Inspiration for Gotamas and twintips (pics)...

[gonzo]

Check these babies out - found them in a buddy's barn this weekend. I wish there was more detail in the black ones, but they are the oldest Volkls I have ever seen - and look exactly like the gotama graphically, minus the budda of course. Shiny black topsheet - white writing above the toe - pretty funny. I wish I could remember what the model is - it says VoLKL (with the oomlat) and then the model name, which was something like "Leader" or something...

http://www.biglines.com/photos/blpic23079.jpg

And these twintips were sweet too. Twintips and beartraps - so hot right now.

http://www.biglines.com/photos/blpic23077.jpg

screw-in edges...
http://www.biglines.com/photos/blpic23078.jpg

[DaveTV]

I like the "ride" in the background. Is your buddy Amish?
http://www.livingpictures.org/images...hcartroad1.jpg

[iceman]

Wow, those twintips are something else. I always thought the Olin somethingsomethings were the first twins, but those have to be twenty years older.

[teledave]

Originally posted by iceman
Wow, those twintips are something else. I always thought the Olin somethingsomethings were the first twins, but those have to be twenty years older.

Ice, you talking about the Mk IV Comp's (orange with white lettering and bases I think) with the kick tail on them or a "real" twin?

[CaddyDaddy77]

How long are those twins? 140-150cm??

Cool Find, any close-ups of the Vokl's?

[Hicks]

There we go - just keep all your skies for 50 years and they become up to date again!

[trainnvain]

Birth of the Goon Ski
It all began in New Hampshire with a figure skater from Boston, Jimmy Madden, who was also an enthusiastic skier. Madden was a former U.S. Olympic team figure skater and 1934 U.S. pairs champ. In the winter of 1938, he gave a skating exhibition at North Conway. Unhappily, he hurt a foot during the performance. He still wanted to go skiing the next day but to ease the strain on his weakened foot, he decided to try kids’ skis.
Once on the mountain, Madden found that these little skis turned so easily he could execute his figure skating routines on them, all but the the going-backward part when the tail of the skis would dig in.
But he was not discouraged. He was so delighted at being able to do “ figure skiing,” he designed the first modern double-ended ski. Then he persuaded Boston’s pioneer ski shop owner Asa Osborn to have the skis made by Thor Groswold in Denver. Madden used his new “ski skates” to create the first ski ballet routines in America.
Of course Madden’s antics looked so goofy to normal skiers that the double-enders were soon known as “goon skis.” The Boston Evening Transcript published (in its December 29, 1939 edition) an interview with Madden, along with a cartoon of goon skiers doing tricks on their way down the hill. The Transcript reported that Madden “intends to master even the most difficult rink maneuvers on his hickory runners.”
Madden trained a troupe of trick skiers and took them to places like Sun Valley—history’s first freestyle tour. Skiers asking where they could get goon skis he referred to Derby-Ball, the woodworking firm in Waterbury, Vermont willing to make them. In the next few years, Derby-Ball sold several thousand goon skis.
Goon skiers became the snowboarders of the 1940s, doing unseemly tricks on those strange pointy skis of theirs all over New England. Ski journalist Peter Miller recalls that, in the mid-1940s at Mt. Cranmore, he had seen “my uncle Cally, up on the mountain in a group of men—I think there were six or seven of them—holding hands and wearing goon skis and doing a skiing crack-the-whip.”
Goon skiing presaged the ballet freestyle skiing of the next generation. Suzy Chaffee says she learned to ski to music on goon skis at age ten, a head start to being the star in freestyle ski ballet Suzy became in the 1970s
.
Teaching On Goon Skis
But it was more than a matter of tricks. Madden was not a trained instructor but did teach kids to ski, starting them off on goon skis, producing a pack of goon ski brats. (At Cranmore, Hannes Schneider had taken over the school in 1939; he was unimpressed by goon skis, naturally.)
But Madden did attract two influential disciples. The first was a remarkable fellow named Hal March, Jr., a freelance writer, businessman and pioneer Vermont skier from Brattleboro, a town that had been a center of New England skiing—site of its first big jump—for three decades. March took to goon skis immediately. A Brattleboro Reformer columnist who signed himself The Whittler, March published frequently and persuasively on the virtues of goon skiing and started informal goon ski get-togethers at Hogback, the area nearest town.
When Derby-Hall stopped producing goon skis, thrifty Yankees who wanted to join the short-ski brigade began doing what they had done for years to provide their kids with skis—cut a foot or so off the tail of old skis. March supported this enthusiastically. He converted so many to “bobtail skis” that, by the mid-1950s, a merry group of some sixty lawyers, bankers, housewives and secretaries, mostly from the Brattleboro Outing Club, were getting together regularly on bobtail skis at Hogback, encouraged by articles published in Ski on the Kitzbühel school.
Now switch the scene to Mad River Glen, Vermont, the ski area where the hero of the early American short ski saga came onstage: there Clif Taylor, a young 10th Mountain veteran, joined the Mad River ski school in1948. Clif was, above all, a playful fellow and frequently took a friend’s four-foot goon skis out for a spin without any intimation of the part they would play in his true career to come.
But he was also very concerned that students get their money’s worth. In 1950, he put his first pupil on goon skis—a story he related to Peter Scully, who published it in the November 1961 issue of Ski:
“The pupil I started on,” Taylor told Scully, “was a doctor in his forties who had been in the ski school for a solid week but could not handle his skis well enough to attempt going up on the big slopes. He had been confined to the practice slopes all week and his vacation was almost over. His main ambition was to go up the chairlift at least once.…I located a pair of five-foot ‘goon’ skis for the doctor…Applying the technique he had attempted to learn on his long skis, he was an immediate success.” Taylor vowed that the doctor spent the rest of the day “riding in the chairlift and skiing down the trails…only a few hours before, he would have been risking his neck to attempt it.”
From then on, whenever he had a slow pupil, Taylor pulled out a pair of goon skis, When the available goon skis became old and worn, Taylor switched to children’s skis and cut-down skis. While neither bobtail nor juvenile skis made very good adult skis, Taylor knew in his heart that they worked much better for a slow novice than even the most beautiful long skis.

[gonzo]

trainvain that is some cool stuff - i am guessing that is exactly what those green guys are.

i had some close ups of the volkls but they were on my girlfriend's camera - i'll see if she can email them to me - prolly gone by now though...