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Reciting the Gettysburg Address

Reciting the Gettysburg Address

Ted Merz
January 27, 2024

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My dad started skiing in the late 1950s when he was in his early thirties. A friend took him to Stowe for the weekend and he later joined a ski club and helped build a lodge.

I recently came across some unused ticket stubs Dad kept. It cost peanuts to ski in Vermont then. Today, prices at large areas can top $200 a day during peak season.

He has a book of single-ride tickets from Mad River Glen good either for ten rides on the aerial chair lift or 40 rides on the T-bar. The iconic single chair lift was built in 1948.

In the 1970s, my parents started taking my brother, sister and me. We would go skiing with half a dozen other families with kids of similar ages.

We tended to ski at Glen Ellen, which was a small resort tucked in between Sugarbush and Mad River Glen on Route 100. We stayed at a lodge in Waitsfield.

In those days the resorts weren’t as fancy. They would offer all kinds of discounts to encourage business. You could ski free if you were over 70. Some days singles got a discount, and my mother said the ladies would take off their wedding rings.

Once, in the mid-1970s, when my parents were skiing during President’s Day week, Glen Ellen offered a free ticket to anyone who could recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

There weren’t many takers, but my father stepped forward.

The ceaseless repetition of Lincoln’s most famous speech by his 9th grade history teacher came in handy three decades later. He got the free pass.

The world has changed a lot since then.

There are plenty of people over 70 on the slopes and resorts charge full fare. The Glen Ellen brand has disappeared, acquired by its larger neighbor Sugarbush.

The cost has increased astronomically, but now there are ski passes for the season that provide access to multiple areas, mitigating some of the cost.

There’s less snow and most East Coast resorts make artificial powder. Lots of people I know fly to Colorado, Utah or even Europe instead of driving to Vermont.

But some things endure.

Like the Gettysburg Address.

And the single chair at Mad River Glen.

(Part of a series of life lessons based on conversations with my parents.)