely with his own hands. He supports the village band, its school, its hospital and, indirectly, its whole population. In 1930, Hannes Schneider visited Japan for one month at $10,000 to teach its royal family, army officers and students how to ski. This year, two of his St. Anton assistants--Benno Rybiczka and Otto Lang--will start U. S. branches of the Arlberg Ski School at Jackson, N. H., Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier, in Washington. Still raging among expert skiers is the argument about the Arlberg v. Norwegian technique. In the U. S., where Erling Stromm, ski teacher at the Lake Placid Club, is the No. 1 exponent of the Norwegian school, the Arlberg technique is currently gaining momentum.

At Madison Square Garden last week Hannes Schneider, now iron-haired and limping from a hip broken while skiing ten years ago, had to do no more than stand still while his skis carried him down the slide once or twice to fulfill his function as main attraction of the show whose clientele was made up mostly of skiing sophisticates. Indirect effect of Herr Schneider's three-week stay in the U. S., before going back to St. Anton for the start of the semester, was to aggravate New York's skiing neurosis to the point of mania. Owner Horace Stoneham of the New York Giants planned to turn his baseball park into a wintersports paradise by building a ski-slide from the top of the grandstand to the outfield, installing a toboggan run. As an improvement on snow trains, Saks-Fifth Avenue--which last year installed the first of Manhattan's now numerous indoor department-store ski slides--chartered the S. S. Paris as a "snowboat." Advertisements said it would sail Jan. 16, with a ski-slide on deck, to get skiers to St. Moritz in ten days. Skiing down the side of a skyscraper is unpractical, but John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s Radio City did the next best thing by announcing that it would swamp the sunken plaza, which is a tourist restaurant in summer, to make the first skating pond on Fifth Avenue since the Plaza Hotel was a frog pond (1869).

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