Sugarbush Tales

"They say if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. This may have been true, but if you were skiing at Sugarbush, you remember every story. I remember one in particular because of my housing situation at the time.

It was 1968 and I was living in the furnace room of a catholic church in a town near the Bush, unbeknownst to any of the priests. (I was the original ski BUM; didn’t even have money to pay rent.) One afternoon after a day of bottomless powder, I walked into Chez Henri for a beer and saw an old friend talking with two women who, in my opinion, had to be models. As it turned out, they were. After a few more beers, the women mentioned that the house they stayed in on the weekends was empty during the week and that the owner (there boss in New York City) was a nice guy who probably wouldn’t mind having someone keeping an eye on the place during the week. I moved in the next day.

One day one of the girls called to say they would be coming up with a number of people, including the owner, for a big party. That weekend I met the owner of the condo. It was Oleg Cassini, the New York fashion king who in the 1960s was the official designer to Jackie Kennedy. The man who created the “Camelot Look.” The designer who had models dying to walk his runways and one of the pillars of the “Jet Set” scene that was happening at the ‘Bush."