'My soul is in Vermont'
In her last days and last interview, the state's top skier looked back
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Andrea Mead Lawrence, who grew up at Pico Peak, appeared in the pages of Time and Life magazines when she skied in the 1948, 1952 and 1956 Olympics. ARCHIVE PHOTO |
Toolbox
By Kevin O'Connor
Staff Writer - Published: April 5, 2009
Andrea Mead Lawrence received historian Bud Greenspan's decree "Greatest Winter Olympian of All Time" a half-century after becoming the only U.S. woman to win two skiing gold medals at one set of games. But in the days before her death Monday, the 76-year-old legend spoke most of growing up in the Green Mountains.
"Those years were remarkable and defining to me," she said by phone from her home in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., where she was battling cancer. "My spirit is in the West, but my soul is in Vermont."
Her parents, Bradford and Janet Mead, had turned Pico Peak into a ski area in 1937 and installed the first Alpine lift in North America in 1941. Living slope-side as a child, Lawrence often enjoyed "snow days" from Rutland High — so much so, she never graduated.
Instead, she got her education traveling the world, first to ski in the 1948, 1952 and 1956 Olympics, then to speak out against unchecked slope-side development.
"Having been raised in the Green Mountains," she told The New York Times in 1991, "they give me a sense of place and they have been a compelling force in my life. I felt that when I was racing and feel it now in my concern for mountain communities."
Reminiscing recently in her last interview, Lawrence recounted an extraordinary life that started and, through her memories, concluded in Vermont.
'That was great fun'
For Lawrence, life began with three lines by poet Robert Browning: "Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"
Her mother was pregnant when she read that poem, titled "Andrea del Sarto" — the namesake "who embodied to Mother the whole of human striving in a single sentence."
Lawrence's childhood was the stuff of storybooks. She woke on Pico in a stone house shaped like a castle and fell asleep to the song of a whippoorwill. Then everything changed at age 10. First, her father died in the fall of 1942. Then her mother, a competitive skier, captained a national team at Lake Placid, N.Y., the following winter.
"I just went along for fun as sort of the mascot," Lawrence recalled in a 2002 interview with this paper. "Someone said, 'Would you like to forerun the slalom?' I remember going into a hairpin, tearing around the curve – that's where I felt this sensation. The rhythm, the timing … there was a connection, a great coming together between what the course required me to do and my natural instincts. I call it a 'psychic click.' You suddenly find yourself in a moment and say, 'Aha, that's for me!'"
"Andy" was 14 when she became the youngest U.S. skier to qualify for the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland. But she didn't strike gold until she was captain of the U.S. women's ski team at the 1952 games in Oslo, Norway.
Feb. 14, Lawrence started her first event, the giant slalom. The New York Times described the hill as "icy as a bobsled run." But the 19-year-old newlywed (she had married fellow skier David Lawrence in 1951) finished on her feet that Valentine's Day to become America's sweetheart.
"Mrs. Lawrence, from Rutland, Vt., streaked down Norefjell's twisting, hazardous 1,640-yard precipice in two minutes and 6.8 seconds to outclass 44 of the world's finest feminine skiers from 15 countries," reported The Associated Press. "She wove her way brilliantly down the wooded mountainside, swirling through the 59 control gates like a gifted ballerina."
A Rutland Herald correspondent was equally awed.
"A roar of amazement burst from the crowd as the time was announced, although it was obvious from the start her brilliant maneuvering of the tricky course would not be matched," her hometown newspaper reported. "She was mobbed by hundreds of spectators and racers before being separated from the crowd to pose for news photographers. … She showed the strain of the race, but recovered quickly and shortly afterwards wolfed down two Norwegian hotdogs."
Decades later, Lawrence remembered what sparked her hunger: She hadn't eaten breakfast that day.
'The defining moment'
Lawrence received a gold medal bearing the Latin words "Citius, Altius, Fortius" — a call to go "Swifter, Higher, Stronger." And so she did.
"The defining moment in my life," she recalled this winter, "is when I won the second gold."
It came in the slalom event that required two runs. Lawrence began the first, only to stumble halfway down when her ski caught on a gate.
Lesser skiers might have surrendered. Lawrence instead sprang up, made her way past the gate and finished the run fourth.
"Her second run would have to be better than good if she hopes to offset this low placement," one newspaper columnist said at the time. "When her turn came, breaths were held and fingers crossed."
Lawrence jumped through the first eight gates, "racing with her skis flat rather than take a chance on losing time by edging them for more control," the columnist reported. "She fairly whistled with speed. The crowd, aware that a record was likely at stake, yelled itself hoarse watching this young daredevil with lightning on her feet. ... When she tore across the finish line, the clock showed her time to be one minute, 3.4 seconds – two seconds faster than any of the world's best women skiers had been able to do all day."
Add that to her first run and Lawrence won the event by eight-tenths of a second.
Ask Lawrence about going for the gold and she talks about the trail, not the medal platform.
"It was a continuation of what I'd been doing," she told this paper in 2002. "My purpose wasn't to go to the Olympics. My purpose was to do the best job I could. I set a standard for myself that every single time I left the starting gate I would put 150 percent of my effort into it. I extend myself to the maximum all the time."
But ask how she came back in that last slalom race and her recollection is limited.
"When I was racing, I was pretty much oblivious about what was going on around me," she recalled recently. "You go into the zone. I went into the zone."
Lawrence struggled to elaborate in her 1980 memoir, "A Practice of Mountains," and later found the words in an interview upon the 50th anniversary of her feat.
"You're into the center of your energy," she said then. "It's the absolute blending of the mind, the body and the spirit. That's where you moved into and that's where you're coming from when you're released to the hill. It was one of those few times in life when you realize you have become the very thing you are doing."
'Typical American girl?'
Her Vermont hometown went wild — even before her win.
A month before the 1952 Olympics, Rutland threw a day in her honor (even though she was, alas, away training in Austria). A sculptor from Boston carved her likeness in 7,000 pounds of ice in the center of downtown, while "restaurants featured special Andy Mead dishes and soda fountains offered Andy Mead sundaes," the Herald reported.
Lawrence got a taste herself when she returned to Rutland on March 24, 1952, to a 5,000-spectator parade and fireworks that spelled out her name. President Harry Truman sent a telegram calling Lawrence's victories "a great honor for the United States." Mademoiselle magazine named her one of its 10 Young Women of the Year. Newsman Lowell Thomas narrated a black-and-white documentary film.
"This is the story of Andy Mead, all-American ski champ," Thomas began. "Doesn't she fulfill your idea of a typical American girl?"
That was debatable. Having dreamed of marriage, she went on to have sons Cortlandt and Matthew and daughters Deirdre, Leslie and Quentin. But most typical Americans don't simultaneously raise toddlers and compete in their third Olympics (nearly winning another medal by finishing fourth in the giant slalom in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, in 1956) or see The Associated Press report their divorce (in 1967).
That's when Lawrence went west. She started in Colorado, settled in California in 1968 and later won election to the Mono County Board of Supervisors in 1982, serving until 1999.
What made the skier run for office?
"A lot of it has to do with the values that come out of being a Vermonter – a sense of community, a caring about where I live," she told this paper in 2002. "I love the whole notion of town hall meetings. I think people have a right to comment about the direction and quality of their community. I don't think you go along to get along. There's a certain independence."
("I'm definitely an Obama fan," she recently added. "I think he's wonderful.")
Some Vermonters didn't understand why Lawrence traded her childhood Green Mountains for the Sierra Nevada, a land of extremes that ranges from Death Valley – the lowest point in the continental United States – to Mount Whitney – the highest.
"I am moved by great mass landscapes," she said this winter.
To preserve them, Lawrence helped form the Sierra Nevada Alliance, an organization of almost 50 grass-roots community groups that work to protect the environmental and economic health of the area.
"Big developers view where we live as commodities," she said in a 2004 homecoming speech at the Rutland Free Library. "I care about our communities, not just the bottom line. We need to reconnect to the land and the value of where we live. You can't just keep consuming without looking at what the cost is."
'It goes on'
Watching developers bulldoze slopes for condominiums, golf courses and snowmaking systems, she founded her own nonprofit environmental protection organization, the Andrea Lawrence Institute for Mountains and Rivers, which has worked to integrate "economic vitality and ecological integrity" within the Sierras.
"The Lawrence institute can play a pioneering role in providing for development that yields a strong economy while preserving the amenities that make the area such an attractive place in which to live and play," the Los Angeles Times opined in a 2004 editorial titled "Just in Time, a Sierra Angel."
Growing up in the age before performance-enhancing drugs, Lawrence didn't believe in pushing to win at any physical or mental cost.
"I was raised in what I consider to be a very fortunate era," she told this paper in 2002. "We did it just because we loved it. Nowadays we're making career professional athletes. I don't know how many racers go on to become doctors or lawyers and have a whole life other than skiing. I'm not taking anything away from their talent, but it's not my world."
Even so, Lawrence always carried a torch for the Olympics. She was pregnant with daughter Quentin when she became the first woman to escort the flame into an opening ceremony — on skis, no less, at the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley, Calif.
In 2002 — the 50th anniversary of her double-medal win and appearance on the cover of Time magazine — Lawrence reunited with the torch by carrying it with Quentin just before its entrance into Salt Lake City's Olympic Stadium.
Few knew how far she had come. Just two years earlier, she had been diagnosed and had surgery for brain cancer. Lawrence returned to her home state for her 2002 induction as the first person in the Vermont Ski Museum's Hall of Fame in Stowe and her 2005 honorary degree from Green Mountain College in Poultney.
Last fall, doctors found cancer in her lungs. Forgoing toxic treatment, Lawrence found comfort in reminiscing with family and friends.
Peggy White of Rutland, a cohort since sixth grade, had to stop speaking with Lawrence after the skier recently began receiving morphine. For White, it was a mixed blessing: "How do you say goodbye?"
This Valentine's Day, the Pico Ski Club honored Lawrence on the 60th anniversary of the area's racing program. Having lost too much weight and stamina, she couldn't travel to Vermont for the ceremony. But sitting in front of a window in her California mountain home, she was there in spirit.
"I'm looking out on a great snowstorm, and I really am just taking it moment by moment," Lawrence said in a phone interview at the time. "I've had friends who thought I've been neglected by history, which isn't true. The race does not stop at the finish line. It goes on. And you do have to give something back."
kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com