[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 21 (Tuesday, March 1, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E309]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              ONE OF THE GREAT FIGURES IN AMERICAN SKIING

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. BERNARD SANDERS

                               of vermont

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, March 1, 2005

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to celebrate the life of 
Virginia Cochran, known to generations of Vermont children as Ginny, 
who died last week at the age of 74.
  In 1961 Ginny Cochran and husband, Mickey, created a ski slope in 
their backyard and opened it as Cochran's Ski Area. In its early years 
it was a training course for all four Cochran children, Marilyn, Bobby, 
Barbara Ann, and Lindy. As everyone in Vermont knows, all four 
proceeded to compete and win in the Olympics and on the World Cup, FIS, 
and U.S. national circuits.
  While Mickey groomed, maintained and expanded the course, Ginny began 
an after-school skiing program, which taught generations of Vermont 
schoolchildren, and countless other families to ski. The 10,000 
children who learned to ski at Cochran's all remember with deep 
fondness the kind, energetic, and passionate woman who taught them.
  Ginny's method of teaching was revolutionary. She taught parents to 
teach their own children to ski. Of course, for every child who was 
frightened of going down the small instructional hill, for every child 
who needed help in learning to go up the Mighty Mite ski lift, Ginny 
was there with advice and support. She encouraged children to extend 
themselves, to compete not so much against others as with themselves, 
and to be more than they thought they could be. Every week of the ski 
season saw Lollipop races at Cochran's, where skiers as young as four 
and five years of age would compete against Olympic gold medalist 
Barbara Ann and her mother, Ginny, and World Cup winners Bobby and 
Marilyn and Lindy.
  Today it is no surprise that skiers who learned to ski at Cochran's 
compete on the U.S. national team, including Ginny's grandson Jimmy, 
the U.S. National slalom and GS champion, and her granddaughter 
Jessica, with both silver and bronze in the National championships, 
have won collegiate championships, like grandson Roger Brown, slalom, 
and ski for major college ski teams such as Dartmouth, Middlebury and 
UVM.
  More important than such successes, however, are the generations of 
young people who learned that hard work brings many rewards, including 
loving what you work at and a maturity which has been shaped by self-
discipline as well as joy. Ginny Cochran and her husband, Mickey, knew 
the importance of combining hard work with pleasure, and taught it to 
their children and many others. Over the course of decades, with great 
commitment, Ginny not only taught children to ski, but to take their 
lives as seriously as she taught them to take skiing. It is a tribute 
to her as role model that her children, Barbara Ann and Lindy at 
Cochran's, and Marilyn at Hanover, NH, High School and the Quechee Ski 
Club, continue the legacy of their mother in teaching young people to 
ski, and through the lessons learned in skiing, they will reach a rich 
and fulfilling adulthood. Today, many of her former students are 
coaches and teachers of skiing.

  I know that Cochran's Ski Area, with its Mighty Mite lift and its 
fast but clearly anachronistic rope tow, will never compete in vertical 
feet with our State's large ski areas. But Ginny Cochran's work in 
hewing a ski area out of a forested mountainside in Richmond, Vermont, 
is not an anachronism: Through the work and commitment and vision she 
put into it, it remains one of our great Vermont institutions. More 
importantly, the lives she touched and shaped are part of her enduring 
legacy to the State of Vermont.

                          ____________________