As NENSA sets out to reflect on our 30th anniversary, Caldwell is a name that will come up a lot. Our first Board Chair? Caldwell. Our first Program Director? Caldwell. There has been at least one Caldwell family member on NENSA’s committees for the duration of our existence. An encapsulation of the family’s vital, and still vivant, role in New England skiing? Look no further than our own Isabel Caldwell, NENSA’s current Community Development Director, who everyday showcases a careful thoughtfulness towards organizing our community without ever wavering from the pure enjoyment of practicing the thing it is organized around, a ski. See: Tuesday Tracks.
To understand the Caldwell contribution to New England skiing, you can look in a few different directions. One is geographical: just head down to Southern Vermont, where the clan has seemingly spent much of the last seventy plus years gleefully striding the fields and folds around Putney, and where any old soul you find in the woods is liable to show a twinkle in their eye recounting Sunday Tours and Terrain Challenges. Another direction is to look up: literally on the family tree, and metaphorically as all of US Skiing has been for years, to family patriarch John Caldwell.
John Caldwell is synonymous with US Skiing, then and now. He has had all the platitudes around community leadership applied to him, and he has earned everyone. “The father of Cross-Country Skiing,” a “guru,” “coach,” “organizer,” “Olympian,” and more. To NENSA, he’s a “founder.”
Yet, the details of his story fill in a different perspective on his accomplishments. Born in 1928 and raised in the Appalachian foothills of Somerville, Pennsylvania, Caldwell wasn’t by providence a name linked to skiing. John’s father took a job as business manager at the Putney School 1941, and the family followed on up to New England. After a winter spent “dribbling a Basketball around looking [and finding] no one to play with in Putney,” as he recounted to Peter Graves in an interview last year, Caldwell adjusted to the New England winter. He strapped on nordic skis, which in those days meant pointing them both cross fields and towards the lip of a jump. A nordic combined skier, his skills were noted by the Dartmouth Outing Club when he arrived on campus in 1946. He was a skimeister star for the Big Green through his graduation in 1950.
The tale from then on is a more familiar one for those who know New England skiing (read it in his own words here). Caldwell coached and taught Mathematics at the Putney School until retirement in 1989. He was an Olympic Team coach through many cycles from 1960-1984. Pupils included Bill Koch, Martha Rockwell, Tim Caldwell and Stan Dunklee. Most importantly, Caldwell’s children and grandchildren built the kindling of his passion for nordic skiing into a fire that has been the hearth of US Skiing. They’ve been on World Cup podiums. They’ve coached Olympians. They coach BKL Lollipopers until they are Olympians!
The cumulative impact is sublime. We’re all striding in tracks John set, so to speak. So much so that the exact animating factors of what helped propel the ski community forward aren’t always easily identifiable. To mix metaphors, the individual layers that kicked us forward – the different people and perspectives that have been mixed (we know, the Caldwell’s love mixing kick waxes) – well, they all needed a binder. What exact base did John put down to make it all more durable, and more pliable? (hint hint, it wasn’t Vauhti Super Base).
I’d cue in on one picture. In 1952, John Caldwell was named to the 1952 Olympic team for the Oslo Games. The ’52 Games were the first Winter Olympiad clear from the post-World War II haze over international sport. The US Skiing squad Caldwell joined represented a first generation of American skiers without direct ties to the Scandinavian diaspora that brought the sport to the United States. The team would go on to form the basis for a sport in the United States as we know it today. There was Duluth-born George Hovland, who would play a similar role to Caldwell as an organizer in the Midwest. Si Dunklee, of another vital New England ski family, joined in. The other great patriarch of New England skiing, Chummy Broomhall from Maine, led the way.
Before they built a sport though, they headed out to Sun Valley, Idaho for a training camp. They paid their way by working Ski Patrol in the mornings and trained in the afternoons. To paint the picture of this new more homegrown version of skiing in the United States, the US Olympic committee sent out a photographer to do a promotional photoshoot playing up the group of lumber town sons and New England boarding schoolboys as snowbound cowboys. Somewhere in there, someone had the idea to liken them to those great graceful creatures of the western US. So, they released the skiers, and they released the antelopes.
The result; there they are captured for perpetuity, the founding figures of our sport prancing along:
Second from the left is John Caldwell, astride and gleaming. Knowing the impetus of the photo helps the tinge of the sentiment expressed in his smile shine. He is very clearly wearing that grin, worn by others since at Bill Koch League practices, Eastern Cup races, Junior Nationals, and the World Cup too, of someone who can’t believe how lucky they are to be seeing the places they’ve seen, with the people they’ve met; to be moving through this world on skis. At the start of this 30th year of NENSA, there’s a reminder that those sentiments aren’t just something to be encountered in a sepia tone. From one person’s passion, we’re all out there, in the frozen woods of New England, still prancing along.
To start the process of reflection for NENSA’s 30th anniversary, Isabel Caldwell stopped in with her Grandfather John at his residence in Hanover, New Hampshire, where they discussed the impetus that led to our founding, and how NENSA has shaped, and been shaped by, New England skiing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Isabel Caldwell (IC): I’m here with my Grandpa John Caldwell, and we’re going to talk about the formation of the [New England Nordic Ski Association], NENSA. So, Grumps, what ca you tell me about what the ski scene was like when NENSA came online, and what were the reasons to start this organization?
John Caldwell (JC): There was this group that used to get together, the [Cross Country Coaches Committee, CCC], who coached Juniors. They’re tended to be a lot of fiery conversation there, ‘you can’t run a [Junior Olympics] tryout race in January’ or this or that or whatever. It was a mess. A few of us Junior Coaches would get out of those meetings and just say, ‘there has got to be a better way to do this,’ and so in that frustration was the impetus for the New England Nordic Ski Association, NENSA.
What made NENSA different than was that prior to this organization, calls on junior skiing were strictly made by high school coaches of a high school league. That didn’t represent the full scope of what we wanted for New England skiing. [Some of us coaches] desired a model more in line with European clubs. [Over there], they have clubs and teams that represent those clubs.
Putting together a calendar for Junior Olympics (now Junior Nationals) Qualifying, “try-out” races, was a central problem we had to solve then. It took a while to get started. We would start by saying, ‘well, we should have every race be a tryout’ which was un-manageable. Then, we said, ‘ok, some races will be qualifier,’ and then finally, ‘NENSA should organize, standardize, and we should have a series that is competitive for qualifying.’ That’s what became the Eastern Cup.
The big change was that we took the privilege of trying out for Junior Olympics out of high school racing and created a calendar of Junior Olympics Qualifiers apart from the high school calendar. Someone had the inclination to call it the New England Nordic Ski Association, NENSA, races, [what became the Eastern Cup.]
IC: How long did it take for NENSA to expand beyond just that initial idea to calendar JOQs?
JC: I would say about a year. Once we calendared races, the same coaches that were in those discussions started to ask questions about the stuff around those races. We held all these Junior National Qualifiers, right? Well, the natural question that followed was ‘what about the Junior Olympic team?’ We need to support those kids at the Junior Olympics.
That was where the essential good idea of NENSA came from. The Coaches had a realization that we wanted to work together to support New England skiers at Junior Olympics. We didn’t care if they were from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, [or Massachusetts], they were New England skiers.
Today, I think at Junior Nationals people view Team New England as a group that works especially well together, and that all came about out of that line of reasoning. If we are setting up these kids to qualify for an Eastern National Team, or an Eastern Elite Team, then we all need to work together to support them as a Team once we are competing against other regions.
IC: Who were some of the key coaches in those formative years?
JC: Gosh there was a board of around 15 people, so apologies, I don’t have a recollection of everyone.
The couple of key figures became some of our first NENSA Staff. Fred Griffin , who was coaching [Bellows Free Academy] Fairfax, became our first Executive Director. Zach [Caldwell] was our first Employee (Program Director). Jim Rodrigues made sure we had some Officials organization in those early years. Peter [Hendel] and Bob [Haydock] were still on that Board for many years (in fact, Hendel is the last remaining founder Board member).
IC: How would you say nordic skiing was Different then compared to now?
JC: I would say New England lent itself to having the kind of organization that NENSA was able to provide. So much of our early work at NENSA was negotiating how things were different between high school skiing in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts.
Maine would say, ‘we don’t do league races until February,’ and in Vermont we’d say, ‘well our skiers have been training all year to race, so they should race in December!’ New Hampshire would go, ‘well, that’s not fair that we qualify athletes for a Junior Olympics in March based off their skiing in November or December.’
One thing that was still very much in the New England tradition was that we proposed an Eastern Cup race weekend, races on Saturday and Sunday, and we had a couple of years’ worth of debate from coaches over whether we could hold a race on Sundays.
Addendum: On a separate visit, Isabel was able to also bring in her Father, longtime Stratton Mountain School Head Coach Sverre Caldwell, to ask the pairing of John and Sverre a simple concluding question.
IC: Overall, what do you think that NENSA has done for New England Skiing?
Sverre Caldwell (SC): Overall, I think the best thing is that it gave New England skiers control of New England skiing. When we formed NENSA, it sparked us all to ask the question, ‘what do we need to do to get better for our athletes?’ and we went about working towards.
JC: Back in those days, I would talk to US Skiing (the National Governing Body now known as US Ski and Snowboard), and say, ‘treat us like we’re a separate country.’ We’re going to collect head taxes on races, build up our resources, and then put them to helping New England skiers. New England skiers working for New England skiers, that’s NENSA, that’s the mantra.
John Caldwell’s First Letter to the NENSA Community, 1995.
(Photo: Courtesy Image)
Almost month to the day after this article was published, John passed away at 97 years of age. He was a husband, father, teacher, Olympian, coach, author, and one of the most influential figures in the history of American cross-country skiing. His life celebrated the importance of family and helped shape the future of a sport in the United States. You can read his obituary here and share memories of John here.
