MMSC Wreath Emblem Patch — c. 1950s-60s

A vintage Mount Mansfield Ski Club patch from Stowe, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1950s or 60s, a small square of green cloth with no border at all — the edge simply cut and now fraying at the corners. A gold laurel wreath encloses MMSC in white block caps, with a tiny white ski-and-pole device tucked into the lower right.

A wreath means racing. In Vermont those initials almost certainly mean the Mount Mansfield Ski Club at Stowe, which has spent the better part of a century taking local kids who could already ski and turning them into people who could race. It is the kind of program that runs on parents driving vans at five in the morning, on coaches who never got paid anything like what the job was worth, and on a shed full of borrowed gates.

Club hardware does not circulate. A resort patch was sold to anybody with three dollars in their pocket; a club patch was handed to you because you had made the team, and it stayed in the family afterward. Most of these are still in somebody's mother's drawer in Morrisville, in a box with the start numbers and a bent trophy.

Embroidered on woven cloth, cut edge, no applied border. Photos are the condition report.