[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 24 (Thursday, February 14, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S754-S755]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RECOGNIZING THE COCHRAN FAMILY
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, in Vermont, you will find any number of
successful family-run businesses. Today, I want to recognize the
Cochran Family and their Cochran Ski Area. This family, which has spent
50 years on a hillside in the town of Richmond, VT, has seen 10 of its
own compete in the Olympic Games and has brought thousands of local
youth together to share in Vermont's rich tradition of winter sports.
The Cochran Ski Area is truly a remarkable place in Vermont, where
the rewards of family togetherness, community support, and shared
knowledge have been reaped to the fullest for half a century. In the
1960s, the Cochran slope was a skiing family's dreamland, but Mickey
Cochran, alongside his wife Ginny and family, chose to open their home
and their hearts to the community. Since then this slope has become a
source of skill not only for the Cochran Olympians, but for every
Vermonter who, with their guidance, has been helped to master the art
of skiing. The Cochrans intensified their skiing talent and dedication
through the application of math and physics, complementing a classroom
education with a thrilling hands-on experience unlike any other. This
Vermont family and their legacy are a model of community building and
achievement. Their charity has enriched Vermont and the Cochran Ski
Area has been cherished in return as a haven for families to enjoy
winter traditions. Today, a new generation of Cochrans preserves their
relationship with the land Mickey and Ginny Cochran sought to make
their home years ago, by founding Slopeside Syrup, a maple syrup
business. Each spring Cochran's taps more than 20,000 maple trees
around the ski slope and opens its doors of the Slopeside Syrup
sugarhouse to visitors and neighbors alike.
I am proud to share the Cochran family's story with the Senate. I ask
unanimous consent that a recent article from The New York Times about
this incredible family be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Jan. 23, 2013]
Short Hillside's Long Legacy
(By Bill Pennington)
Richmond, VT.--It was 1960 in northern Vermont and Mickey
Cochran had a simple plan with an uncommon stipulation. A
former schoolteacher, Cochran would buy a house in the
country for his growing family, but only if the new home had
a pitched slope behind it where he could install a ski lift.
Along with his wife, Ginny, whom he met while skiing,
Cochran found the right house and parcel of land for $10,000,
and soon there was a rope tow just outside the back door.
Educated as a mechanical engineer, Cochran affixed
floodlights to adjacent trees and the roof of the two-story
home, turning the modest rural hillside into a round-the-
clock winter playground.
Like a Vermont version of the movie ``Field of Dreams,'' if
you build and illuminate a place to ski in snow country,
people will come from far and wide.
Throughout the 1960s, thousands of local schoolchildren and
their parents learned to ski at the Cochran hill, with Mickey
and Ginny providing free hands-on instruction. They did not
charge to use the 400-foot rope tow either. Everyone was
welcome, even in the kitchen of the Cochran home, which
served as a warming hut.
``It was a magical place,'' said Bob Cochran, one of Mickey
and Ginny's four children. ``Like a big party at your house
every night.''
The ski hill, moderately expanded in subsequent decades,
continues to this day as a nonprofit organization and revered
civic resource, a tribute to Mickey Cochran's humble 1960
dream.
But that is not the reason Cochran's Ski Area, with its one
tiny roadside sign, is known throughout the racing world. It
is not why the one-room Cochran lodge, built in 1984, is
replete with pictures of international skiing stars who have
made the trek to this out-of-the-way little ski area next to
the Winooski River.
Mickey and Ginny Cochran's children--Marilyn, Barbara Ann,
Bob and Lindy--all made the United States ski team and each
raced in the Olympics. At the 1972 Games in Sapporo, Japan,
Barbara Ann won a gold medal in slalom.
The Skiing Cochrans, as they became known in the 1970s,
were an American sensation, feted at gala dinners and
featured in national magazines, like a sporting version of
the Osmonds.
But there's more: six of Mickey and Ginny Cochran's
grandchildren have made the United States ski team in the
last decade, including Ryan Cochran-Siegle, Barbara Ann's 20-
year-old son, who won two events at the junior world
championships last season. His cousin Robby Kelley, Lindy's
son, is the reigning national giant slalom champion,
extending the lineage of America's first family of ski racing
into a sixth decade.
In 2005, four second-generation Cochrans were on the United
States ski team, matching the four Cochrans on the team 43
years ago. And the ski area has helped produce more than a
dozen United States team members who are not related to the
Cochrans, even if they are all embraced as Cochran racers.
``People have asked me if there's something in the water,''
Bob, 61, said with a laugh last month, sitting at a picnic
table inside the unassuming Cochran lodge. ``People think we
have some secret. But there was no special criteria for
coming here except one. My father said you had to have fun.
``And my mother made every kid who showed up here feel like
a part of the family.''
No Discussion of Olympics
Each of the original skiing Cochrans insisted that making
the Olympics was never discussed by their father, who died in
1998 at age 74, or by their mother, who was 76 when she died
in 2005.
``Even making the national team was never envisioned,''
said Lindy, now 59. ``That was some mystical place and the
farthest thing from my father's mind. He did, however,
believe that you needed a lot of repetition to get good at
something.''
So what better way than to grab the rope tow just outside
your bedroom window?
The usual Cochran winter day would have the children doing
their homework after
[[Page S755]]
school, then awaiting their father, who had left teaching to
take an engineering job at a General Electric plant in nearby
Burlington.
``He would get home around 6 p.m. and we'd be waiting to
get out there,'' said Bob, who became a physician after his
amateur and professional ski racing career ended. ``My mom
would give my dad something to eat, and then he'd go fire up
the old gas-powered engine that ran the rope tow.''
Gates would be set on the hill, and if there were not
enough gates, saplings cut from the adjacent woods would be
used instead.
``It would hurt hitting those saplings,'' said Marilyn, 62.
``But you couldn't get us off that hill. We'd be out there
five nights a week, and the only way to get us to go to bed
was to flip off the lights.''
When Marilyn and Barbara Ann, who was 11 months younger,
began winning regional and national-level races, their
celebrity spread in the pastoral remote villages of northern
New England, but they remained something of a curiosity at
the extravagant Alps resorts that hosted the top
international ski races. That was true even after they each
won a medal at the 1970 world championships.
``I recall the Europeans saying: `Who are these Cochrans?
From where?' '' Marilyn said. ``But you know, they started
thinking of us as kids to be reckoned with.''
Their father was their coach and, they said, an innovator.
Relying on his engineering background, he introduced
scientific methods to racing tactics, turning a mountain
descent into a conversation about vectors and ski path
velocity. He taught his children to chart the number of gates
in a racecourse and to memorize it using visualization
techniques. He was also a master sports psychologist, an
underappreciated part of coaching at the time.
``He was a teacher at heart, and he knew how to keep you
focused on your performance and not the outcome,'' Bob said.
``He was years ahead of his time.''
If there is a shared trait from generation to generation of
Cochran Olympians, it is the powerful benefit of basic
homework, or time on the snow in ski racing parlance. The
emphasis has always been on the value of dedicated,
enthusiastic preparation, even in modest circumstances. The
Cochran race training course is far from steep and only
several hundred feet long. But Cochran racers for multiple
decades have completed lap after lap, smiling as they go.
``There was never pressure on us,'' said Ryan Cochran-
Siegle, who is now racing at the highest levels of the World
Cup circuit, a path his cousins blazed before him. ``I never
felt any expectations. I wanted to do well, but winning was
never the central goal. We were urged to just get better and
better.''
Marilyn, who became a World Cup giant slalom champion,
recalled that her father always deflected questions about
success, even as it became common to the household.
``Acknowledging medals and things like that seemed arrogant
to him,'' she said recently, sitting with her sisters and
brother. ``Although I know he was proud of us.''
Marilyn then explained that her parents could not afford to
attend the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, where three of their
children competed, but they stayed up late to watch the races
from Japan. The living room scene, just feet from the
backyard rope tow, was later recreated for her.
``My father cried twice in his life--when his mother died
and when this one won the gold medal,'' Marilyn said, tapping
the shoulder of Barbara Ann.
``I didn't know that,'' Barbara Ann said, turning with a
look of surprise. ``Now I'm going to cry.''
Marilyn said, ``Me, too.''
More Room to Teach
The Cochran's Ski Area of today has moved about 150 yards
from the original home, which has remained in the family. An
adjacent 140-acre parcel of land, bought years ago for
$4,000, allows more room to teach beginners, which comes in
handy with more than 700 students enrolled in after-school
programs.
Hundreds of local youth and Vermont high school racers also
train and compete on the main trail next to a busy T-bar.
``It's just an extension of when the local parent-teacher
organization came to my mom and asked if she would teach the
kids on our hill,'' said Barbara Ann, who heads the current
instruction program. ``Mom always said skiing was the best
way to keep parents and their kids together in the
backyard.''
On a bluff overlooking a dirt and cinder parking lot, the
Cochran lodge is festooned with dozens of numbered racing
bibs from championship races. The oldest are from New England
in the mid-1960s and the newest were proudly spirited home
from top international competitions last winter.
The skis Barbara Ann used to win her gold medal hang from
the ceiling, and photos celebrating the careers of nearly
every Cochran are tacked to the walls, which takes up a lot
of room given the breadth of the accomplishments. From Bob's
1973 win in the famed Hahnenkamm combined in Austria to
Lindy's top American finish for a woman in the 1976 Olympic
slalom and giant slalom, to N.C.A.A. championships by the
grandchildren, the Mickey and Ginny Cochran racing pedigree
is long and full. And all of it from a hill that is a
miniature of a major ski resort.
Simplicity and unpretentiousness have remained hallmarks of
the Cochran way. So has affordability. A junior weekend lift
ticket is $14. Children pay about $40 for a season of after-
school lessons $90 with rentals.
``And we give scholarships if someone can't afford that,''
Lindy said. ``If you really want to learn to ski, you won't
be turned away.''
The ski area may have registered as a nonprofit
organization only after Mickey's death, but as Ginny told her
children at the time, ``It was always a nonprofit.''
Viability and Availability
The current ski area, with its gaggle of instructors,
coaches and lift operators, is overseen by a board that has
had to raise money for improvements like top-to-bottom snow-
making. The bills are paid, the lodge picnic tables overflow
in the winter with excited, red-cheeked children, and warm
food is doled out of a tiny kitchen. But donations are
continually sought to keep Cochran's Ski Area viable and
available to the next generation.
On a stormy Friday four days before Christmas, rain pelted
the tin roof of the Cochran lodge and gusts knocked out the
electrical power. Man-made snow was on the slopes, but the
downpour threatened the anticipated opening of the ski area
the next day.
The four children of Mickey and Ginny Cochran, who live not
far from Richmond, happily gathered inside the lodge
nonetheless, reminiscing and finishing each other's sentences
as if they were at the dining room table in 1960.
They discussed the Olympics and world championships like
run-of-the-mill high school events. When shown black-and-
white pictures of their Olympic media appearances, the
Cochrans hardly seemed impressed; they were too busy teasing
one another about their 1970s hairdos.
One by one, recollections from decades past were summoned
with ease and spontaneity, and almost every story began with
a Cochran turning and pointing at the ski trails beyond the
lodge window and saying:
``We were on the hill. . . .''
The weather that day may have been cold and blustery. The
Cochran memories are forever warm and genuine.
After a few hours, the siblings departed wondering when the
ski area--a Vermont cultural landmark--might open for another
winter.
``If it stops raining, we've still got a chance tomorrow,''
Lindy said.
The next day, the rain had ceased but the snow beneath the
T-bar lift was too irregular for Cochran's to open as
scheduled.
About 25 youngsters from the weekend race program showed up
anyway. So did some coaches and the three Cochran sisters.
Pulling into the muddy parking lot, they got out of their
cars to gaze uphill at the swath of good snow that remained
on the central trail.
A procession soon began hiking up the hill carrying skis.
Gates were set in the snow. Racers skied down.
Smiling, they walked back up the hill. Over and over.
It snowed soon after. Three days later, Cochran's Ski Area
officially opened for another winter.
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