FALLS VILLAGE — Long-time followers of the Salisbury Winter Sports Association’s ski jumps will remember a youngster named Ariel Picton, who started ski jumping in Salisbury at age nine.
Now married with two children and living in New Hampshire, Ariel Picton Kobayashi is the author of the just-published “Ski Jumping in the Northeast: Small Towns and Big Dreams.”
Kobayashi held a Zoom talk Thursday, Jan. 22, sponsored by the David M. Hunt Library.
She recalled her introduction to the sport as a child, and her work as a coach for SWSA some years later.
The first section of the book is based on her senior project as a history major at the State University of New York — Purchase.
She noted that SWSA is celebrating its 100th year of ski jumping.
The year it all started, 1926, is when ski jumping was becoming popular in the northeastern United States. The original name of SWSA was the Salisbury Outing Club.
There were dozens of small towns with jumps in the Northeast. Colleges had jump hills, and sponsored winter carnival events.
Excursion trains ran from big cities such as New York and Boston, taking urban skiers to the rural towns.
She cited SWSA’s Larry Stone remembering that in the 1950s, Salisbury had eight or nine jumps, including jumps in back yards. Children took to ski jumping the way they did to baseball in the summer.
But over time the clubs faltered and by the 1970s most of the ski jumping venues closed down.
Kobayashi said that one factor in the decline of ski jumping was the famous “Agony of Defeat” television clip that showed a ski jumper in a spectacular crash. This clip was used every Saturday in the intro to ABC television’s “Wide World of Sports.”
“It was shown over and over again,” she said.
Another blow came in 1981, when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) dropped ski jumping as a sanctioned college sport.
“This had a ripple effect all the way down to the local level,” she said. Young jumpers no longer had a “clear college pathway,” and the number of jumpers continued to drop.
SWSA was one of the few clubs to survive the decline, which Kobayashi attributed to the strong ties between SWSA and the community as a whole.
Screenshot from Zoom
“I was lucky to have SWSA.”
The book contains a section on hill preparation. “It’s not glamorous, it’s not about individual performance,” she said.
“It’s about everyone working for a common goal.”
The book also addresses women in the sport. Kobayashi said the first documented female ski jumper was Paula Lamberg, an Austrian countess who competed in 1911 wearing a long black dress (and set a record while she was at it).
She said a long-standing myth persisted, that ski jumping was bad for girls because it had a negative effect on their ability to have children.
Things started to change for the better in 2009, with the popularity of alpine skier Lindsey Vonn, and finally, in 2014, female jumpers were allowed in the Olympics.
Kobayashi said this happened because of “persistence, community, showing up when the system isn’t designed for them.”
Proffitt and her husband and business partner, Robert Bristow, are well-known leaders in the art and architecture communities, and their home, studio and workshop in Lakeville; store and office at 16 Main St. in Salisbury; and gallery space in Norfolk are vibrant hubs for arts and design in the region.
Proffitt has been coming to the area since she was a teenager. Originally from Puerto Rico, her family moved to the New York City area in the 1970’s. Her artist and architect father encouraged her interests in art and design and her deep desire to create. At school, she excelled in math and art and soon realized that this was all she wanted to do. “Think logically and then break the mold with creativity,” she said.
Armed with a degree in visual art from Trinity College, she pursued advanced studies at Berkeley and Pratt before receiving a master’s degree in architecture from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, where she met Bristow. Both landed apprenticeships in Boston and were drawn to the arts community in Norfolk centered around the Yale Summer Arts Program. The area quickly became their personal and family anchor.
They started Poesis, a furniture design and manufacturing studio, with a small loan from her mother. They landed a major house project and soon met a hotelier at a party who hired them on the spot to design a hotel in Washington, D.C.
Proffitt said, “I was hooked because it combined everything I wanted to do creatively: design experiences in the broadest sense with all the supporting pieces of the puzzle — furniture, objects, art. My father felt that architecture was the Renaissance profession: It holds the seeds of art, design, engineering and all the other ingredients. For me, it all starts with art.”
A rendering of King Winery, one of Pilar Proffitt’s current interior design projects.Provided
Proffitt is devoted to the area. She and Bristow raised their family in Lakeville. Their daughter Grace, a sculptor, attended Hotchkiss and is pursuing her MFA at University of Pennsylvania. Their daughter Ellis, also a graduate of Hotchkiss and Trinity, is a mathematician and aspiring actress in Los Angeles; and their son Sam attended Salisbury School and is a junior at Trinity, majoring in art history with a minor in architecture. They all are carrying forward the family’s passion for arts, architecture and design.
Proffitt’s interior design work and unique furniture pieces welcome visitors at Hotchkiss’ Art Center, the Scoville Memorial Library, her own wHole hOuse shop in Salisbury and, soon, across the street in the new Jam Food Shop, which is expected to open this fall.
The region’s many museums and galleries include some of Proffitt’s favorites, from Mass MoCA and the Clark to Salisbury’s Geary, Mad Rose in Millerton, Jack Shainman in Kinderhook and Art Omi in Ghent. Proffitt loves the connections and new opportunities brought to the community by the increase in full-time residents, as well as impromptu get-togethers with friends — recently watching a Knicks playoff game at the tavern bar at the White Hart. Moments like that keep her grounded here.
In addition to the White Hart, Proffitt is a fan of area restaurants, including Fern for a quick pasta at the bar; Isabela in Amenia, where Michelin-starred chef Jose Ramirez Ruiz is from Puerto Rico; and Clare de Boer’s Stissing House in Pine Plains.
A perfect day for Proffitt is spent working in her studio overlooking Lake Wononscopomuc, without distractions, rain or shine. It is a quiet and peaceful place that supports her many architecture and design projects. When asked what she would say to a younger version of herself just starting a career, she responded, “Don’t be so shy. As one of my professors told me, ‘Sometimes you just have to crash the party.’ Draw, write, run, play tennis. And travel!”
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