Gretchen's Gold; The Story of Gretchen Fraser America's First Gold Medalist in Olympic Skiing Crying The Torch Beyond The Olympic Village

Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Inc, 1996. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Bobbie Burns (Cover art). xii, 172 pages. Illustrations. Foreword by Bill Janss. Signed with sentiment by author on fep. DJ has slight wear and soiling and some sticker residue on the back. The author was the West Coast correspondent for Ski Magazine. In 1964 she won the William B. Berry ski writing award. In 1968 she won the national Harold Hirsch United States aware for 'excellence in ski journalism". In 1969 she was one of only 14 working journalists to receive their study fellowship at the Edward R. Murrow Center in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. In 1991 she one her second Hirsch Ski Journalism Award and in 1992 she won the North American Travel Journalists Association first place for magazine sports' story writing. The author had a decade of friendship with Gretchen Fraser and committed to writing her story shortly after her death. Gretchen Kunigk Fraser (February 11, 1919 - February 17, 1994) was an alpine ski racer. She was the first American to win an Olympic gold medal in skiing. She was also the skiing stand-in for ice skater Sonja Henie in the movies Thin Ice (1937) and Sun Valley Serenade (1941). Gretchen Kunigk was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1919. She was the daughter of German and Norwegian immigrants, Willibald and Clara Kunigk. Her Norwegian-born mother was a skier and Gretchen first skied at age 13, at Paradise Valley on the south slopes of Mount Rainier in December 1932. Under the tutelage of Otto Lang she became a proficient ski racer and later competed on the ski team at the University of Puget Sound. In 1938, she traveled to Sun Valley to compete in the second Harriman Cup, a new international event featuring the best racers in the world. She met 1936 Olympian and Northwest ski champion Donald Fraser (1913-1994) of the University of Washington on the train trip to central Idaho. They were married in November, 1939 . Sun Valley became their home. Both Frasers were members of the 1940 Olympic team, games that were canceled due to World War II. She spent the war years skiing in Otto Lang's military training films and helping to rehabilitate wounded and disabled veterans through skiing, setting the stage for a lifelong commitment to working with disabled skiers. After the war, Fraser got her chance to compete in Alpine skiing at the Winter Olympics. A week before her 29th birthday, she won the gold medal in the women's slalom and a silver medal in the women's combined event at the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Following the Olympics, Fraser became a mother and an ambassador for Sun Valley and skiing in general. Later in life she was a mentor to aspiring female ski racers at Sun Valley, including Susie Corrock, Christin Cooper, Picabo Street, and disabled skier Muffy Davis.