When Sun Valley celebrated its golden anniversary in 1986, the most unusual attendee was 109-year-old Herman Smith Jackrabbit Johannsen. He passed away the next year.
Born in Norway not long after the American Civil War, Johannsen was still on cross-country skis when he was 100 old. His Methuselahn life had spanned skiing's revolutionary change from a utilitarian form of winter travel to a modern sport of high-speed lifts and sprawling resorts.
He grew up near Oslo when the city was still called Christiania—a name that came to be preserved in the christie turn. As a youngster, he would have used the recently invented sidecut ski—narrower at the waist than at the tip and tail. He met Fridtjof Nansen about the time Norway's national hero was preparing to cross Greenland on skis, awakening the world to a remarkable new way to explore the outdoors in winter.
Johannsen was a skilled mechanical engineer, and when he emigrated to America in 1901 he found work in industrial Cleveland, where he also found a wife. During a trip selling machinery in northern Ontario, Johannsen stopped long enough to demonstrate to the Cree Indians how much faster he could move on skis over long distances than they could when running their traplines on snowshoes. Cree was among five languages he knew how to speak, and the admiring Indians came to refer to him as "Chief."
The Red Birds, North America's oldest alpine ski club (I happen to be a member), made him their honorary President, although the members also referred to him as "The Chief." At the club's beer-soaked, moose-eating dinners, the Chief capped off the evening by performing a handstand on the table. He was laden with honors, celebrated by luminaries such as Norway's King Olav and Canada's Prime Minister Trudeau.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, and the Great Depression ruined his once prosperous machinery-importing business, he and his Cleveland-born wife, with their children, moved into a wood-heated cabin at Shawbridge in Quebec's Laurentian Mountains. They had little money. "I had time for the things which enriched my life," he told author William Lederer ("The Ugly American"), like "being with my family, cross-country skiing, exploring the wilderness, enjoying nature, and teaching these pleasures to others."
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Johannsen was distinguished by piercing eyes that were fierce without a trace of belligerence. In 1930, he led the first group on skis to the summit of Mont Tremblant, proving that here was terrain suitable for a major resort. During the descent, wrote a participant, "the old master fully exploited his bag of bushwhacking tricks -- pole-riding, grabbing a spruce tree and sliding its length to grab the next one, dragging a ski."
"There goes that jackrabbit!" cried a friend, as he watched Johannsen dash down through the trees. The name stuck.
He coached at the first American-held Winter Olympics in 1932. That same year the rope tow was invented at Shawbridge, next door to where Jackrabbit lived. It came to revolutionize skiing, but not Jackrabbit. "What! Pay to go skiing!" he exclaimed.
At the age of 72, four times older than the youngest competitors, he raced in Vermont's Stowe Derby and came in third. He was 75 when snowmaking and grooming were introduced. He was 90 years old when leather was replaced by plastic in boots, wood by fiberglass in skis. Around his hundredth year, snowboarding and shaped skis arrived. He witnessed them all when they were new.
During a visit to Norway in 1987, he died of pneumonia, only a few miles from where he'd been born. He was 111 years old.
John Fry is the author of The Story of Modern Skiing, about the revolution in technique, equipment, racing, resorts and the environment that revolutionized the sport after World War II.
When the 10th Mountain Division held a reunion at the Sun Valley Resort in Feb. 1986 as part of the 50th anniversary of skiing here, one of the visitors was Herman Smith Jackrabbit Johannsen (right), then 109. Like a king of skiing, he greeted visitors at Dollar Cabin during an exhibition of the 10th Mountain “Pando Commandos” white-suited demonstration team on lower Dollar. Express photo by Elaine Somerville
