The little ski hill that could Brattleboro’s Living Memorial Park offers $5 lift tickets and 8 decades of tradition By Kevin O’Connor BRATTLEBORO, Vt.
The T-bar lift takes skiers and snowboarders up the hill at Living Memorial Park in Brattleboro. Brattleboro Reformer File Photo
Turn back history to January 1938 and you’ll see headlines as dark as storm clouds, be it about President Franklin Roosevelt focusing his State of the Union address on “a world of high tension and disorder” or Vermont ministers lamenting theaters breaking a longtime Sabbath rule by showing films on Sunday. “Those motion picture houses that do evade the law do not merit public patronage,” one cleric said. Bookended between the Great Depression and World War II, the era seemed inescapable. Then came news of a newfangled contraption — a “ski tow” — sprouting at a local hillside farm. “A 20-horsepower electric motor operating a one-inch, specially prepared, waterproofed rope will be capable of handling 20 persons at a time,” The Brattleboro Reformer reported, “drawing them up the slope at a speed of over 10 miles an hour.” UpCountryOnline.com | 35
