John Jay; Descendant of Chief Justice Pioneered Ski Films

John Jay was a direct descendant of the man who became the fifth president of the Continental Congress and George Washington’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice--he was the great-great-great-grandson of that John Jay. He was expected to carry on the family traditions of statesmanship and finance.

But this John Jay plowed a very different path.

Before insulated parkas, before fiberglass skis and almost before chairlifts, there was Jay the skier, who took to the sport in the 1930s when it was little more than a rugged cult.

He became known to generations of aficionados for the ski films he made for 30 years and kept before modern audiences on the lecture circuit for another three decades after that. Named one of the 100 most influential skiers of all time by Ski magazine, Jay died of cancer Dec. 7 in Encinitas, said his wife, Mary Margaret. He was 84.

“He pretty much invented the ski film business,” said Warren Miller, the ski film mogul who has made more than 500 ski movies since seeing his first Jay film in 1947. “We were competitors, but I can’t say enough about how good John was at what he did. He had a sense of humor that really separated him from everybody else.”

Jay made 34 feature-length ski movies, starting in 1939, when skiing was in its infancy. He introduced a new film nearly every year until 1970, when he stopped making the movies but maintained a heavy schedule on the lecture film circuit, carving a new audience among the Leisure World set.

He was not the first and certainly not the last to make a mark in the rarefied world of ski films. Otto Lang, in the 1930s, directed what is considered the first theatrically released ski documentary. Among contemporary ski filmmakers, Miller is better known.

But Jay was an early evangelist whose first films coincided with--and many would argue, spurred--the growth of the once obscure sport. The release of a new Jay film signaled the start of the ski season just as Miller’s films do today.

“The exposure he gave to skiing was unparalleled,” said Morten Lund, editor of Skiing Heritage, a quarterly journal based in New York. “He came in at just the same time as the big lifts were being built. . . . He got a lot of people skiing.”

Jay attributed his success to two simple facts: “I was practically the only person who knew how to ski and make films,” he once told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

He narrated his films live, packing big-city theaters such as the Wilshire Ebell in Los Angeles with crowds drawn as much by his dry Yankee wit as by his spectacular ski footage. He spotlighted Olympic champions and other legendary skiers in harrowing runs in exotic locales, but also caught neophytes bumbling down powdery slopes. Critics compared his delivery style to that of Victor Borge or Robert Benchley.

Born in New York City in 1915, Jay was the son of a businessman who had headed the board of Globe and Rutgers Fire Insurance and Pierce Arrow Motor Co. in Detroit.

Jay senior frowned deeply on his son’s interest in what seemed a highly perilous form of recreation. In 1934, when Jay junior was a freshman at Williams College in Massachusetts, he resolved to provide proof that he could safely spend his spring break doing snowplow turns down St. Sauveur in the Canadian Laurentians.

With his father’s permission, he skipped the Upper East Side debutante balls that most young men of his class were expected to attend. Instead, he borrowed the family’s 16mm camera and used it to produce his first film.

He screened it in the family parlor and it was such a hit that he soon was showing the film to family friends and trading showings for lodging at ski resorts.

At that time, advances in equipment were beginning to transform the sport. The first rope tow in the Western Hemisphere was introduced in 1933 in Canada and was quickly imitated in the United States. In 1937, the first chairlift was built at Sun Valley, Idaho, an innovation soon followed by the first cable car at New Hampshire’s Cannon Mountain.

Jay graduated from Williams and was hired by Time Inc. to write scripts for the “March of Time” movie-house newsreels. He learned film craft from Louis de Rochemont, then America’s leading documentarian.

In 1939 he was hired by Canadian Pacific Railroad to produce a documentary on powder skiing in the Canadian Rockies. He began to perfect his camera techniques, which included shooting with one eye on the viewfinder and the other on rocks and stumps and filming while skiing backward. “These now ordinary modes of filming were first used by Jay,” Lund wrote in a 1996 profile in Skiing Heritage.

In 1940 about 50,000 people saw his first full-length film, “Ski the Americas, North and South,” which featured Dick Durrance, America’s first international racing star, and astonishing scenes of summer skiing in South America. Jay won praise from eminent radio newscaster Lowell Thomas, who said he “got more laughs from your running commentary than from any theatrical production in New York this year.”

Inducted into the Army in 1941, Jay spent the World War II years making training and recruiting films for the 10th Mountain Division and evaluating equipment for winter warfare. In 1942, he married Lois Goodnow, who would help shoot much of the footage for his films. They divorced in 1973.

After the war, Jay devoted himself to filmmaking. From 1946 to 1970, he traveled the world to produce a film a year. His 1952 film, “Alpine Safari,” was nominated for an Oscar in the short-subject category and later became a Warner Bros. release under the title “Winter Paradise.”

He was seriously injured only once in six decades of skiing and filming: He cracked a shoulder bone at Chamonix in 1948. What bothered him more were the hectic pace and tribulations of the lecture circuit, which took him to 100 cities a year at his peak in the 1960s.

He is survived by his wife of 20 years, Mary Margaret, of Rancho Santa Fe; a son, John, of Boston; and five stepchildren.