Tonight on New Hampshire Crossroads the art of daffy jumps and ski ballet at Waterville Valley.

A unique vocal ensemble brings New Hampshire's past alive.

And a Fremont expert says you are what you write.

Hi, I'm Eloise Daniels, and this is New Hampshire Crossroads.

Theme Music Local presentation of New Hampshire Crossroads on Channel 11 is made possible in part by Shaws Supermarkets.

Keep New Hampshire beautiful.

Recycle your aluminum cans at Shaws, where you're someone special.

And Weeks Dairy Foods Incorporated, manufacturers and distributors of fresh dairy products and premium ice creams for your family.

If you're a skier, you may have noticed some of those ski slope hotshots.

Who, as you're cautiously making your way down the hill, leave you in a cloud of dust.

You may even have wondered who's teaching those young people to ski like that?

Well, look no farther.

We found one of the culprits.

He's hiding out at Waterville Valley, luring unsuspecting young people into his program and turning them into incorrigible hotdogs.

Music Most of these skiers are already intermediate to expert skiers when they come into the program.

They're usually young kids that have skied at Waterville Valley or other mountains for 5 or 6 years.

And they've finally gotten to that point where they've decided they'd like to do something a little bit more than just turn right and left all day long.

This is a program that is a, one of the competition training programs offered by the W.V.B.B.T.S.

And that's a ski club that was founded here in Waterville in 1934, so it's one of the oldest ski clubs in the country.

And now it holds a reputation for providing some of the finest junior competition programs in the country as well.

For those of you who are wondering what the W.V.B.B.T.S.

stands for, would you believe Waterville Valley Black and Blue Trail Smashers?

Music Up!

Woohoo!

There you go!

That gentleman is one of the young men that just came for the Christmas Week camp to see if freestyle was something he wanted to try.

And as you can see, right now, he's doing something that probably he's never done in his life before.

And he's now asking me about the Waterville Valley Academy and if there's any openings for next year.

The program is designed to prepare these young people for United States Ski Association-sanctioned national junior freestyle competitions.

And what is freestyle?

Well, it has three components: aerial, ballet, and moguls.

More commonly called mogul bashing.

So I want you to just come into it one more time and just work that timing, right from the transition to the lift, and much smoother timing, keeping the hands right out in front.

Okay.

Yeah.

Go ahead.

Let me just see you run into it.

The experience is much like, if you can have the analogy of a diver, even the very approach to the, to the takeoff is important.

The takeoff itself is a is a part that they must develop skill on.

And lift!

Good girl.

They also have the flight itself, where they are expected to perform their maneuvers, which they will be judged upon.

The maneuvers range in difficulty from single maneuvers such as a spread eagle, twister, daffy, etc.

up to multiple maneuvers such as triple daffys, double daffys, spread eagles, or helicopter maneuvers.

Rotationals.

Those are aerials that are higher in the degree of difficulty that they work up to.

And then there's also landing.

This, in the judging criteria, is very important.

The judges want to see a strong, safe landing.

That means in balance and able to regain a good straight run position and ski out the landing hill successfully.

So there's in-run, takeoff, the flight, and the landing.

All of which counts are very important in the judging criteria.

This will be a demonstration event in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, Canada.

What is it that makes you want to do these crazy things on skis?

Ok, clear!

Oh, I don't think they're so crazy.

I've always liked it.

When I first started freestyle, I wanted to everything, to do everything but aerials, I remember, and they sent me off a little jump and then I started competing, and I was doing well.

Jody did so well, she won a place on the World Cup freestyle team.

What's next?

I'm hoping to be in the Olympics someday.

Maybe in in 1992.

I'm not too sure about 88.

Another component of their training is ballet.

Dancing on skis.

Music Okay.

Music Yeah.

Nice and easy.

Okay, try it again.

Music The final part of the training is learning how to bash those moguls.

By the way, the moguls are all those big bumps in the middle of the trail.

I suspect this is how the Black and Blue Trail Smashers got their name.

Music So now we know where all those hotshot skiers are coming from.

Nick Preston and the Waterville Valley.

Black and Blue Trail Smashers claim full responsibility.

Oops.

Story must be over.

Here comes our ride.

That's Eric and his trusty snowcat.

You didn't think we walked all the way up the mountain, did you?

Music Nick and his wife, Susan, also run a summer freestyle training camp for those hotdogs who absolutely can't wait for winter.

From the acrobatic beauty of freestyle skiing, we pick up speed now and go for the gold with the U.S.

Men's Ski Team.

We caught up with them recently at Attitash Mountain in Bartlett, and found out just what it takes to become one of the best ski racers in the world.

Music Each gate is a frame.

It's like a frame or a picture in your mind, and you want know, when you get down there that, you know, you're going to remember how you wanted to be right on that gate.

You know, you remember, you try to maybe envision yourself on that gate.

And each gate, you do that on each gate all the way through the course, some are easy, some are just basic, simple gates.

Some are tough gates, and you picture how you're going to go through that gate or you, you know, do something that is going to remind you that that gate is there and you have to prepare for and preparation is the name of the game.

Since the stunning success of Phil and Steve Mahre, the U.S.

Men's Ski Team has been undergoing a rebuilding program centering around the NorAm Trophy Cup Series pitting the U.S.

Ski Team against a talented Canadian team.

The Men's Ski Team is readying another challenge for the always powerful foreign competition.

Yeah, we definitely, definitely feel it's important to be in physical, very, very strong.

And we came to the, we realized that basically last year that we we have to be physically much stronger.

And we have made adjustments to that, and we see the benefits already for that.

So yeah, the coaches are looking definitely for for athletes who are, who are basically very well-rounded athletes in all types of sports.

We have a strength trainer, an actual physical trainer who travels with us and he helps us with, we do a lot of the weightlifting and, well, we do a lot of running, a lot of biking, almost anything we can.

A lot of basketball.

Kids like to play basketball, so we just do almost anything we can to stay in shape.

I think where we get most of our physical training in is actually the skiing, on the hill, skiing.

We spend probably five, five hours a day on the hill.

But the toughest part of competing for the U.S.

Ski Team isn't always found on the slopes.

Living the gypsy life of a ski racer can be just as trying as an icy course or a determined foe.

That's probably one of the hardest parts about ski racing is you travel so much.

It's one of the toughest things in the world to stay positive for five months or five weeks, in Europe.

There are different cultures, different people, different food.

Every other night is in a different bed.

I mean, there are times when I've, you know, you wake up in the middle of night and you don't know which side of the bed to get out of.

What we try to do and what we feel is most important is to keep the the athlete an individual, as much as an individual as he is.

And because everybody has certain habits and certain things he likes to do and certain places that he wants to go, you know, he wants to be alone or he.

So when we go to Europe, we try to hopefully fit everybody's needs and let them do what they want to do on a day off particular.

And also we try to talk to the athlete individually with how they feel.

And so we try to make adjustments for them.

If they're tired, maybe they want to take an extra day off.

And if they want to go somewhere and see a city, we certainly try to to to do that and let them do that because we feel that it's important to to be in Europe and to see that the cities and see that the culture and see how they live over there and, and some, some athletes are very, very interested in that and some athletes, they don't really care about that much.

They want to stay in the same place.

So that, we feel that is what we try to do.

And we think that we were pretty successful with that.

Of course, success is the ultimate goal of the U.S.

Men's Ski team, and according to Coach Capaul, that goal should be just around the corner.

I think the future looks, looks good.

I think we've been we've been underdogs.

I think we have not been noticed too much this summer.

You know, we didn't have any reporter, not many reporters there or television and, and people have not really looked, looked on us that, that hard because we don't have any proven winners yet and they've been spending more time with the girls team where they have really incredible, the team has credibility.

They have winners.

They they have a record and we don't have really a record yet.

So that's what's good for us and we use that to our advantage.

I've tried to ski safe in the past, technically sound and and, you know, not go too fast so you're going to make any mistakes.

But it's really important at this time in my career that I go as fast as I can go and and training is very important, you know?

I want to win those races.

If I don't, I don't want to be second or third.

That doesn't do me any good to be second or third.

You know, I've been second or third too many times.

I want to win the race.

Even though skiers can be part of a team, each racer has his or her own individual trademark.

Remember the fluidity of Franz Klammer?

The reckless abandon of Billy Johnson, the sheer glamor of Jean-Claude Killy?

Well as producer Dave Burke found out, each of us has our own trademark style that reveals the inner self and it's right at our fingertips.

Ron Scott had a problem.

He was spending far too much time interviewing and testing potential employees for his insurance business, only to discover that most of them weren't working out.

On a fluke, just by accident, really.

I won't go into the details, but someone said, I'd like to borrow your conference room and I'd like to give a short course in handwriting analysis.

I knew this woman pretty well, and I said, well, that's really far out, funny stuff.

Isn’t this like palm reading or or tea leaf reading?

And she said, well, I'll just I'll give you the course free.

It's eight Wednesdays if you'll let me use your room.

And so I said, all right Phyllis you can do that.

And so I took the little course and then began to wonder whether this would help me if I pursued it, would it help me in selecting people?

As it turned out, it didn't for about two years of intensive study.

But then after about two years, I got lucky.

Had a breakthrough, found out what the common denominator was for sales success, because that was the key I was looking for.

And it worked.

And it worked so well that other companies wanted me to do it for them.

And so I, it put me out of a 20 year career that I was very happy in and into something new.

Handwriting analysis, or graphology, isn't really new.

There's evidence it existed 4000 years ago in Greece.

It's still a novel personality profile tool in this country, but in Europe, 80% of all job interviews include some kind of handwriting analysis.

Ron Scott says it doesn't matter what a person writes.

Although his company Success Potential Incorporated supplies a nine question paper to fill out, he insists that even if a person knows that the writing sample is going to be analyzed and intentionally alters it, he can still accurately predict the personality.

You see, so many things are going on simultaneously when a person is writing, that you can't control more than maybe 1 or 2, or maybe several dozens of things that are happening at once.

And not only that, but the three key things that I look for are technically a trade secret.

And other handwriting analysts, even, don't know how to determine these things from the handwriting.

And so, I don't believe there's anyone that could manage a handwriting specimen to to fool me.

With validation studies showing Scott's analysis to be 85 to 90% accurate, he's certain people can be matched with the right job.

There's no hocus pocus here.

Every stroke has a meaning, he says, and there are over 200 personality traits he looks for in each specimen.

What I look for, first of all, I just glance at it and determine the slant.

Now, slant is very interesting because if it's about, well, 80% approximately, of the people in United States have a distinct right hand slant.

Now, that's from the perpendicular to the baseline.

And looking only at the upstroke, it gets a little technical.

So much of this does.

But a right hand slant indicates a person is basically warmly responsive to other people.

The more vertical the slant becomes, the more objective and cool and calm and in control that person is.

If a person is over to the left, very much so, that could mean a couple of things, but usually it means that person is basically self-oriented.

They're self-centered.

They're saying always to themselves, how's this going to affect me first?

And then how is it going to affect whatever else second?

Okay, Ron, take a look at my handwriting and tell me what you see.

Okay.

A few of the things that I would see here, normally.

First thing I would do is look at the slant and, it's obvious that, your upstrokes on your letters are a nice right slant, which means that you're basically warmly responsive to other people.

You're not cold, hard, calculating, and self-oriented.

You notice the y ?

This is interesting because it's a nice large loop in here that shows the fact that you like people in general.

If you had made the Y stem or the G, could be either one, like this, and a lot of people do it this way.

That's clannishness, which means that that person is very, very selective in his or her friends And won’t let very many people get close to them.

But you have a nice large one.

Also, something else we can tell from the stem that comes down, this this particular straight line is long and it's pretty strong, which means that shows a good degree of determination or won't quit .

That's where we have the won’t quit .

I notice that your I dots are rather close to the stems, which shows a good attention to detail.

The further they fly out in left field or right field somewhere, the less the inherent attention to detail capability.

For example, if I dots were flying out here, you probably would not want to hire that person as your accountant or your bookkeeper because you might get into trouble.

The, also, they're relatively round.

If you had a dash here for each I dot, that would show irritability.

So I don't think you're very irritable.

Meaning the little things I don't think bother you very much, which is good.

Pretty decent high T stem, which shows pride.

And that can be a spur to achievement.

And the T bar is relatively high on the stem, which indicates that your goals are set pretty high but yet they're achievable.

If the T bar is consistently above the T stem, that shows a person that has goals that are really beyond their grasp and that can lead to frustration, perhaps, and disappointment.

It's interesting the F. I really need more to be definitive about this, but just as an example, if most F's are like this with the same size and shape upper and lower loop, this shows inherently good organizational ability.

Some people make their F's like this.

No upper loop at all, one down here, inherently poor organizational ability, but they can work at being organized and they can be organized.

It's just not an inherent trait.

Does Ron analyze his own writing?

All the time.

I don't always like what I see, no.

For example, if you're making jabs, little dashes for I dots, that indicates irritability.

That means you're getting uptight.

It's time to forget what you're doing and take a walk.

Or do something else for a while to relax.

If you'd like more information on graphology, you can write to Ron Scott in Fremont, New Hampshire.

But remember, you are what you write.

Our final story this evening profiles a group of singers who are bringing back the messages and the memories of one of New Hampshire's most famous singing families.

The Hutchinson Family Singers were famous in the early 1800s.

We caught up with the modern version, the Singing Hutchinsons, at the Gordon Nash Library in New Hampton.

We have come from the mountains We have come from the mountains.

We have come from the mountains of the old Granite State It was with the singing of The Old Granite State that the Hutchinson family introduced themselves to audiences across America from the 1840s to the 1890s.

Who are the Hutchinsons?

Forgotten for the most part in our time, but in their day, the Hutchinsons from the old Granite State were the best known, the most widely praised, the most thoroughly damned singing group in the country.

This evening, we intend to make the Hutchinsons, their life, their convictions, and their music live again and become a part of your heritage as Granite Staters as it is a part of ours.

Tis the tribe of Jesse, tis the tribe of Jesse tis the tribe of Jesse, and their several names we sing David, Noah, Andrew, Zephy, Caleb, Joshua, Jess and Benji, Judson, Rhoda, John, and Asa and Abbe are our names.

We're the sons of Mary of the Tribe of Jesse and we now address you with our native mountain song Liberty is our motto, liberty is our motto, equal liberty is our motto in the old Granite State Well, approximately seven years ago, I was a director of a fife and drum company here in the Newfound area, and I was looking for native New Hampshire music.

I went down to the New Hampshire Historical Society and they directed me to some, to Hutchinson Family music.

I had never heard of the Hutchinson Family before.

And they said, there's this, this native New Hampshire music.

And I got it out and and looked at it and hum, hummed through it.

And I said, gee, this is interesting music.

Someday it would be nice to perform.

And that was about seven years ago.

And just about two years ago, the people who who are able to perform it, and, and sing it suddenly appeared.

Hear the mighty car wheels humming Now, look out!

The engines coming Church and statesmen!

Hear the thunder!

Clear the track!

Or you'll fall under!

Get off the track!

Get off the track!

Get off the track, all are singing while the Liberty Bell is ringing.

Get off the track Get off track!

Get off the track, All are singing while the Liberty Bell is ringing Get Off The Track was written by Jesse Hutchinson.

His words were fitted to an old slave melody, and he used the new novelty of the steam train as a symbol of an irresistible force, rolling to freedom.

a happy nation.

Huzza, huzza!

Huzza, huzza!

Huzza, huzza, emancipation soon will bless our happy nation The Hutchinsons all inherited a determined moralistic streak from their Baptist deacon father, so it's not surprising that several of the children became early convinced of the evils of alcohol and joined the temperance movement.

One of the favorite temperance songs was King Alcohol .

King Alcohol has had his day, his kingdom’s crumbling fast His votaries are heard to say Our tumbling days are past There's no rum, no gin, no beer, no wine, no brandy of hue.

No hock, no port, no flip combined to make a man get blue And now they're merry without their sherry , or Tom and Jerry, champagne and Perry, or spirits of every hue.

And now they are a temperate crew As ever a mortal knew.

And now they are a temperate crew as ever a mortal knew The shout of Washingtonians is heard on every gale They’re chanting now the victory O’er cider, beer and ale For there's no rum, nor gin, nor beer, nor wine nor brandy of any hue.

No hock, nor port, nor flip combined to make a man get blue and now they're merry without their sherry, or Tom and Jerry, champagne and Perry, or spirits of every hue And now they are a temperate crew as ever a mortal knew, and now they are a temperate crew and have given the devil his due Their politics were very important to them.

Their politics and the spiritual content of what they did was very important to them.

They, so we try to get that across and it's important to some of us, a part of why we do this is the fun of the music, but also the content of it as well.

We have members of the group that are vegetarians.

We have members of the group that are, pacifists, that are feminists.

And so it gives an added dimension to the music that makes it very meaningful for us and I think meaningful for our audiences as well.

Tenting tonight, tending tonight tenting on the old campground Tenting tonight, tenting tonight Tenting on the old campground We are tired of war on the old campground Many are dead and gone Of the brave and true who left their homes and others been wounded long Many are the hearts that are weary tonight wishing for the war to cease Many are the hearts that are looking for the light to see the dawn of peace Tenting tonight Tenting tonight Tenting on the old Tenting Tonight was written during the Civil War by Walter Kittredge of Merrimack, New Hampshire.

Tenting tonight, tenting on the old campground That's our show for tonight.

Thanks for watching.

As you probably know, New Hampshire's own Christa McAuliffe will be blasting off in the space shuttle Challenger in late January.

Her story will be part of a special New Hampshire Crossroads next week, a program honoring the Granite State's many contributions to the space program.

For New Hampshire Crossroads, I'm Eloise Daniels.

See you next week.

Theme Music Local presentation of New Hampshire Crossroads on Channel 11 is made possible in part by Shaws Supermarkets.

Keep New Hampshire beautiful.

Recycle your aluminum cans at Shaws, where you're someone special.

And Weeks Dairy Foods Incorporated, manufacturers and distributors of fresh dairy products and premium ice creams for your family.

Theme Music