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With foresight, Walter had
early on begun to teach others to teach his method. He held his first official
instructor's course in March 1959 at Jay Peak, with Newport's Winston LeRoy
(high school teacher and ski coach) and Montgomery Center's Hubert Daberer (the
latter, along with his wife Caroline, was entrepreneur-extraordinaire behind
the local Carinthia Lodge and Alpine Haven resorts, and the other contender
for Jay's wedeln crown) becoming instuctors nos. 1 and 2 (in actual fact, Ernie
MacFarlane, Newport High School ski racer, was Walter's earliest (non-certified)
instructor, and Daberer his 1st full-time instructor). By the Spring of 1965
at a course given at Okemo Mountain, Walter had certified well over a hundred
men and women to teach full time, and upwards of two hundred part-time instructors
(both numbers would double in time.)
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Jay
Peak full-time instructors circa
1961 (in those fabulous sky-blue
and
red reversible jackets): L.
to R., Dave Baker, Joe Ehrler,
Alden Blanchard, Franz Smith,
Walter Foeger (in darker jacket),
Ellsworth Moore, Sybil Gagnon,
George Cunnius,
Tom Emrich, Laurent (Sonny)
Cote, and Denis Godin. |
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photo courtesy of D. Godin |
Many ski areas were clamoring to have Natur Teknik ski
schools. And Walter obliged them. He sent Ellsworth Moore of Swanton, (instructor
no. 6, class of 1960) to Camelback Mountain, PA; George Stepanek of Sutton,
Quebec, (instructor no. 15, class of 1961) to Thunder Mountain, NY; and Fred
Diette (Instructor no. 52, class of 1963) to Okemo, in southern VT. Eventually
Natur Teknik would be taught at more than a dozen ski centers, in three
countries, with many thousands of skiers taking lessons at Jay Peak during the
1966-67 and 1967-68 seasons alone. Morten Lund, SKI Magazine's editor, dubbed
him "the original teacher of direct parallel" in this country.
http://w3.ime.net/~eldorado/emsa.html.
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