Spectators

Fry, John
Lund, Morten
Masia, Seth

Actors

Adams, Charlie
Arieh, Simon
Arnaud, Albert
Asay, Larry
Barbier, Jean
Boix-Vives, Laurent
Benson, Kirk
Cagliari, Cesare
Chalmers, Ed
Colley, Hendy
Colini, Albino
Courvoisier, Guy
Cristoforelli, Roberto
De Lotto, Rich
Everest, Clark
Fergusson, Ian
Feuz, François
Guérin, Philippe
Haldemann, Willy
Hitchcock, Peter
Hock, Nick
Jacobs, David
Kennedy, Peter
Kratzer, Jean-Pierre
Killy, Jean-Claude
Laberge, Jim
Lange, Bob
Lanvers, JF
Lumet, Marc
Martinsen, Knut
McManus, Rip
Marxer, Herbert
Méli, Marcel
Miorelli, Lucianno
Mucci, Rob
Nicosia, Ken
Pachoud, Jean-Yves
Phelps, Ken
Pirot, Roger
Provost, David
Prucker, Uli
Quigley, Pat
Shepard, Morrie
Shuggart, Wayne
Timmons, Kelly
Trimble, Alan
Villiot, Jean-Louis

From racing glory to bleeding Flo - 1970 to 1973

For the 1969-70 season Lange was offering three models; the Lange Standard with a blue liner, the Lange Pro with a red liner and the Lange Comp with a yellow liner, and a riveted upper cuff. The liners were simply glued into the shells and were not removable, and the buckles were the state of the art with micro-metric adjustment. The boots had a severe negative cant, and it was absolutely necessary to correct it by either grinding the sole or gluing a wedge shaped cant to it. The cuff was also too low and didn't offer much support, which open-up a market for the "Jet-Stix" a useful accessory (see further details on this page) as well as an after market "Lange Spoiler" that was marketed by the Boulder company and attached by means of screw-rivets. On the other hand the rubbery Adiprene polyurethane was totally impervious to abrasion and would seem to “last forever…”


At he 1970 Val Gardena world championships, not less than 16 teams were in Lange boots. By 1971, Lange’s business was producing 60,000 pairs of boots a year at its plants in the US, Canada and Italy. The sky was the limit—the market for Lange boots, it seemed, would expand forever. Bob started to see big; he signed an agreement to manufacture and distribute Dynamic skis in the U.S.

Bob Lange began to make the ski in Broomfield and signed up Jean-Claude Killy at an annual retainer of $50,000. Killy helped push Lange’s European sales to over $7 million. At the same time Lange built a second factory in Canada to make plastic hockey skates—another invention… By some accounts, Bob Lange also offered Jean Beyl one million dollars to purchase Look bindings which the French inventor turned down. Jacobs resigned from Lange in February of that year to start HotGear, his first clothing company, but remained as a director.


In spite of its high racing visibility, Lange’s main challenge remained very close to the skier’s foot, and that was plain old comfort. The tongue was a major offender, often applying excruciating pain on the shin-bone that came to be known as “Lange-Bang.” The first liners were also devoid of comfort as they could not provide for a decent transition between the skiers’s feet and the punishing, stiff plastic shells.

Since Bob wanted to expand his market to recreational skiers, he licensed a“flow material" invented by two brothers, Chris and Denny Hanson. The flow took the hardness out of the boot by making the inside conform to the skier's foot, a real breakthrough. Bob called it Langeflo; this miracle material was inserted into the new vinyl liners that Bob Lange developed for that purpose. That winter a barrage of complaints came rocketing in from frustrated purchasers. The Langflo proved to be chemically reactive with the plastic liners that held them within the boots, literally digesting the liners.

"Worms of red Langeflo squirted into skiers’ socks like so much raw hamburger,” recalls Nick Hock, then Lange’s marketing director. Unfortunately, the liners were not meant to be removed. Lange offered to remove the Langflo at no cost to the owners and reline the boot. Tens of thousands of boots came flooding back to the Lange factory in Broomfield to be reamed out, relined and reshipped. On another front, Lange desperately needed cash to complete the Canadian plant, which was scheduled to produce the hockey skate. Dynamic was contesting its distribution agreement, and the Broomfield plant was not yet up to speed. Cash melted away. In 1971 Lange’s ski boot operation lost $1.5 million on $12 million in sales. Chris and Denny Hanson quit and started making their own ski boots in Boulder. Lange sued.


In spite of all that development continued and new audacious designs were introduced, like the women’s Competite model, that was more an exercise in styling than a practical female ski boot. For the 1971/1972 season, the dysfunctional, one-piece shell “Comp II" and "Pro II" versions were introduced to the market; the "Comp" with its significantly higher back being the very one that Gustav Thöni had the fortitude to use while emerging on the international racing scene.


Bob Lange loved the aura of ski racing and the partying that was built around the sport of skiing. He couldn’t get enough of it. It was during a time when skiing and a sexy lifestyle went together very well. This “joie de vivre” would lead the way to the regular and successful publishing of “Lange Girls” poster that would become a tradition and have continued to this day with significantly less creativity as time went on. The first of its kind, using a Norm Classen's photograph, was produced in 1970 while Nick Hock was in charge of advertising and sales promotions...

The company was technically bankrupt and in 1973, the Garcia Corporation, a major sporting goods conglomerate that distributed everything from Rossignol and Fischer skis, Carlo Gruber sweaters, Marker bindings and Mitchell fishing tackles, stepped in, offering operating cash in return for control of Lange. Bob accepted, taking a contract to work for the company. But Bob was not a good corporate soldier. “A lot of stupid rules, a lot of forms,” he recalled. In July 1974, Bob Lange left the boot business.

TECHNICAL NOTES
In 1970, Bob Lange patents the first slalom ski with fixed or removable offset ski tip.
In 1972, Bob Lange patented the first plastic boot with a flex-cut sole.

RACING NOTES
The 1972 Lange trophy
The Lange trophy or Lange cup was a premier professional ski racing event that was created after Bob Beattie, a former U.S. Ski Coach revived the dormant “pro” circuit in 1970. The $50,000 Lange Cup, held for the first three years in Vail, was by far the Pro Tour’s most prestigious trophy and a magnificent gesture by Bob Lange.

ODDS & ENDS
The Jet-Stick, a timely accessory:
For the 1970-1971 ski season, Jack Nagel, from Enumclaw, Washington (father of ski racer Judy Nagel) offered a new ski boot accessory developed to assist in executing “avalement,” the latest of modern ski techniques. It also helped complement the low cuff of the current Lange boot design before the company would offer its own after-market "Lange Spoiler." The device consisted of a fiberglass "gutter" shaped to fit the lower calf and strapped under the top buckle. Billed as “great for powder snow, (sit back and let 'em go) tremendous on packed, moguled slopes for taking up the bumps in skiing ‘low and loose’," the Jet-Stix was designed for most levels of skier, all the way to the competitor. It offered support to the back of the leg without restricting forward movement. An introductory “Pro-Form” offer made before October lst, 1970 priced one pair of Jet-Stix for just $6.00. After that date, the price jumped to $7.00…

Eyewitness Account:
As a young man instructing in Avoriaz, France, I was lusting for my first pair of Lange boots. For the 69-70 season, only Hofstetter Sports in Geneva was carrying the product (with the Comp offered at more than 400 Swiss Francs!) Unfortunately, I still had to “amortize” my almost brand new pair of Molitor ski boots, purchased the year before. I wouldn’t make it to the “Lange Club” until the 70-71 season when I got my first pair, with a "pro-form" at the French distributor in Grenoble. I also hand-painted a large Lange sticker that I placed on the back of my Citroën 2cv. JF Lanvers

The first plastic buckle boots - 1964 to 1969

By 1964, Bob Lange built a complicated molding machine dubbed "Mickey Mouse," to inject adiprene into the molds and the Lange boot company produced 1,500 blue-and-white Royalite boots, and 2,000 black Adiprene boots. That same year, the first Lange boot equipped with buckles was introduced to the market. One year latter, Dave Jacobs, the founder of Spyder skiwear, who was at the time coaching the Canadian ski team, was contacted by Bob Lange and asked if the Canadian team was prepared to test the boots. They were and they did, and while Dave Jacob said that "they were really bad boots," he traveled to Dubuque and suggested a number of technical improvements to be made on the product.

In June 1966, three pairs of re-designed boots incorporating the required changes were made available to the Canadian team who came to train at Mt. Hood; Gerry Rinaldi, Rod Hebron and Nancy Greene tried them on, went skiing, and they thought they were great. That year, Lange sold 10, 000 pairs of adiprene boots, mostly to top skiers and racers in a locked-hinge, competition model. At the 1966 World Championships in Portillo, Chile, that summer, ”Lange arrived with half a dozen pair. Racers, coaches and trainers crowded around to inspect them. That was the breakthrough,” says Lange. Rod Hebron and Suzy Chaffee of the U.S. team both unexpectedly almost won medals in the “Boot from Dubuque." Bob Lange carried a tape recorder around to the Portillo races, dictating suggestions from the racers.

Changes in design resulted from that effort; further improvements came from his research on foot, walking around in other people’s boots at Portillo. He repaired and rebuilt racers’ Lange boots then and there, and wrote copious reports home to the factory. As a result, the boot evolved, growing higher and stiffer to handle the new avalement technique introduced by the French. This is when the boot started to be become popular with top racers. Nancy Greene started wining on the brand new World Cup circuit wearing Lange. That same year, Lange-Jacobs Inc was formed and in 1967 opened a small factory in St. Jerôme, near Montreal, to assemble the boots.

Click to enlarge image

Meanwhile, in the United States, the boot became the hottest thing in the business. In 1968, Bob Lange wanted to go public with the company and moved the operations to Broomfield Colorado; that same year, Lange boots claimed five medals at the Grenoble Olympic Games, with Nancy Greene getting three of them. The Lange Corporation sold 25,000 pair to the general ski public that year. Lange went public to finance its move from from Dubuque to a brand new factory in Broomfield, Colorado, outside Boulder.

In 1969, Dave Jacobs moved from Montreal to Colorado to become director and vice-president responsible for the international operations and the company's expansion into Italy, where a plant was established in Mollaro near Trento, and in Japan, where Lange Far East was formed. At that point, sales were up to $12 million annually.

TECHNICAL NOTES
In1968, Bob Lange patented the first self aligning swivel post for buckle in ski boots.

RACING NOTES
At the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, 72% of the alpine ski competitors wore Lange boots and won five medals.

ODD & ENDS
At the Grenoble Olympics, Loris Werner was on the US Ski Team and I met him while in the military; Loris was Bud Werner's brother who tragically disappeared in the 1964 St-Moritz avalanche. My division, assigned to the ABC television network, was assisting with setting up the cameras and the studio at the downhill venue, in Chamrousse. Loris was always tagging along with Jim “Moose” Barrows, another skier from Steamboat Springs. During the non-stop, Moose took a spectacular spill just in front of the camera where I was stationed and ended up injuring himself quite seriously.

I helped the ski patrol get him down to the helicopter that took him to Grenoble. He was wearing a pair of Lange that made me drooling. They were the very first plastic ski boots I'd ever seen (quite different from the Trappeurs that we re-enforced with fiberglass at the time.) “Try them on” Loris told me “Moose won't need ski boots until next season anyway.” Since they did fit me like a glove, Loris assured me that I could keep them. Needless to say how proud I was when I showed them off to my mountain regiment buddies in Annecy; I had the very first pair of Lange in Haute-Savoie!

Patrick Wahle, Toronto

The early years - 1957 to 1963

Born in 1925, Robert B. Lange was a multi-faceted individual who embodied vision, invention, risk-taking, story-telling, persuasion and charisma. For a short while Bob flew a P-38 for the Air Force, before going to Harvard where he studied business, economics, mechanical engineering, tinkered with fiberglass and also took on skiing. His relationship with ski boots however was a particularly difficult one. His foot was extra wide, his boots were too soft and in 1948, he started re-enforcing them with fiberglass and polyester, the first foray into plastic boots on record. After graduating, he joined his family insurance business in Dubuque, Iowa, that was enjoying a booming business right after the war.


This is how Bob got his seed money for entering the plastic business and starting the Lange Corporation, a small plastics firm set in the basement of the old Brunswick Radio Co. in Dubuque that had gone under during the Depression. In 1955, he was officially in business when he received a contract from General Motors to make 30,000 fiberglass toy cars in the shape of the 1956 Corvette.

In addition, Bob Lange made all kinds of products from refrigerator interiors to hula-hoops, but as a hobby, kept on experimenting with fiberglass inserts for ski boots. He was still an avid skier and watched the sport grow as leather boot manufacturers were trying to keep up with an ever advancing ski technique. He already was convinced that the future for ski boots was plastic, not leather and long before the movie “The Graduate” came out, he heeded the call to plunge “into plastics.”


This is probably why, in 1958, Lange decided to make the jump and build a boot entirely out of plastic. Uniroyal was offering “Royalite,” an ABS material that Bob Lange used for making the seats of his miniature Corvettes and he thought it might be appropriate for his new product. That year, Lange patented his first thermoplastic ski boot design.
For that, he built a vacuum press and formed his first pair of boot. The initial result was an extremely stiff ski boot that could only have been used by a powerful ski racer. In 1959, a new blue and white lace-up version, with hinged cuff came out of production; in addition to forward flex, it offered more control, but still necessitated two persons to tighten-up the laces.

Fortunately this was precisely at that time that the Martin buckle developed by a Swiss inventor for Henke, started to be used widely by leather ski boot makers and is when Lange installed it on its boot, it worked much better than on leather boots, without stretching or deforming. As Morten Lund wrote: “The Lange boot and the Henke buckle had been fated to meet and marry.” Another problem that needed to be solved was the ABS behavior at low temperatures; it did crack and there wasn’t much that could be done about it, until Dupont came up with a new polyurethane product called Adiprene.

The chemical company provided Bob Lange with plenty of technical assistance and Adiprene proved to be the answer. Instead of being vacuum-molded, it was poured into a mold as hot liquid and left to cool. The first pair ever made were designed to fit Bob Lange’s 9 1/2 EEE feet, and he was able to buckled them on during the 1963 winter. The Adiprene boot held together in the cold. It flexed forward nicely and was rigid laterally but the new boot was still a far cry from what ski racers were expecting.

TECHNICAL NOTES
Before Bob Lange…
Before Bob Lange entered the sport, in all its history, no theme sounded more sorrowful notes than those struck in the literature of the alpine skl boot of the middle decades of the last century. A single page from the reams of screams set down by victims regaling their audience with the agonies of their ill-fitting, iron-hard boots (was there another kind?) would make a tyrant weep.

Every skier lay in the grip of the dilemma,. to wit, it took a new, stiff leather boot to control the ski—but it hurt like hell; switch to an older pair that felt great and the skis wobbled like a drunkard, rendering precise steering and edging impossible. The situation called for desperate measures. Some spent a small fortune importing custom boots shaped to a half- page of myriad precise measurements of each foot, a tactic usually sufficient to smooth over the otherwise brutal break-in period.

More affordably, less elegantly, others took their new stiff pair, laced them on tight, filled a bathtub, soaked the boots and feet for an hour, then walked around in them until they dried in the shape of the foot. The life of the boot was considerably shortened thereby but the fit made the boot bearable. The damnable thing, almost forgotten now, was the limitations of the boot liner. Today's thick, malleable liners can make any boot off-the-shelf feel like a custom fit.

In the Age of Agony, the boot was at lined with thin leather flaps because A thick protective lining would have made things worse—much worse—as the boot went soft. There was, however scant, a jot of time in every boot's life when it was just stiff enough to steer yet had stopped hurting so much. Of course, the boots after just so many turns down the mountain, became soft, meek, and uselessly demure as a pair of slippers.

But the all-too-short, blissful "window" of near-perfect results could be exploited, as French ace Jean-Claude Killy discovered. During the early 1960s, he employed Michel Arpin, whose feet were, miraculously, twins of Killy's, to break boots in until they reached the golden mean between rock and putty. Michel would then hand over the perfectly-broken-in pair, loyally donning another set of iron maidens to suffer through yet one more of the five-six excruciating break-ins a season endured for the cause of France.

Even at its hardest, leather, was no perfect medium, having too much give by modern standards.. The breakthrough had to come via a solution to the material problem. The material boy who resolved the problem and supplied further ingenious solutions was thirty-three year old Bob Lange of Dubuque, Iowa. The man never gave in and went through orgies of self-torture until he had the major problems of boot-making licked. Given the various evaluations floating about during Bob's short but lusty prime, he was a public relations genius turned genial buccaneer obsessed

Adapted from “The boot that Bob built" by Morten Lund