Founder of Squaw Valley Dies

Alexander Cushing, 92, Resolute Founder of Squaw Valley

BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the SunAugust 22, 2006

URL: NY Sun's Obituary

Alexander Cushing, who died Sunday at 92, was a tetchy and brilliant entrepreneur who created a primitive ski resort at Squaw Valley, Calif., and then brought the 1960 Winter Olympics there.
In 1955, Cushing convinced the International Olympic Committee to site the games there, thanks in part to a giant plaster model of the valley that he shipped to Paris at great expense. The bid — which may have had its genesis as a publicity stunt — was audacious, given that the competition was luxury Old World resorts like St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Innsbruck, Austria. Cushing's resort had but a single chairlift and two tow ropes, and minimal amenities. But it also had snow — an estimated 445 inches annually — and slopes up to 3 1/2 miles long with a 2,700-foot vertical drop. The single ski lift was, at 8,200 feet, said to be the largest in the world.
Initially funded by a $1-million California state pledge, preparations ended up costing many times that amount, and the recriminations echoed for years. Cushing bruised sensibilities in every corner as he coordinated construction of dormitories, ice rinks, stadiums, and other facilities. Irritated IOC officials declined to offer Cushing tickets even to the opening ceremony.
Yet the games came off in spectacular style, including a storybook victory by the underdog American hockey team over its reputedly invincible Cold War opponent, the Soviet Union. Americans Carol Heiss and David Jenkins won gold medals in figure skating.
"We should do pretty well here from now on," Cushing told Time magazine in 1959, observing the rapid growth of his resort. "Unless we hack things up, and we probably will."
With a bump from the televised Olympics, and blessed by proximity to Reno, Nev., and San Francisco, Squaw Valley flourished, although for decades it maintained a reputation for Spartan accommodations and rickety lifts that occasionally dumped passengers. In 1976, four passengers were killed in a cable car accident.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Cushing, then over 70, returned to developing with renewed vigor and upgraded every facet of Squaw Valley. "He ruthlessly spurned environmentalists, regulators, and shareholders," to whom he never paid dividends, his daughter, Alexandra Cushing Howard, said. Cushing spent "his life pursuing his vision to make Squaw Valley the best ski resort in the world," she said.
Cushing was born into high society and lived at first on East 70th Street, in a house designed by his godfather, William Delano. His grandfather had been a prosperous Boston tea merchant. His father, the artist Howard Gardiner Cushing, died when Alexander was just 4 years old, and much of the family's money disappeared in the crash of 1929. Yet Cushing grew up amid extravagance in Manhattan and Newport and learned, his daughter said, "a lifelong disregard for money."
He prepped at Groton, where he excelled at tennis, was a good-hit, no-field first baseman, and lousy at skiing — a sport he never excelled at. While attending Harvard, Cushing traveled the world during the summers, and when he managed to graduate a year early in 1936, he took off for a nine-month tour of the Far East. He then attended law school ("the alternative was going to work," he told Time) and briefly worked at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.
During World War II, he worked as a troubleshooter for the Naval Air Transport Service. At one point Cushing worked himself so hard that he ended up in a mental ward suffering from partial facial paralysis, a condition that continued to give him a frozen slight-scowl for decades.
In 1946, having moved reluctantly to practicing law on Wall Street, he became interested in investing in a ski resort. While on his way to Squaw Valley with friends, he stopped off at Vail to test the slopes and was buried up to his neck in an avalanche. His brother and best friend, Alexander McFadden, was killed. Shaken but not deterred, Cushing hiked in to Squaw Valley — there were no roads at the time — with Wayne Poulson, a Pan Am pilot who had already bought land there. The two would become partners in developing Squaw Valley, a partnership that quickly became acrimonious.
Cushing raised about $400,000 from Laurance Rockefeller and other friends, plus his savings and money from his wife, Justine, an heir to Fulton steamboat and Bayard fortunes. He trucked in old Air Force barracks to use as housing, had the big lift and rope tows installed, and prepared the area for skiing. Using his position as majority stockholder, he fired Poulson as president of Squaw Valley Development shortly before opening the resort, on Thanksgiving Day 1949.
Opening day was a minor disaster as workers went on strike, plumbing malfunctioned, and dinners were delayed. One of his daughters broke a leg, and somebody ran over his dog. Later in the season, as was to happen in each of the resort's first three years, an avalanche wiped out much of the skiing and destroyed the chairlift. In the fourth year, there was a flood, and in the fifth year, the lodge was destroyed by fire. Yet Cushing persevered.
Over the next few years, Cushing added more runs and improved the accommodations a bit, but according to a 1955 article in the Hartford Courant, by the time Squaw Valley won its Olympic bid, one of its chief selling points was that it was "a private, secluded community in a natural amphitheater completely separated from commercial influence and public interference." Whether or not the bid was initially planned as a publicity stunt, it certainly had the effect of raising Squaw Valley's profile, and well in advance of the 1960 games, it became a favorite of celebrities like Joan Fontaine and Bing Crosby.
"We had literally thousands of skiers up here last winter," Cushing told the Los Angeles Times in 1958. "Why, Doc Nelson down in Tahoe City must have set at least 250 broken legs."
Gangly and blessed with a distinctive shock of red hair, Cushing made an impression when he strode into rooms. He seldom worried what people thought, an odd characteristic for someone devoted to making people comfortable. "I'm terrible with the public," he told Time. "I don't like that professional, oily quality, but I guess I'm wrong. People at resorts like to say the owner talked to them. Here they say, ‘That sonofabitch Cushing didn't speak to me for the 13th consecutive day.'"
In the early 1970s, Squaw Valley began to drift as Cushing spent more time in Newport and elsewhere, returning perhaps once a month to make sure everything was working. Following the death of his second wife, Libby, in the mid-1980s, he found himself rededicated to building up Squaw Valley.
"And it occurred to me, ‘This is basically what you do with your life — it's this place here,'" Cushing told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. "But it comes to you, ‘Well this is what you do,' and the next question is, ‘Well is this the best you can do?' And you say, ‘Well, no. I'd never thought about it that way.It's not the best I could do. Well then, why don't you do the best you could do? I mean, what are you saving yourself for? Why don't you get at it?
"I really went back to work, is what it comes down to."
And he kept at it until shortly before his death, when there were no fewer than 31 lifts at Squaw Valley.

Alexander Cushing

Born November 28, 1913, in New York City; died August 20 at his home in Newport, R.I.; survived by his third wife, Nancy, his three daughters, Justine Cushing, Lily Kunczynski, and Alexandra Howard; six grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.