This month’s blog takes a look at the life of John Clarkson Jay IV (1915-2000), great-grandson of Dr. John Clarkson Jay (1808-1891), son of business executive John Clarkson Jay III (1880-1941) and Marguerite Soleliac (1877-1937). He is referred to as John Jay for here on out.
John Jay was one of the most influential ski-film makers of all time. The effect of his films on the sport of skiing cannot be understated, as “going to see John Jay” became an annual ritual for American skiers. Skiing was an incredibly difficult sport in the first half of the 20th century, and mountains were not nearly as accessible as they are today. There was no grooming or snowmaking, the only way to get up a mountain was painful rope-tows or a T-bar, and chair lifts did not work well when they were first introduced. Not to mention that equipment like boots and poles were made from much heavier material than they are today and not waterproof. Only those passionate about the sport skied, and there were a lot of injuries. The difficulty of the sport made for a tight knit community of skiers, one that John Jay brought closer together with each film he would produce.
It was in 1933 when John Jay attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire that he first found his passion for skiing. He had never skied before, having grown up in New York City, but the snowy landscape of New Hampshire gave him the perfect opportunity. He had a natural ability to ski well. After St. Paul’s, John went to Williams College in Massachusetts. While not close to any ski area, Jay began traveling to Woodstock, Vermont on the weekends. The first rope tow in the U.S. was installed on a local hill there in 1935. During these trips he began taking the family camera with him and filming his ski adventures, which included the Williams Winter Carnival, the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, and the Inferno Race down the headwall of Tuckerman’s Ravine in New Hampshire. He showed these films to friends and family back home over their projector.
After working as a writer for Time Inc. for a short while after Williams College, Jay was accepted as a Rhodes Scholar at the prestigious Oxford College in England. After leaving Time, he had nine months before beginning his scholarship, so he came up with an idea that would allow him to do some spring skiing before he left. He scheduled a meeting with the public relations department at the Canadian Pacific Railway in New York, where he showed them some of his prior skiing and winter sport footage. They were so impressed that they offered Jay $500 and expenses to produce a short film about Canadian Rocky Mountain powder skiing. Jay then spent six weeks at the picturesque Skoki Lodge, located about 12 miles from Lake Louise in the province of Alberta. The result of that adventure was the 1939 movie Skis over Skoki, the first American film to capture backcountry powder skiing. It was also where he perfected his camera techniques and filming style, most notably his ability to film others while on skis himself.
Unfortunately, the onset of World War II postponed Jay’s Rhodes Scholarship so he decided to set out on another adventure to make a film, this time to the only ski resort in South America at the time, Farallones in the Andes Mountain range near Santiago, Chile. The result of this trip was Jay’s best footage to date, which he put together into what would become arguably the most groundbreaking ski film ever made, 1940’s Ski the Americas North and South. It was really the first ski film that had an adventure-travel theme, which has been the norm in ski film making into our modern day. It entertained the viewer in a way that a ski film had never done before and made them feel like they were really there as the film maker guided them through the adventure through this unknown terrain in a live lecture. Legendary ski film maker Warren Miller said that with Ski the Americas North and South John Jay had, “…virtually invented the ski film in its modern form,” as over 50,000 viewers attended the screenings on the film’s initial 50-stop tour.
Around the time of the tour’s end, Jay’s draft number had been called and he was asked to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey to begin his military service. The Army had invested money into producing ski training films, as there were a small number of ski units stationed throughout the US, and of course they assigned John Jay to travel to both Idaho, and Washington to record the training sessions being taught by famous skier Otto Lang. Needless to say, Jay enjoyed this first assignment and wrote a short piece about this brief adventure for the January 1942 issue of Ski Illustrated. That same month, Jay received orders to report to the 1st Battalion, 87th Regiment at Fort Lewis, Colorado, where he would be a Second Lieutenant to the ski troops. His main duties were to help recruit troops for the unit after the attack on Pearl Harbor, photograph, and help evaluate equipment during winter field tests, as well as serving as the unit’s publicity officer. He was also part of an eight-man unit of Army enlisted men that completed the first ever winter ascent of Mt. Rainer in Washington. Despite being in military service and not being able to travel during this time, Jay made a brief trip back east to Norfolk, Connecticut to marry his sweetheart Lois Goodnow. He soon began producing his next film while enlisted, Ski Patrol, which he would finish and begin touring for during the winter of 1943.
Ski Patrol was a promotional piece for the Army’s ski troops, as it was comprised of footage of troop training exercises at Mt. Rainer and Camp Hale in Colorado. The tour for that film drew over 75,000 viewers on the coast-to-coast trip, with recruiting flyers being handed out at the end of each showing.
After the war was over, John Jay was so anxious to get back to recreational skiing and filming, that he abandoned his Rhodes Scholarship and decided to use his leave pay from the Army to finance his next two films: 1945’s Hickory Holiday and the 1946 film Skis in the Sky which captured the unofficial opening of the first single chairlift at Aspen in November 1946. Before the tour for Skis in the Sky, Lois Jay learned to film as well, and her footage would appear in John Jay’s films for the rest of his career. Their 1946 tour culminated in a special screening for the National Geographic Society at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. where the film was shown to an audience of almost 4,000 people.
With the war behind him, and his filming methods perfected, John Jay spent the next 25 years making a ski film every year and traveling the country on an accompanying lecture tour since the screenings involved a talk about the film making process, and a question and answer session with Jay after the film’s conclusion. In true adventure fashion, Jay’s films show his audiences almost every significant ski location on the planet including Switzerland, Austria, Chile, Argentina, Japan, and British Columbia. He filmed the first ever Alpine Skiing World Championships in the U.S. at Aspen in 1950, a 1954 film at Mt. Toubka in the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, and both the 1960 and 1964 Winter Olympics at Palisades Tahoe (formerly Squaw Valley) in California, and Innsbruck, Austria respectively. One critic said of Jay’s 1960 Olympic film “…the much-praised coverage of the 1960 Olympic Games… was a blurred Brownie snapshot compared with John Jay’s action-packed color masterpiece.”
During the height of his popularity, Jay was traveling to over 100 cities every ski season and lecturing to a total audience of about a 250,000 people. Jay’s final lecture series / film that had original footage was 1970’s World of Skiing. This film came exactly 30 years after his career began, one that saw him travel and film ski destinations in over 30 countries worldwide, and ultimately inspired the growth of the American ski community. By the time of his last tour, middle class America had grown rich enough to enjoy the amazing locations they had been seeing in Jay’s films for years and traveling to ski different locations became as much a part of ski culture as snow itself. Skiing had gone from a hobby that people thought could only be enjoyed on a local hill to a global sporting phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of annual participants worldwide. Jay’s format of the adventure-travel ski film, and his technique of filming while skiing has inspired multiple generations of ski film makers including the previously mentioned Warren Miller (who is widely considered one of the greatest adventure film makers of all time), Steve Winter’s company Matchstick Productions, and professional ski-mountaineer Cody Townsend’s The Fifty Project.
In 1997 John Jay was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Ski History Association. Recognizing him for his outstanding record at preserving the history of skiing, the association introduced Jay as a “towering figure in the history of skiing who effectively communicates, records, and popularizes his love of the skiing life to countless thousands with his ski films.” John Clarkson Jay IV died on December 7, 2000, at the age of 84. He made 36 ski movies during his long career; they listed below in chronological order.
Sons of Eph (1937) short
Skis over Skoki (1939) short
Ski the Americas, North and South (1940)
South for Snow (1941)
Ski Here, Señor (1941)
They Climb to Conquer (1942)
Ski Patrol (1943)
Hickory Holiday (1946)
Skis in the Sky (1946)
Singing Skis (1947)
Skis over Europe (1949)
From the Alps to the Andes (1950)
Skis Against Time (1951)
Winter Wonders (1951) short
Olympic Victory (1952)
Alpine Safari/Winter Paradise (1953) short
Cavalcade on Skis (1954)
From Ski to Sea (1955)
Holiday on Skis (1956)
Great White World (1957)
Ski to Adventure (1958)
White Flight (1959)
Mountain Magic (1960)
Olympic Holiday (1961)
Once Upon an Alp (1962)
Stars in the Snow (1963)
Catch a Skiing Star (1964)
Persian Powder (1965)
Silver Skis (1966)
An Evening with John Jay (1966)
Head for the Hills (1968)
World of Skiing (1970)
Skiing is (1971)
Swiss on White (1975)
Winter Magic Around the World (1946-1970) (1976)
Ski Down the Years: 1930s-1960s (1993)