Ferd Thoma and His Enchanted Ski Shop

Once upon a time in Peru, VT there was an enchanted ski shop owned by a European immigrant named Ferdinand Thoma. Perhaps you have an image of Austrian alpine architecture and efficiency, maintained by a stately Tyrolean gentleman. Well, the reality was quite different, at least by the time I became acquainted with Ferd. He was a wizened old curmudgeon from Hungary, not Austria, and the Hillside Ski Shop was more the workshop of a mad scientist than an enclave of old world ambiance. Hillside was perhaps the area's first specialty ski shop, appropriately named as it clung to the steep hill beside Little and Big Bromley ski tows. The shop is long gone, but the building still stands, forlorn and forgotten, just west of the Sun Lodge on Route 11. Sixty years ago, however, the Hillside Ski Shop was a mecca for people seeking equipment, service and advice about the nascent sport of recreational skiing. Ferd was a brilliant purveyor of all three.

He was a friend and confidant of Fred Pabst, founder of Bromley and the man most responsible for developing the ski industry in southern Vermont. Fred and Ferd were, in many respects, Bromley's yin and yang, cut from very different cloth, but both necessary for creating the whole. In the decades of the 40's and 50's Bromley was one of eastern North America's signature resorts. Ferdinand Thoma represented alpine retail's cutting edge, offering the best equipment and fashion and the very latest in service technology, much of it of his own design. In a time when Bromley attracted a largely urban crowd, Ferd was dedicated to making the sport accessible to locals, as well, providing the necessary gear at generous discounts, or at no charge, to those most in need. This tradition continued to the very end. The Hillside Ski Shop enjoyed a business bonanza that only the select few, fortunate and insightful enough to ride the crest of a successful trend, can experience.

By the time I met Ferd in 1989 the shop was nearing the end of a long decline. I worked at the Hillside Ski Shop for two seasons. It was like being a curator at a skiing Smithsonian. Ancient Henke leather boots in boxes were stacked next to hand-made wooden skis from Austria in original plastic wrappers, while clothing styles from the early '70's hung on display racks, effectively marking the date of his last order. All of it waited for consumers who stopped coming to the shop a generation earlier. During my tenure our specialty was service. Ferd would work on anything. No ski was beyond repair, no binding spring beyond replacement, no boot beyond rebuilding. The tools we used would be more familiar to Dr. Frankenstein then they would be to Walter Wintersteiger, but they worked. I'd never seen anything like them before and never will again, but they were the extension of a man who wasted nothing (every wax scraping was reused until it evaporated) and fixed everything.

Stories about Ferdinand's incredible life created the undercurrent of my time at Hillside, punctuated by wild arguments between Ferd and family members in bombastic Hungarian, regardless of any innocent non combatants (re: customers) who may have wandered in. As his one constant companion, tethered by a paycheck, I heard them all, and all of them many times. The tales of his later life were colored with anti-communist paranoia which led me to question their veracity: Soviet agents desperately trying to locate and silence this staunch enemy of the Kremlin, for example. However, his personal trials during World War II are documented. As an executive for Standard Oil in Budapest he was confronted by none other than Adolph Eichmann, demanding the names of Jewish employees. Ferd replied he could have the names or he could have the oil, but he couldn't have both, because Standard's decimated infrastructure would be unable to supply the goods. The Nazi thirst for petroleum saved the day for scores of Hungarian Jews. When the Soviets invaded Hungary during the War's final stages, Ferd organized armed resistance, finally fleeing for his life by swimming the freezing waters of the Danube, trailed by Russian bullets. His dramatic escape on foot through hostile eastern Europe in the winter of 1944 is the stuff of legend.

The Hillside Ski Shop closed in 1992, followed by Ferd's passing three years later. Virtually nothing of Ferd Thoma and decades of Hillside history remains in Peru, only a headstone shared with his wife. I run into few people who remember the man or the business. My feelings for Ferdinand are conflicted. I certainly learned from him, though some of what I learned is filed in a HOW NOT TO folder. Undoubtedly, others have created such a folder after working for me. There is value in such lessons. My time with Ferd was fleeting and entirely framed within a working relationship, so there is much on which I don't feel qualified to comment. I can tell you Ferdinand Thoma was a man who deserved to be remembered. He was a successful businessman, a pioneer in the truest sense of the word, certainly a survivor and in many respects, a hero. He could also tell an amazing story.