at the famous Cresta bobsled run in St. Moritz that they closed the run down after one of his crashes. In his wartime journals, the only moment of enthusiastic pride was when, in his mid-forties, he successfully completed training and received his parachute jumper’s pin.

He was a ski racer when that implied dash and a pioneering spirit. As with many sports, ski racing in the 1930s is barely recognizable as racing when compared with the sport at its top level today. Speed was important, but so were the dual, and often dueling, traits of daring and judgment. Racers often checked their speed or executed extra turns to control their speed. Alec was referred to as the “Flying Stem” because he raced with a perpetual slight stem. This was no faint-hearted technique. Look at movies of racing in the 1930s. Skiers seem to routinely slide off the course and into snow-covered brush. In the 1936 Olympics, racers scratch to an almost complete stop before negotiating difficult sets of slalom gates. I have a photo of Alec, covered with snow from falls, winning a race on Mt. Moosilaukee.

It is for this reason that in the lore of New England ski racing, there is perhaps no greater event than Toni Matt schussing the Headwall of Tuckerman’s Ravine in the 1939 Inferno. As a young boy of ten, I climbed up to Tuckerman’s with my father to go skiing. There were a lot of things about that day that would seem odd to a skier growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Most disconcertingly, there were no lifts. We had to hike with skis on our backs. Part way up, where the hiking trail comes close to the Sherburne Trail, my father led me out of the line plodding upward and over to the snow-covered ski trail. Out of his pack came “skins”—real seal skins. He fit them to our skis. We continued upward, gliding over the snow but magically never sliding backwards. At one point in this climb my father stopped and pointed at the solid gray trunk of a tree. To me, and probably to any other skier that day, it was like any of the hundreds of trees that lined the trail. The name of the skier is long-gone from my memory, but not what my father said. He said, “He [the ski racer] hit that tree at full speed. It caved in his face. He died right here.” We paused and I examined the tree for signs of this terrible accident of decades earlier. The consequences of too much daring were apparently more severe than a broken leg or a wrenched knee.

That’s not to say that my father did not take certain injuries with a sense of humor. He was, if not a founder, at least an early and enthusiastic member of the Broken Bone Club. Membership was apparently extended to those who broke bones while skiing. Members received pins, each with a “skull and crossbones” type bone clearly broken. The more broken bones a member had, the more bones would be on the pin. It was with a certain pride leavened with a twinkle of humor that my father would boast of being that rare man who had broken three legs. He had a pin with three jaggedly broken bones forming a rough triangle.

There is probably a sizable list of races that Alec won or placed in. He tried out for the 1936 Olympic team and won a spot. Although he did not race, he was always proud of having marched in the opening ceremony when the American team refused to salute Hitler. The team’s coach, reporting on the team’s results, dwelt longer on Alec’s effectiveness as a volunteer manager of the team than on all but one of the actual racers. It’s not clear exactly what the manager did, but taking care of the team members who did race and making certain that their equipment was ready were probably part of the job.

In many ways, that might be a metaphor for all of Alec’s involvement with skiing. He loved to race, but he really enjoyed the friendship and camaraderie of the skiing fellowship. It was the gathering together—talking, singing, and carousing—that made skiing so appealing. Alec also realized that the sport would not flourish without a continually improving infrastructure. He seemed to be entwined with many initiatives to develop the sport, including the Taft Trail, a precedent-setting race course on Cannon Mountain; the construction of the Cannon Mountain tramway, the first of its kind in the US; the backing of Minnie Dole’s National Ski Patrol (he was in the first class to complete certification as a patroller); the Thunderbolt Trail on Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts; the founding of the Ski Club Hochgebirge; and investment in and promotion of the original Wildcat Mt. ski area.

On one of his skiing trips to Europe, he prepared one morning to move with his group of friends from a ski resort in Switzerland to do some skiing in Austria. Their baggage was taken from the ski hotel to the train station. While his friends went on to the station, Alec stayed in the breakfast café to finish his conversation with a young Swiss. In mid-conversation, he thought to look at his watch and immediately realized that the train was to leave at that moment. He jumped up and excused himself (politely, I suspect) and dashed to the simple train station. He was just in time to see the train disappearing down the tracks with his friends and luggage. The train would navigate through two long switchbacks to reach its next stop, a more substantial town below in the valley. Alec ran, in shined, leather-soled street shoes, down the mountainside—a sprint of three or four miles by a more direct route. He was waiting on the platform (probably in a coat and tie with his shirt as crisp as when it came from being laundered) when the dilatory train arrived. He entered the train compartment with a relaxed smile on his face, probably all the larger for the surprised looks that greeted him.

My father never told me that story. One of his companions on that trip described it to me years later after my father died. What Alec did required what we would now call “thinking outside the box” and, then in execution, “pushing the edge of the envelope.” Not too dissimilar from those ski racing in the 1920s and 1930s.