OK, so we can get started if everybody is ready. I want to say good afternoon. My name is Stephanie Young, and I am the executive director of the 251 Club of Vermont. And so I want to officially call our annual meeting to order. Thank you for being here with us today. It is great to see so many familiar faces, catching up with members that I've gotten to know over the past few years, and then also welcoming some new members to the annual meeting the first time. So if you don't mind, if this is your first meeting, I would love just to see whose first meeting this is. Thank you. Well, welcome to the annual meeting. That's great. We also want to welcome those members who are joining us by CCTVs live streaming our event today. So welcome to the members who are watching us online. And we're so glad that so many of you can be here today to join us either in person, whether this is your 10th annual meeting, your first annual meeting, or watching online. Thank you. So this is actually our 68th annual meeting for the 251 Club. This is number 68 for us. Since 1954, the club has existed to help bring together those who love adventure, discovery, and Vermont. The stories we hear from 251 Club of Vermont members, some which are shared in our newsletter, constantly remind me why so many of us take on this challenge. It isn't just the love of the journey, but it's the memories we create along the way. It's those places you find that you go back home and you let others know about. It's those inside jokes that you have created or cherished memories you end up having with family and friends. It's the opportunity to sometimes journey out on your own and with just your thoughts and Vermont's beauty to keep you company. It's the joy of seeing Vermont towns during all of the seasons, including spring, summer, fall, stick season, mud season, and of course winter, which we will talk more about with our speaker today. It's the people who you meet while out on a 251 Club visit and the places you would have never been to but for the club. This year, we heard from members for whom the 251 Club has been part of their lives for a long time. We heard from club members whose children grew up with the 251 Club, starting their quest when their youngest was six months old, and then they finished their quest when that same child was married and they finished it with him and their new daughter-in-law. We also heard from members who found their parents' photo album from the 1980s and they went through their photo album and they saw the old station wagon and they could remember taking those trips during the 80s in that station wagon. This year, we have also welcomed several members with young children in tow who have started their quest to create family memories and many out-of-staters who learned about the club from friends, family, or seeing us last year on CBS News Sunday morning. And then of course, we also can't forget the four-legged companions that many of us have along the way. We hear from members who bring their dogs along with them or even cats as well. It's always great to hear the stories from members as they work through their journeys and learn about the libraries and museums, restaurants, and general stores. But we also know that many of those businesses and organizations as well as many of our members individually were impacted by the summer's floods. Our hearts grow out to those impacted by the floods. And we look forward to supporting those local communities and businesses in the years to come as we visit Vermont towns and cities. And as many of you know, our interim meeting has traditionally been held in Montpelier at Capita Plaza and streamed by Orca. However, this year, the Capita Plaza couldn't host due to the flood impacts. We were grateful to work with them to relocate to their sister property here at the Delta Hotels by Marriott. And we thank Delta for accommodating our meeting on relatively short notice. We also would like to thank CCTV, who, as I said previously, is live streaming our event for helping us with that and also recording our meeting this year. At this meeting each year, we also report on the club's accomplishments and important developments. In 2023, the club continued to have a strong membership base with new members joining and members continuing to renew. Thanks to your support through memberships and 251 Club merchandise purchases and your attendance here today at the interim meeting, the club is in a strong financial position to continue to grow and provide value to our members. We also continued our new tradition of hosting a spring get-together of last year's event being at Hildine, the Lincoln family home. We had around 100 members join us last May. And in your winter 2024 newsletter, we will be announcing where our spring 2024 get-together will be, but we definitely continue or plan to continue that tradition as well. So with all of that being said, I'd like to thank all of you again for being here today. And I also would like to recognize and thank our board of directors who if you are in this room, if you don't mind standing up, our board of directors, members. I'd like to thank all of our board members for their continuous support and their hard work on behalf of the club. So I am now pleased to introduce our keynote speaker, Barbara Ann Cochran. Over the past few years, we've been lucky to hear from some wonderful guest speakers. Those speakers have represented different regions of Vermont and different aspects of our history. And now today we are excited to have Barbara Ann as our guest speaker. Cochran's enrichment has been an innovator in establishing a nonprofit ski area to help anyone who wants to learn to ski afford to do so. The Olympic accomplishments of their family, including Barbara Ann and her son Ryan, have put Vermont skiing on the international radar and encourage countless Vermonters and out-of-state visitors, children and adults to ski the East. After Barbara Ann speaks, I think we would use some Q and A. And so with that, I would like to turn it over to Barbara Ann and thank her again for being here with us today. Laura, don't move it. Well, I'm delighted to be here. Can everybody hear me? I can't tell if this is going out. Okay, good. So I have an announcement to make and then I have a confession to make before I really get started here. My announcement is that I just completed a book that I'm so proud of. I started it over a dozen years ago and then got about three quarters of the way through and never finished it. And last fall, beginning of the winter, I was able to meet my producer. And so with a lot of encouragement on her part, then I was able to actually complete it. So if anybody is interested in finding out when it's gonna be published, hopefully it's gonna be published, the publishing date is like November 4th. The book is called Hike the Course, A Journey of Family, Passion, and I always forget the last part of that. Sorry. But anyway, if you want more information, there's a QR code here that you can take a picture on your phone and then you'll fill out a form and then I'll let you know when it is published and how you can order it. So I'll keep that, that can get passed around. So my confession is I really wanted to show a lot of family pictures and stuff, but that was gonna take some technology. I thought, oh, I'll just do it on PowerPoint. That'll be easy. But I have pictures on the wall that I was gonna take pictures of. And I didn't know how to get the pictures. I could take the picture on my phone, but then I didn't know how to get it onto my computer to be able to put it in PowerPoint. So my confession is that I don't have any pictures to go along with the stories that I'll be telling you, but I do wanna say how delighted I am to be here. And just out of curiosity, how many of you have actually been to Cochrane's? How many of you have skied at Cochrane's or snowboarded at Cochrane's? Wow, nice. How about biking? How many of you have been there for the biking? Awesome, all right. Yeah, Cochrane's is a really special place to me. So it's kind of where I grew up, but I'm gonna give you a little bit of the history of Cochrane's and how it got started and that kind of stuff. So the first thing I'm gonna share with you goes way, way back to 1923. And in 1923, that was the year that my dad was born. When my dad was born, his name was actually Gordon Timothy Sullivan. It wasn't Cochrane. So it could have been Sullivan's instead of Cochrane's. But anyway, what happened was that my grandfather Sullivan had been in World War I and had been exposed to mustard gas. And he had been married before he married my grandmother. And the Sullivan's were Irish Catholics. My grandmother was Scottish Protestant. And back in 1922, when they got married, that was not acceptable by the Sullivan's. So the Sullivan's never really embraced my grandmother's side of the family. But what also happened is that my grandfather Sullivan, with his first wife, had a son named Neil. So my dad had a half brother named Neil. And when grandpa Sullivan, when Neil was like three years old, he was born in 1920, when he was three years old, my grandfather, or four years old, I guess, because when my dad was a year old, then my grandfather Sullivan got sick and actually passed away. So my dad never knew his own father. He wished, he did share with me one time that he had wished that he had gotten to know his father, his biological father. But Grammy wanted to raise Neil and dad together, but the Sullivan's didn't really recognize her as part of the family. So they took Neil back and raised Neil while Grammy was a single mom to my dad for many years, until dad was in, I think probably junior high school. And then she met the grandfather that we knew who was Grandpa Cochran. And he actually, when he was 17, he came to this country as a shipbuilder from Scotland. So he had a Scottish Brogue. We love Grandpa Cochran. And anyway, and he adopted my dad. So that's where Cochran came to be was that. So moving on to many years later, after World War II, dad was in World War II, fought in World War II, and then went back to UVM. He had started at UVM, but went back after the war and met my mother. And they met because my mom had a friend that wanted to go skiing at Stowe. And she said, go ask Mickey Cochran if he'll give us a ride to Stowe. And so she did. She went and asked dad if they could get a ride to Stowe and dad was perfectly happy in giving him a ride to Stowe because he loved to go skiing too. And back then it's like, I don't think they paid for lift tickets because what the deal was is that if you went and you sidestepped up the hill to pack the trails, then you could ski for the rest of the day or get a lift ticket to ski. So dad provided the ride for them but they both ended up going skiing. And skiing obviously was a very important part of our, our lives growing up. I have no idea how my dad learned how to ski. I have no idea how my mom learned how to ski but when they met in college, they both already knew how to ski. So my mom was from the Windsor area and from Burlington to go down to Windsor they would take route two. And then as they went through Richmond dad said when he would drive, this was like late 40s, I think they graduated in 1950. So late 40s, 1950. They, dad said that as he was driving through Richmond he would look across the river over on the hillside over there and say, I'd make a nice little ski area someday. Never dreaming that eventually that property would come up for sale and he would buy it. So he had been a school teacher in Windsor at Windsor High School and actually there's a student of his that is here tonight. He was telling me that he had dad for algebra when he was at Windsor High School. So, but anyway on a teacher salary there were four kids, my mom and dad and just could not make it on a teacher salary. So dad started to look for another job to use his engineering background and had a interview scheduled for Boeing out in Seattle, Washington. I remember them talking about taking this trip across country and going out to Washington but I have an uncle that was working at GE in Burlington and he said, you know Mickey, I'm pretty sure they're looking for engineers here in Burlington, why don't you see if you can get an interview. So he got an interview there and got a job. So that's how we ended up staying in the East. We didn't move out to Washington but we moved from Cornish, New Hampshire, moved up to South Burlington, lived on Macintosh Avenue for two years but living in the suburbs like that was not the most favorite part of the family story. That, you know, nature and being outside and just being, having land. And the dream that my dad had was to put a rope toe in the backyard. So he, they started looking for land. I remember going around and looking at various houses. There was actually a house in Underhill that I thought was pretty interesting because it came with a horse. But didn't have a hill in the backyard. So that wasn't okay, we didn't get that one. But then they came to Richmond and looked at the property. It was about 100 acres and it had a hill in the back. The hill faced Northwest was perfect for skiing and holding the snow. So in 1960, my parents bought the property. They bought it in the middle of September but school had already started and we were all in school. I was in the fourth grade. My brother was in third grade. My younger sister was in second grade and my older sister was in fifth grade.  She would drive us from South Burlington to Richmond and then go back and pick us up after school so that we didn't have to switch schools after the first two weeks of school. But anyway, so we moved to Richmond in the middle of September of 1960 and dad got right on top of his dream. He started to cut down trees. We carried a lot of brush. We had big, big brush piles. And so he, because most of that property, that hillside was actually a lot of trees. They probably, I'm guessing, it's so far back, I don't remember too well, but I don't think they were huge, huge trees. I think they were probably at new growth. But anyway, he had certainly one trail, probably a couple trails for us to start skiing on. And then got a tractor motor, put poles up for the pulleys and got the rope and by February of 1961, he had the rope tow put together. So that was Cochrane's at the beginning. Cochrane's was the hill right behind the house and it was, there wasn't a lodge per se. The lodge actually where kids went to get warmed up was in our kitchen. And there was one day, I remember, mom had made a pan of brownies and she had left them cooling on the counter.  They couldn't resist. They thought, well, just take one brownie each. So they had a sample of brownie and then they couldn't stop. So when we got back in, it was supposed to be for dessert for our dinner, but when we got back in, the pan was empty. So, but anyway, so that was one story. And I do remember, I'm pretty sure, I wish there were people here that could verify this for me, but what I remember is that when people wanted to ski at Cochrane's, it was always public, it was never private, but mom and dad would charge a quarter to be able to ride the tow. And the other thing I remember is that, and I almost think it was that first year, sometime in February, when there was a young couple, they were probably in their early 20s that came to ski at Cochrane's and they wanted to know if they could get a lesson. We didn't have a ski school or anything. So dad just kind of looked around at us and said, is there anybody that wants to teach? And so I said, I think I was either 10 or 11 at the time. I said, I will. So I remember going and trying to teach this couple how to do a snow plow. And I said, you gotta get all your weight on your outside ski, on your downhill ski. And I could see that they were trying to do it, really trying, but they had their upper body over their uphill ski so they really weren't getting that carve. So finally, I was really frustrated and I just went to dad. I said, dad, I keep telling him, get your weight on your outside ski. But I said, you know, I can see they're trying to do it but they're just not getting it. And he said, well, sometimes you have to say the same thing but use different words. So I said, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, instead of telling him get all your weight on their outside ski or the downhill ski, why don't you tell him to get all your weight off of their uphill ski? So I did that and it was like magic. It was unbelievable. They got it. So that was like really exciting. And that was a lesson that I learned, you know, throughout my whole life is that when I'm talking to somebody, if they don't understand what I'm trying to tell them, then I have to think of how to say it, say the same thing but just use different words for that.  That was awesome. I'm not sure exactly when it was but I know mom and dad bought more land and that's where the ski area is now. One other story about when we first moved there and again, I don't remember if it was that next year that he thought, well, he'd just expand the area a little bit more and go up above a little bit but I do remember the story that he was actually out cutting down trees where the mighty might is now if you've ever been to Cochran's and there was somebody that came up to him and said, Mr. Cochran, do you realize this isn't your property? And he didn't, obviously he thought it was his. So he found out where the lines were and after that they were able to buy some more acreage and that's where the ski area is now. The rope tow behind the house is no longer there, no longer running, the trails are still there but and it does get mowed but the rope tow is there. So now we have the rope tow, a mighty might which is like a, it's a cable lift that's a little bit like a rope tow except it has handles on it that you can use and that's our beginner area and then we also have a T-bar. It's like amazing, even dad passed away in 1999 and mom passed away in 2004 or 2005 and since they've passed away the changes that have gone on at Cochran's is unbelievable. I think mom and dad looking down would be so pleased with what's happening today. It's like, and their mission, like they really, they wanted to make sure that if people wanted to come and ski and eventually even snowboard that the mission at Cochran's is to make sure that anybody who wants to come and enjoy it can. So cost was not supposed to be something that would prevent them from doing that. And Cochran's like my nephew, Jimmy, whose Bobby's son has been the general manager for the last, I don't know how long, I don't know if it's been 10 years. I mean, time flies. But anyway, when he first started there one of the things he felt was like, you know, I think what we have to do is we have to lower our prices. And so a season pass for a family was $395 at that point. And then it would go up on December 1st, it would go up another $100. But he said, I just don't think that's gonna work. So he decided to lower it to $295 no matter when you bought it. It's like, so December 1st would come and go and it didn't matter. And what he found was that more people could actually afford $295. And it's for the whole family. It's not like for the first adult. And then you have to pay that again for the second adult. It's for the whole family. And if there's grandparents that wanna be on that ticket then we add them too. So we do, we try and keep it very, very reasonable. And I just, you know, like I feel such a connection to my dad where I just feel his joy of having people come and love skiing at Cochrane's. I don't know how much he felt about the snowboarding, but. But anyway, but just, you know, like and my mom too. My mom, she would teach people how to ski. She was running the ski school forever. And but her rule was you had to be six years old to be in the ski school, to take lessons at the ski school. So one year Howard Dean brought his two kids to learn how to ski. And mom thought maybe the younger one really wasn't sick. So she asked Howard how old he was and he said he's six. And so when she got Paul out onto the slopes, she asked Paul how old he was and he said five. So but anyway, so and the other part of that was that I think Howard was really nervous that his kids would act out a little bit. And so what he said was, you know, like he was just hovering and trying to make sure that they were behaving and that they'd listen to my mom as she was giving him a lesson and stuff. And my mom just, she got tired of it and she looked up at him and she told the governor to buzz off. My mom did not mince words. So and anyway, so he went off and came back and his kids learned how to ski in that lesson. So it's amazing how quickly that can happen. Right now, we've added no more lifts. We're hoping eventually to go up on the ridge so that we can get longer runs. But one of the things that my nephew decided was that the T-bar was too short.  So it is a little bit longer than it was when my dad put it in. And that was like a game changer. It's like all the decisions that Jimmy's made have been game changers. It's like they worked on the race trail and when I skied on that for the first time, they changed the, they blasted some rocks out and stuff. And I went, oh my goodness, this is my favorite. And then when they lengthened the T-bar, I was going, oh, I love this, this is my favorite. And then another idea that Jimmy had was that he felt like we didn't really have a beginner trail off of the top, so he felt like we needed to have a beginner trail, so he put that in. And then when I skied on that, I was going, oh, this is my favorite trail. So a lot of, it seems like there's always a project that gets done over the summer that just keeps improving Cochran's. And like I do think that Howard Dean at one point said that Cochran's was a state of Vermont treasure. And I truly believe that too. I've heard other people talk about it being magical. There's even one dad that his kids learned to ski in the ski tots program, which is a program where we teach the parent how to teach their taught, how to ski their three to five year old how to ski.  So, and right now we're a nonprofit. We became a nonprofit. Like when dad was getting sick and we knew his time was limited, people in the community were saying, what can we do to keep Cochran's going? And so what was decided, the best way to do it, to take it from like a mom and pop organization with mom and dad at the helm to see if we could become a nonprofit and be run by a board of directors. And so that's what it is now. We have a board of directors and then we, Jimmy is the general manager. We do have a mountain manager and then we have someone that does the social media stuff. And then we have others, those are the three salaried people. And then we have others, obviously, the lift attendance, kitchen help that get paid on an hourly basis. We do have a ski school. I ran it for many, many years after my mom. And I officially retired as of last year. So last year I wasn't running the ski school, which was awesome. I love being the ski school director, but it just got to be too much for me to try and be over there every day. So yeah, the joke between Jimmy and I by the, like as we got into March was that, oh, there's a, you know, you think you can make it? We got like two, three weeks left. So, but anyway, so we have programs. We have programs that we don't charge anything for for Boys and Girls Club. We have King Street Youth Center comes and we don't charge them. We have after school programs that are very, very inexpensive for people. We, one of the things that we try and do is 10% of the sales of the season passes for the families. I don't remember how many we're up to now, but I know when we first started with a nonprofit, it was about 75 families would buy season passes. Now I think we're up over 300. It might even be more than that. But anyway, so there's 10% of whatever that number is. We try and give out season passes for people that know it. So we don't, we try not, we don't turn anybody away. If anybody wants to come and really can't afford it, then they just have to talk to Jimmy and say, you know, can you help us out? And usually I say, why don't I just give you a pass? So anyway. I'd love to take questions and see if I can answer your questions if you have any questions for me. Yes. How many students or family members went on to Olympic? Well, not all of them were ski racers. Can I count them too? Okay. So in the family, there's six of us. There's four in my generation, myself, my brother and my two sisters. We're all Olympians. And then in the next generation, Jimmy and my son, Ryan, are Olympians. But then outside of that, we've had someone that grew up skiing there, Leah Davison, who is also, she's a two-time Olympian in mountain biking. And then there's others that have, like there was another Olympian freeskier that skied at Cochrane's. I don't think she was ever part of the ski club, but she was in the Olympics this past Olympics as a freeskier. We've had another cross-country skier that started out as an alpine skier and went through the ski club. And, but she was on the Olympic team as a cross-country skier. And then there's also like other, when they're not the alpine skiers, I'm not as familiar with them, but we've had others that have learned to ski there. Like Ann Battelle was another, I think she was a freeskier. Anyway, she was an Olympian. So I don't know if I'm leaving anybody out, but we've had a few. Yeah. Yeah, I'll take more questions. Yeah. Yes. The snow making has been incredible. I, when my mom passed away, one of the things, like dad actually, I think it was around 1980, maybe 1981 or around in there. He knew that we needed to have snow making. So he designed his own system and he tried to capture water that was on the hill and then use that to make snow. And he developed his own gun and he figured, like he experimented to see if he put water into the gun and then mixed it with air going into the gun. Would it make snow? And he was really pleased that it did. So he started way back then, but my parents with that snow making system would like be exhausted in the winter. They would go up to the lodge and they'd be running the snow making overnight. And it would make like maybe an inch on the mighty might. And it was like, so it was beautiful snow. It's actually of all the snow making that I've ever skied on, that was the best. But it also was the most inefficient. So now when my mom passed away, we knew we had to get a better system. And so now we actually draw the water from the river and we have the HKD snow guns, those really tower guns that work really well to make snow. And the first two trails that get snow is the beginner hill, the mighty might hill and I-89, which they'll make snow from top to bottom. It's about like five feet of snow. And so it's really, really good. It's, I mean, we have to get the weather to cooperate and sometimes that's a struggle. But Jimmy and Corey know what to do to make snow. And so it's unbelievable. We've had people coming from other places like other racers that will come and train there and they say the conditions here are the best that they've been skiing on any place. So I mean, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm a little bit biased. I don't know, but I think the snow making system has made a huge difference. I know there was one year that I was thinking, without our snow making, we wouldn't, we probably couldn't have run that year. That some years have been really a struggle to get snow without the snow making that we've got. So yeah, it's huge, it's huge. And it's really, I mean, other ski areas have been wonderful in helping us out and making sure that we have the ability to do that. So, yes. What's the elevation like compared to snow? We're low. To be honest, I'm not good with elevation. I think the house sits at 300 feet. And so, and then it goes up from there, but I am not good with the numbers like that. So, but we're low, we are low. Yeah. Sure, yeah. So, yeah, one of the reasons that dad wanted to build the rope tower in the backyard was because we had all started skiing by then. We learned to ski at Mount of Scottney when we were down in Cornish, New Hampshire. And when we moved to Vermont, and I think dad was actually instrumental in starting something called the Northern Vermont Council. And by that time, like we were, you know, adolescents and we had started racing and being an athlete himself, he knew that just training on weekends wasn't enough. So, he wanted, that was his dream to put up a rope tower in the backyard. So, he did that. And then as we were able to start training, training became important to us to be able to train after school. And in junior high and high school, we would come home. Dad had put lights on the back of the house and then one or two poles on the hill so that we could ski actually at night too. And then like in junior high and high school, every Tuesday and Thursday nights, people, our friends from all different clubs would come and train with us. And on the hill, right behind the house on the rope to there and we'd come home, we'd do our homework, we'd have dinner and then we'd go out on the hill, probably about 6.30 or so and ski until like 9, 9.30, 10 o'clock or something like that. And it was a blast. It was so much fun. It didn't feel like it was training. It was just, it was skiing. But one of the stories goes is that when Lindy was a freshman, so we were one year right after the other. So Lindy was a freshman, Bobby was a sophomore, I was a junior and Marilyn was a senior and Lindy came home and she said, she didn't want to ski race anymore. And we went, oh, you gotta tell dad. How are you gonna tell dad? But she told him and he accepted it. She wanted to play basketball with her friends. So, but she would still go out and ski with us on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She just wouldn't train, she just wouldn't run the gates. And so, dad, he was like, the psychology that he used was amazing to me. And what he did was he noticed that she would always go over and ski on the far side of where we were skiing. And so he went out early one night and set a course where she would run into it. And so, he said he watched her when we all came out and started skiing. He was watching her and he said, she skied down and then she stopped because she saw the course and she stood there and looked at it for a little bit, then she ran it. And after that, she was back to be a ski racer. But so anyway, so when I was a freshman, Bobby was in eighth grade, Marilyn was a sophomore in high school. We all made the state team to go to Easterns and we made the Eastern team to go to Junior Nationals. So that was basically like all the kids basically in high school, that age, raced from across country and raced at Junior Nationals. Dad, they picked to be the coach, which was awesome because I love my dad as a coach. And so we went out. And to be honest, I was pretty sheltered. I'd never been, I don't think I'd ever been west of Vermont. I'd been to Maine because my grandparents lived in Maine, lived in New Hampshire, but I think those are the three states that I was familiar with. So I'd never flown on a plane. I'd never, so going out to Colorado, it was Winter Park, Colorado. And yeah, we raced at Junior Nationals. And I ended up winning the Giant Slalom. Marilyn won the Slalom. And then another, Eason or Erica Skinger won the downhill. So that kind of put us on the map for the U.S. team. But in order to be on the U.S. team, you had to be top 10 in any event. And back then there were only three events. They didn't have Super G. They only had Downhill Slalom and Giant Slalom. So I think that the coaches were still trying to figure out the process and the organization of the ski team and stuff. So they decided that there were some juniors that were kind of talented. So they felt that they wanted to add another program. So they added the hopefuls. They called us the hopeful squad. And I do remember the coach like sitting us down at the first winter camp that we had gone to after these junior nationals. And he was saying, he was trying to explain, you're the hopeful squad. And he said, so you're part of the team, but not really. So I was going, oh, okay, whatever that means. But that meant that we could go to train at national camps with a national team. And we roll pretty quickly after that too. So we started racing not only in the east but nationally at some of the races national and did well throughout that. And once we did that, then we made the national team. We actually were part of the A team. And then I got to go to Chile to train in Chile in what was our summer, but their winter. And then training, like going out to, I remember going to Aspen for a condition camp in June. Skiing in Bend, Oregon on the glacier in August. So, and then, but back then there was no snow making. So we always had to wait for this natural snow to fall in order to figure out where we were gonna go train. But once we made the national team, then by my senior year in high school, I was part of the team that went to Europe to race on the World Cup. But the World Cup was relatively new then too. I think 1967 was the first year of the World Cup. And I think 1966 was when the Winter Park Junior Nationals were, so we were like, the thing that amazes me now is that our family was so much a part of the history of skiing, I'm just, it's incredible, nevermind. But anyway, yeah, unbelievable how much, history is there. So then, by the late, well, 1974 was the last year that Marilyn Bobby and I raced. We were pretty young, but I felt like back then, I felt like the ski team was actually kinda tired of the Cochran's. Lindy was still young enough that she's still raced for another four years, but the three of us retired all that year. And one of the things that happened that made it kind of hard too, was that that year, dad was chosen to be the head alpine director, or head of alpine coach. And I was so excited, because I just knew what a great coach he was, and I thought, oh, this is awesome that he'll be able to coach all my teammates, and that I felt like it would be good. But some of my teammates, I think, were a little bit nervous about having four Cochran's that he was gonna be coaching, and could he really treat all everybody equally, and really care about all the others, and not just his kids? Which he could, he definitely did it that way. He wanted to see the best for each individual, not just his kids. But so that was going on, and then there was one of my teammates that was struggling a little bit. She had a lot of promise, but she was starting to struggle a little bit, and I remember her saying something about, like she was kind of blaming dad's coaching, and I just said, I think you need to look at yourself first, and she did not like that. So there was a little bit of tension on the team, and I think she had, I don't know for sure, but I think that she went to the administration, and really felt like it would be better if the old coaches came back and not be under the direction of dad. And at the same time, what happened was that it was really tough on my mom, because she was trying to run the scarier by herself, and what happened was that she was, it was in January, early January, she was listening to the radio, and on the radio, there was a story that came over that said there was five members of an American family that were killed in an airplane crash in Italy, and she knew, she just, she knew it was us. She hadn't, she, we weren't in Italy, we were in Germany at the time, so, but she was convinced, so she had a nervous breakdown, physical breakdown, she was hospitalized, we went to bed, we were in front in Germany, Marilyn, Lindy and I, I don't know where the boys were, but anyway, we went to bed one night, everything was normal, we got up in the next day, dad wasn't there, we were going, where's dad? And nobody knew, and he did tell the coach that he was roaming with what had happened and that he had to go back to the States, but I think he was just so, you know, like sleepy and he didn't even recall that dad had said that to him, so it was a couple days before we actually found out what had happened, but, so that made it kind of tough too, so that was a year that the four of us retired, but then, you know, I went back, finished up school, we were all finishing up school, Bob went to med school, became a doctor and then we all started getting married and having kids, and so then we were, you know, back at Cochrane's with our kids and teaching them how to ski and having them race, some of them, like my daughter was a snowboarder for a little bit because she kind of rebelled against the skiing part of it, but she was also a good ski racer, but I say, okay, between her and Ryan, Ryan's still racing, he's 31, he's still racing, he's someone that was at the Olympics and won the silver medal at the Olympics, last, the last Olympics, and, but I say the difference between Ryan and Caitlin is like, I think Caitlin would have loved the culture of the US ski team as far as like the uniforms that they'd get, the travel that they'd have, but I don't think she was really into the ski racing part of it so much, whereas Ryan's like very passionate about the ski racing, and I think that one of the things that happened with Caitlin is that she felt like she wasn't ever really good enough to be a Cochrane, so I think that was kind of a sad thing for her, but, which I did not believe that, I felt if she wanted to race and if she put her heart into it, she could have made the US ski team in my estimation, but I'm her mom too, so. Anyway, yeah, okay. Did you bring it? You know, at one point this morning I was going, oh, I gotta remember and bring my gold medal, but I forgot, but anyway, so yeah, so 1972, Marilyn, Bobby, and I were on the Olympic team and went to Japan, Sapporo, Japan, to race at the Olympics, and like there's things that, like one of the things that happened is that, and I talk about this in my book, is that I never knew what affirmations were, I use them with the kids that I, the athletes that I'm coaching now, I use it a lot with them, but an affirmation is just a statement that is positive and there's three parts to it, it has to be first person, present tense, and positive, because of the way the subconscious mind works and the subconscious mind can't tell a difference between what's real and what's imagined, so one of the things that happened in 1971, like the spring, summer, and fall of 1971, was that we were getting a lot of questions as to whether or not, how do you think the US ski team's gonna do at the Olympics? And I'd say, we had a lot of talent on our team. I think we could do very well, I think we could win medals at the Olympics, and then the reporters would say, well come on, let's be realistic. So they'd say, well, how do you think you're gonna do? And I'd say, well, I don't know if I'm gonna win at the Olympics, but what I do know is that I'm capable of winning. And so I told that, like every time I was asked that question, that was my response, and so I think for me, when I went to the Olympics that I was better prepared mentally for those Olympics than any other race I'd ever been in. And the other thing that happened at those Olympics was that for the slalom, I drew number one, and number one was my favorite number to race. I just had this thing that, it had happened before in a spring series that I drew number one five times in a giant slalom, which giant slalom wasn't my best event, slalom was my best event, but in those five giant slaloms, I won every single time. So once I did that, I was going, oh, number one. I wanna get number one. And in the World Cup, I drew number one one other time in Maribor, Yugoslavia, and I won that. So I was very convinced that if I drew number one, I mean, I didn't even plan on it because it's so random, it's like it didn't happen very often, but when I drew number one for the slalom, my coach even called and said, you've got number one. So it was like very exciting that I was number one. And I think I was just in a really good place. I knew I was capable of winning. And so the first run, I just felt like, okay, just do the best that you can. So I got up, I was the first one after the four runners, I was the first one out of the gate, and they had this clock. It was a white clock with one black slash on it and only one hand on it. And I was going, how does this work? And so I thought, I thought it was gonna beep. I thought it was gonna go beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and on the higher beep, then I could go. So I was in the start, I was all ready to go, had my clothes planted and everything. And then I heard the beep, but there was only one. And I was going, what's going on here? And I was like, I was frantic, I didn't know if I should go or not, because I knew that there was a rule in the rule book that said you had to leave one second of go, either side of go, because it was not that far removed from hand timing. I knew that it was electric timing, I knew my time would be accurate. I didn't have to worry about that, but I didn't know about whether or not they were still enforcing that rule. And I laughed, I went, because I just was going, I don't know if I'm supposed to go or not. And then between the start and the first gate, these thoughts flashed through my mind and I was going, oh, I wonder if I should stop and try and get a restart. And then I was going, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. I gotta go, I gotta run this course. And so I was just focused on running the course. And then when I finished, I felt good. And then I was waiting for the others to come down and I really was excited because after the first run, I was leading by three hundredths of a second. Well, three hundredths of a second is not very long. And so then my mind started switching a little bit and was going, okay, I gotta another run. And so I memorized, it was memorizing the course for the second run and all these thoughts were popping into my mind like, oh, hope I don't make any mistakes. I hope I can beat those French girls.  And what was happening? I could feel my body changing. I could feel getting tenser and tenser and tenser. And so I remember thinking to myself, come on BA, you gotta change how you're thinking because right now this is not working. And so I did, I had four thoughts that I changed to. The first one was, just do your best. Put your best effort into it. That's all you can ask of yourself. So that was my first thought. My second thought was, you know what? If those French girls can win, I can too. And my third thought was something that my dad had told me two years prior to that at the World Championships. When again, I was getting really nervous for the second run. And I went up to him, he was at the top of the hill. And I said, dad, I'm just really nervous for the second run. And he was just so calming. He just said, I always thought you were the cool cucumber in the family. And I went, oh yeah, I am. So that's what I thought about. That was my third thought. I'm the cool cucumber in the family. And then the fourth thought was, you know what, even if you don't win this race, you've won the first run of an Olympic slalom race. Not very many people have done that, so you can always be proud of yourself for winning the first run. And once I thought that, the tension left my body, it was like, if I won so much the better, if I didn't, if something happened and I didn't win, I could live with myself. So it gave me the freedom just to run that second run. And so this time they flipped the order. So the order goes in 15s. So if I ran first, if everybody had finished, I would have run 15th that run. I think that my sister had fallen. I think there were a few others that didn't make the first run. So I probably ran about 12th or so. And when I got to the start, the start was hard for me because I'm short and it was slanted back a little bit. And I wanted to be close to the wand, but I didn't wanna be opening it early or anything. So on the second run, I was close to the wand and what I would do is I'd try and go back as if I was sitting in a chair and then lunge myself out of the start. And what happened was that when I started to go back, I knocked the wand open with my knees. So I started the clock early and again I was going, oh gosh, should I stop? It's like, no, no, no, no, can't stop. And so I just went, oh, just do what I can. And so when I finished that run, everybody that was close to me had already gone down because they were in that pile ahead of me.  So I actually won the race. But yeah, but the thing was with Danielle too is that I didn't wanna know how anybody else had done and before I raced, and I'm glad I didn't because Danielle, when she raced, she had beat everybody up to that point by about a second. That's huge. That's really a big margin in ski racing. And if I had known that, I would have started questioning myself again. I would have lost my confidence. I would have said, oh gosh, what'd she do? How do I go that fast and stuff? But I had no idea. I was just there to do my best and so it worked out. So, thank you so much. You've been a great audience. Barbara Ann, thank you so much for being here with us tonight. I think Governor Dean had it right that Cochran's is absolutely a Vermont treasure. And I think hearing you today, we were all very lucky.  I feel like I was there at the Cochran's. I feel like I was there at the Olympics. So thank you so much. We really, really enjoyed having you here today. And I think the paper with Barbara Ann's book that's coming out is circulating through the room too. So if you wanna take a scan of that, you can order Barbara Ann's book that's coming out soon. So now, traditionally, we've opened the mic up to hear from members who completed their quest during the year, so 2023. And I know I had a few members reach out to me that they just wanted to share a few stories from completing their quest and so that we can also congratulate them. So is there anybody who wants to share a memory from their 251 journeys this past year? I think Bob, if you're here, oh, come on up then. Thank you so much. Although my wife and I have been in Vermont for decades, we learned about the 251 Club only a few years ago from our dear friends, Fran and Ralph Lancaster, who are here with us today. We thank them. We are thrilled, but also sadly nostalgic and sorry to have finished the Vermont 251 challenge. It took us almost three years between 2020 and this August 2023. Being retired has certainly helped us find the time for this project. For those who think Vermont is a tiny state, well, you're technically correct, of course. But try visiting all the towns, cities, villages, and gores and see if you still agree at the end. We went to college in Vermont, go pincers, and have lived here for more than 30 years and have a deep and abiding affection for our brave little state. Our approach for the 251 challenge was to take a selfie of ourselves in front of each entity's town hall, clerk's office, or other municipal building, which had the town's name on it. Once, it was a dump truck to prove that we had been there. I think that was Hyde Park. We printed out tiny pictures of these and pasted them into our journal provided by the 251 organization. We have proof we were in all 255. Admittedly, some corners had to be cut for the gores. Once, the picture of our car's GPS was the only proof we had that we had been there and there were no signs. We chose to make our last town Woodstock where we lived for almost 30 years and where I taught Spanish at Woodstock Union High School during that time. We now happily live in White River Junction but continue to have great affection for Woodstock. We are grateful to have accepted this challenge, now what? This 251 experience will be impossible to equal. We are so proud and we have the hats and pictures to prove it. In sum, V is for the verdant valleys of Vermont. E is for the eye-catching views from the hills and mountains of Vermont. I is for the rolling hills and pastures of Vermont. M is for the mountains of Vermont so green and inviting and also for moonlight in Vermont. O is for the old folks who give character to Vermont. I guess that's us. N are many of us. N is for the nooks and crannies we found in every town in Vermont. T is for the terrific state that is our brave little state of Vermont. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bob, for sharing that with us. Are there any other members? I think there was, maybe Steven wanted to speak. Not sure if he's still here.  And Carol, right? Steven. I don't know if that was Steven. Oh. That was many Stevens. Great. Well, thank you. This is Steven and Carol. Thank you so much. We, just like Bob before us, finished in three years. We started in 2020 and ended last Wednesday in Lewis in 2023. We had such a blast doing this. My husband, Steve, is a native remonter. So if we ever went somewhere and he's like, never been on this road before, that was actually a good sign because he saw something that he had never seen before. I am a transplant from Western Massachusetts, but I have lived here for 35 years. And we both retired in 2019, which is what gave us the time to do all these fun things. So a lot of people say, well, what was your approach? What did you do? So I'm just going to say a couple of things and Steve's going to tell you our gnarliest story. So we decided not to use any GPS. So we used the DeLore maps, which it's an atlas and it has supposedly has all of the roads on it. Doesn't always have all of the roads on it. The only printed directions we used were for Lewis because we had tried to go there a year ago couldn't figure out how to get in. And so we said, we're not going to go through that again. We're going to figure out, we're going to like break our own rule and we're going to print out directions. And even with the printed directions, we still went the wrong way, but we finally found our way into Lewis and to Lewis pond. Steve drove 100% of the time I navigated 100% of the time. And my advice is to write out your itinerary ahead of time because if you don't do that, then the person who's navigating has their face in a map. So the first couple of times we went out, Steve's like, oh, look at the covered bridge. Oh, look at the tree, look at the white church. Oh, look at this. And I didn't see anything because my head was in the map. So after that, we wrote everything down and we knew exactly where we were going. And then we had to adjust at times because you can't always trust what DeLore map says. Even if it says it's a road, an established road, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's an ATV trail.  We had dogs with us for 50% of the towns, not all of them. But so it's interesting when you take a dog, it's a whole different character and you can't go into museums and you can't do things like that. But then again, you tend to gravitate more towards outdoor things that you can do. And so that's different too. You would find that we would do more indoor things. If we were without dogs, with dogs, more outdoor things. So that was fun. So we had, and a couple of things of helpful advice was that we always started with gas in the tank, always started with a picnic lunch and always had water. Because when you follow the DeLore maps, you're like, oh, we're coming up to a village center. And then you'd be like, where was the village center? There's like nothing there. And so we learned quickly to always have food with us so that we didn't have to waste time trying to find a real, real road and going to get stuff. So yeah, so don't trust road conditions and don't trust population centers on the DeLore maps because they're literally nothing there. It's just a little diamond on the map and then you're off into some other place. So we had a couple of really gnarly adventures and I'll let Steve choose which one he's gonna tell you about. The first one would be, has anybody been on the vertical mile? Oh. Oh yeah, one taker. Yeah, so we did it, we were in our GTI at the time, which is a load of the ground car and the vertical mile had just been graded with rocks that were no less than two inches and diameter up to three and four inches. And we actually literally slid down and it was like trying to just on the break, let it slide, try to catch it back. The rocks were just all just marbles, it was crazy.  If you, that's a connection there. The other place that was interesting, does anybody know where the Podonk Wildlife Refuge is? It's really a podonk, it's called Podonk. Really? Right. So if you come out of Stratford and you wanna go to West Fairleigh, which we wanted to do, going east, we went up Penwick Road. Delorm shows the road goes all the way through. We got up to the top of a hill, probably three miles up. Road took a hard right. We realized it went to a really nice house. Big lawns. Straight ahead was two dirt strips with grass in the middle. And the map said you can go through. We started through that. We had the passport this time, four-wheel drive and summer tires on and it's summertime or fall. Start in there. The next thing I know, we are driving on rock ledges, downhill, and I'm hitting bottom. And now we're going through creek beds. Luckily the car has short front end and back end so we didn't hit. So we were going through creek beds. Now we start up hill on rock ledges and I'm just wondering, I'm hoping the tires don't pop. And they were good tires. I mean the car, it was a fairly new vehicle. So we get up and then we kinda come up to this opening and we look to the right on a tree and it's snowmobile signs. So at this point, Carol is just having a blast. True, true. She said this is the coolest thing we've ever done. So anyway, we drive, keep going and we stayed out of the ledges but the road, the center of the road was pretty high. You could hear, even though we had high clearance on this car, we could hear it hitting on the bottom. Finally, I would say half hour of this, we came out onto a road. And I looked at her, I said, do you know how lucky we just were? I said, no cell service up there, no nothing. So if you ever get, you wanna make that route across that way, don't do it. But that's one of the places where Delorm was wrong. Another one, another one was, again we had the GTI. It was in Glover.  Still Hill. Still Hill Road. Still Hill Road, Delorm showed it to go all the way through. We drove up for probably three miles up this hill. And all of a sudden, I looked straight ahead. And this was actually before we did, Panic Road in the Musonobil trail. We looked straight ahead and the grass had to be, there was two dirt strips. The grass had to be three feet high in the middle. And there was a driveway that went up. And he goes, oh no, it's gotta be going that, gotta go up the driveway. Go up the driveway, in somebody's yard, turn around. Came back down as we're turning around, a four-wheeler comes out. I tried to get his attention, but he was in a big hurry. But I said, no, the GTI is not gonna go through there. So I don't know where that ended up. But that was, again, another road that ended up. Another ATV trail. Another ATV trail, yeah. So those are kind of the fun things that, one of the funny things is that, you know, we tried to spend, we stopped in certain towns.  But the last town, Lewis, which is an unincorporated disorganized town, according to the state of Vermont. It's truly called a disorganized town. It's in the Silvio Conti Wildlife Management Area, which is huge. The DeLorm map and GPS, the road does not exist. They have, it was blocked. So we finally, we had to go back, as Carol said earlier. But that, when we got in there, there were signs that were missing. We got going up a road the other day. This was Wednesday, last Wednesday. We were going up a road and we kept going. I kept getting worse and worse and full of rocks. Again, we had the four-wheel drive. And so we get up, the next thing I know, we're up in there and she said, this can't be it. There's, you can't be here. And we said, oh, okay. You know, so we'll go as far as we can. So we get up, next thing you know, there is a washout in the road and it's covered. They filled it in with logs, different sized logs. And I said, we have a picture of it. But I said, I got out, I studied it, walked on the other side, looked back. Carol took a picture of me looking at it. And I said, you know, we can get high-sighted on this one. Because it was a putt, the logs went up like this and down again and it was pretty. So I did a six-point turn to turn around. We were in bushes scraping the side of the car, the whole works. And we turned around, went back down the road and looked at a post that's engraved and figured out that has to be the way to Lewis Pond. Lewis is not recognized, the town of Lewis is not recognized on a map. If you want to find it, do Lewis Pond. That's how you're going to find it. But we spent the most time in any town, on any of the trips, except for the overnight, we spent in Lewis for five hours. Because there were so many roads and so many places to stop. They have really nice wheelchair-accessed ramps out into the pond. And I think we did three other ones after that. They're just really neat area. You're up there, so. Anyway, I think that's about... That's it. That's about what we had for our trip, so. Thank you. Thank you, Steve and Carol.  And it sounds like also, if anybody is looking for directions to Lewis, that's probably the most common question we get. They should go and talk to Steve and Carol. But thank you so much. Anybody else that wants to share a memory from?  Thank you. Chip Taylor from Cabot. I'll be brief. All I can tell you is, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I think years ago, weren't you supposed to mail a postcard from the local post office to prove you've been in a town? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that kind of slowed me up. Let's just say this. It helps if you're born out of state to have maternal grandparents in London Derry, because I'm sure I hit a few towns in Vermont when I was a month old. So that takes care of that. Then you get a little older and you summer in Vermont. So naturally, you're with your grandparents, but you have to go to Rutland to shop. You go to Bennington. You go to Browlborough.  Then you have a sports car and you're dating girls, and some of them live in obscure towns. So now you're driving to some towns you normally wouldn't go to. And then you have a couple of state jobs, one of which was I was HR manager for state welfare. So now I'm visiting all the welfare districts around. And well, let's take a little different road. Here's a town I've never been to.  I won't mention the name.  Oh, can I get a ride to here? Can I get a ride? So now I'm checking off more towns. And then, and I'm dating myself, I had a job with civil defense, now emergency management, doing radiation safety in case that evil empire nuked Vermont. Now they didn't know where Vermont was, but I'm not making this up. Almost every town in Vermont had a civil defense yellow Geiger counter. And my job is to go around and teach the firefighters and the cops and the select men how to use that Geiger counter. And all of a sudden, I'm over 200 towns. Then it got tough. And the only other thing all I had, and I'll be brief here, the criteria for visiting a town is a little bit loose. You kind of, you know, make it as you go. And I realized about two weeks ago, well, I've been through the town of Westford hitting some other towns, but there's rolling the window down and breathing the air as I drive through Westford County. Not in my book. I mean, boots on the ground I think is the real, for me, the real criteria. So I had to make a trip a week ago to Westford and actually drive into the town and get out and walk around. And I hope you all do the same thing because driving isn't quite the same. You miss a lot. Get out, walk around, go to Lewis, take pictures, if you can find it. And I encourage everybody to keep knocking them off until you get to 252 right now. Okay, I did it. You can too. Thank you so much, Chip. Anybody else? If not, then we are moving on to the trivia part. Yes. And I'm going to turn the mic over to board member, Hubey Norton, who put together the trivia questions. I know our table is having a lot of fun trying to answer them.  Thank you so much. First of all, understand this is not a contest, okay? There will be points awarded for the correct answers, but the points don't count. So the idea was to take the collective knowledge of the tables and see if you could come for these answers. And so we'll start with the first one. And I think maybe the easiest way is if you know the answer, you know, like kind of shout it out. The other thing is if you have the correct answer, I want whoever was recording the answer to just raise their hands. We just want to make a quick count to kind of see, get an idea of the difficulty of the questions. So that if we do this again, you know, we can modify it. Probably have to make it tougher, right? Okay. All right, number one, what is the highest elevation in Vermont is in the town of? Underhill is the correct answer. How many? Look at your delorn map and you'll see that it is indeed under hill. Another, if you got extra points, I could have added this one too. What did the highest elevation in Vermont, what towns did it used to be in? Towns. Mansfield is correct. Mansfield is one of them, which is no longer exists. And another one is Sterling, which is another town that did not exist. And they got incorporated into Stahl and so on. So anyway, little piece of chair, we'll be able to use that one another time. But anyway, what are the four Haven towns in Vermont? West Haven. West Haven. East Haven. East Haven. Fair Haven. Fair Haven. New Haven. New Haven. That was easy. Oh, look, yeah. All right. Almost every town in Vermont starts with every letter of the alphabet, except there are four letters that are not used for the first letter of a town. And what are those four letters? That's correct, QXYZ. Did anybody, did anybody say? Did anybody say, so how many, how many had that one correct? How many had, we had a lot with that one. That was pretty easy. That was pretty easy. Q, QXYZ. Excuse me? What about Quiche? What about Quiche? There you go. Part of Hartford. Quiche's part. Next one, name the three, the two towns, two towns in Vermont that begin with the letter O. Orange and Orwell. Who said Orleans? Orleans is a village within the town of Barton. A lot of moans there. So how many, how many had that one, how many had that one correct? Yeah, okay, good, good. Let's not get our towns and villages mixed up, okay? One of those B towns, Brunswick. Brunswick is just south of what town? It's close. Ferdinand is, what? Bloomfield, Bloomfield is the correct answer. Yeah, how many had Bloomfield, Bloomfield? How many know where Bloomfield is? Way, way up there. So we tried to make these questions regional. All right, so this is a little hint here, you know, because we've been kind of in the northern part of the state here a little bit. You're heading south and you just passed a little round of Bricks Schoolhouse on your right. You're in what town? Brookline, Brookline is correct. How many had Brookline? That's a little tougher one, yeah? Brookline's not a big place, but it does have that very unique round Bricks Schoolhouse. Next one, there used to be 60, there used to be more than 60 gores in Vermont. Is that true or false? It's true.  When they would survey towns, sometimes they would come up with these little slivers of triangles that didn't close the boundary. So, you know, some of them might have been, a lot of the towns that were mounted six miles square, so they might have been two legs that were six miles long and one like maybe only a hundred feet or something like that. So all of these gores ended up getting incorporated into adjacent towns over time, but the bigger ones like Bewell's Gore and Avery's Gore, they continued to stay as gores. So, that was Wentworth, is it Wentworth? That was the, no, Huitla, Huitla was the surveyor general of Vermont and he said the difficulty was trying to lay squares on a sphere, trying to lay squares on a sphere. Vermont has nearly 300 roadside historic markers.  Oh, yes. Oh, so somebody's excited to answer this question correctly. The Vermont town of Albany was first called what? No, no, this is a tough one. I have to admit, this is a tough one. I'm hoping that somebody from Albany might be here. No, it's, it's a Luther law. It's L-U-T-T-E-R-L-O-H. And it was named after a colonel, Colonel Henry Luther Law, and he was a deputy quarter master for George Washington in the Continental Army. And he was the first signature on the charter. So Luther Law, L-U-T-T-E-R-L-O-H. Okay, so who, how many got that right? One more. We'll mark that one down, it's difficult. This one should be easy, I think. Well, maybe not. Vermont has nearly 300 roadside historic markers, the Nahalla, and I'm not sure how to exactly pronounce that. Nalaka, Vermont roadside historic marker was one of the first one placed in 1949 and is located in the town of Brattleboro is correct. You get extra points. You get extra points, but they's right. You get extra points if you said Dumberston, okay? Because it's not located in Dumberston, but the marker is for Robert King's house, which was called, and it's N-A-U-L-A-H-K, Nahaka. And that means jewel beyond price. So his house was actually in Dumberston. And thank you, John, for pointing that out to me. Longest river in Vermont without a dam. Oh, the Clyde, my God, that's got so many dams on it.  I like it so much. They're taking some, but there's still one big one up there on Clyde Pond there, right? So yeah, it's not the Clyde. Who said white river? White river. White river is correct. Good, good response there. Three bodies of water that Vermont shares with Canada. Let's take them easy ones. What, Lake Champlain meant for me, God. Wallis Pond. Wallis Pond, how many had Wallis Pond? Yeah, okay, great little pond up there in Canaan. Bordered right through the middle of it. Two, there are two server lakes in Vermont. One in Barnard has a state, yeah, the one in Barnard has a state park, Vermont State Park on it. And the other one has a primitive campground and is where? And I know somebody knows the answer to this one. Boy, you're circling it. I'm hearing Branding, Salisbury, it's Goshen. It's Goshen, how many had Goshen? It's a lake, it's up above Lake Dunmore. It's up on the mountain above Lake Dunmore. It's a great little place. You have to hike into it and so on. They do have a, it's in a national forest. You have to bring it, you can go camping up there. And they actually, I think they have a cabin there now. Now, I have to admit, here's an opportunity for extra credit, okay? You know how those people that got the grade point average of 4.2, how can you do that? You know, it's like, wait a minute, how can you get more than perfect? Anyway, here's a chance. There's a third silver lake in Vermont. Georgia. Actually, yes, it's split between, I saw you, you're from Fairfax. It's split between Georgia and Fairfax. Yeah. Extra credit. 4.2. Vermont Route 30 and Vermont Route 100 have two intersections in this town. I'm here in London, it's Jamaica. Route 30, angles down from Middlebury to Brattleboro, Rua and Hunter, of course, goes up to Spine and they actually come together and share the same highway for a section there through Jamaica. Town of Rockingham, here we go, villages again, all right? Town of Rockingham has two villages. What are they? Bellas Falls and Saxons River, yeah. So, did you get to the town of Bellas Falls? Well no, I didn't, but I got to the village of Bellas Falls, right? Place names, now I heard someone talk earlier about a place name and so on. So there are a lot of place names in Vermont. So if you're in Mosquitoville, what town are you in? I heard Peacham, that's close. Barnett, Barnett, just south of Harvey's Lake in the town of Barnett, yeah? Mosquitoville, how'd you like that on your address? I live in Mosquitoville, yeah? Come visit. What is the name of the municipality on the north border of Grand Isle? North Hurl, but you know Isle of Mott might not be a bad answer. I'll have to look at the map on that because you might be correct. It's west, but it could be northwest. We'll have to, yeah. But maybe there's an opportunity for extra credit there too. That was a trick question. Oh, oh, we got, no, no, no, no, you have to go across the drawbridge to get to North Hurl. Once you cross the drawbridge, you're in North Hurl. The new drawbridge, the $25 million drawbridge. You're in the town of Warren, you're going south on Route 100. What's the first town you enter? Grandville, Grandville. There must be a lot of Addison County people here. Yeah, Grandville. Grandville and Addison County. Largest body of water entirely within the state of Vermont. Lake Bamazine is incorrect, is incorrect. It's the Herman Reservoir or sometimes called Lake Whitingham down south. That's the home of the glory hall. You've never heard of the glory hall? Some people, it's a big dam, it's a big reservoir. They generate power in this, just where the water was done, it's a huge thing. Pearl S. Buck, Vermont roadside marker is located in what town? Danby, must be Pearl S. Buck fans, yes. And last but not least, what is the smallest town in Vermont? Not a city, a village, or a gore, a grant, by area, what is the smallest town? It's right here in Chittenden County. St. George is correct, Winooski is a city, okay? St. George. So now we're gonna reward the points, but the points don't count. So give yourself a hand. Thank you, Huey, for putting that together for everybody. It sounds like everybody had a great time with that, so maybe we can make this a new tradition of the annual meeting, a little bit of trivia. Especially if Huey is on board with putting together the questions. So thank you so much, Huey. So our last item now is the raffle prizes. So we wanna thank the businesses that donated the raffle items, as well as members. And I also wanted to thank Vermont Magazine for donating magazines for all of you as you came in to take a look at it. And we will also be listing all of the donors in the winter 2024 newsletter as well. But I'm gonna call up two additional board members to do the drawing. Erica and Shauna, if you'd like to come up here. Oh, and one other note. If you are present, please just make sure you take the raffle items that you have won so that we don't have to track you down and ship it. So if you win, go ahead in the back and somebody back there will help you take the raffle items. All right, you guys ready? Yes. Here's the list. Actually, you don't need another bonus to dump the ones after we're done. We're just gonna come down there and work out just so we don't have to. And here's the packages, too. If you wanna read off the packages. The names. There you go. So we have number one. Okay, okay. You wanna say which one it is? Yeah, I think, great. So this is package number one, Explorer Southern Vermont. Jennette Williams. Package number two, Explorer the Northeast Kingdom. Erin McGovern. She might be online. Okay, great, great. Great. Package number three, Outdoor Recreation in Central Vermont. Nancy Miller. And I should add, too, that for some of these packages, some of the winners might also be live streamers. We have about 50, around 60 members live streaming our event as well. Okay, is this number four? Yes. Number four, Ski and Stay at Jay Peak. Mary Mag. There's Roger, yep. Great, congratulations. Okay. Number five, Outdoor Adventures of Lunch and Reading. Susan Polk. Back there in the corner. Number six, Cross Country Skiing Lunch and Pie. Jean McCallum. McCallum. I think she's here as well, okay. Congratulations. Number seven, Day and Montpelier with a behind the scenes tour. Chelsea Dubey. Number eight, Garden and Kitchen Supplies. Emily Hamela Taylor. Number nine, Visiting Museums in Vermont plus a Puzzle and Treasure. Carol Anderson. Number 10, Museum Hopping and Learn the History of Vermont. Diane Bouchard. Number 11, Night on the Town. Elizabeth Law. Hi. Number 12, Thunder Road. Mary Parker. Okay, and now the next four are for, you have to be present to win, so please just let us know that you are here. Number 13, Vermont Country Store Gift Basket and Grafton Cheese. Okay, I'm pretty sure. Is it Barbara Hamilton? Did we get there again? All right. Yeah, I didn't want to jump in until you were here. Number 14, Burn-Out Bistro Gift Basket and Certificate. Matt Parson. All right. Two more to go. Number 15, Breakfast Maple Syrup and Essential Orioles. Dottie Sunquist. Great. Here. And the last one. Thank you, Charlotte. An Assortment of Italian Foods. Jim Reddy. We probably have to draw again. Oh, is he, has he definitely left the, oh. Okay, I think we have to. Okay. I think we should, okay. All right. Stephanie Haas. Great, I'm gonna put this one here. All right. Great, great. Thank you. Thank you, Charlotte. And Erica, thank you. And thank you again to all the businesses and members who donated. So that wraps up our 68th annual meeting and I just want to say once again, this is one of my favorite days of the whole year is coming here and getting a chance to meet members or see members again that I've gotten to know over the years. So thank you all for being part of the club and for being here. And we will hopefully see you at the spring get-together or next year at our next annual meeting. So thank you, everybody.


Things can be coded as capital, it's the right legal coding. So the question that we now have to ask is really who has done it. We've talked about how capital is coded in law, how different legal institutions or the modules of the code of capital like property rights and collateral law, have been grafted onto different types of assets, onto objects, ideas and promises to future payment and we have to now find out who is doing that job. And I'm basically arguing the private attorneys are the masters of the code. You might be puzzled by that because the real law makers, of course, are legislatures or in common law systems in the UK or in the United States and other common law jurisdictions. Judges also have explicit power to make the law. But most transactions that people enter into are never tested in the court of law. They happen outside. And so if you use your bargaining power and you push a little bit what you would like to accomplish and you make the argument that in principle this should be still consistent with what courts or legislatures have told us in the past, then you can actually push the law itself as long as the other party buys into that and complies. And if it doesn't comply, then we can go to court and test these principles. But in many cases courts might actually go along. So if most people think that law is really made by the state, there is, of course, truth to that because ultimately the state has to back law so that it can be enforced. We talked about the centralized means of coercion. That's really what modern states are all about. But who has access to the means of coercion and what kind of coding strategies might be used without ever going to court or without ever asking the legislature to back these laws. So where do they come from? An independent legal profession emerged only in the modern times in the 16th and 17th century in England and later on on the continent as well. In England you found attorneys who would advise private clients rather than a ruler or a feudal lord or sit on the bench as a judge. So this is a different type of lawyer, right? You're not a judge, you're not hired by the state, but you advise private clients. That kind of independent legal profession emerged in the 16th, 17th centuries with several thousand of people calling themselves lawyers and advising private clients. Very often these attorneys were recruited from the landlord class, if you want, because these were people who were literate, they had an education, the second-born sons couldn't get the property from their fathers and so they would go into the medical profession, the legal profession and others accounting later on as well. So that's where mostly we recruit lawyers from that has changed over time, but I think in the early days it's fair to say they also come from the upper classes and it might not be so surprising that they have a cognitive bias at the very least. An independent privately profession earns fees. It earns fees by charging their clients and whoever can pay better fees might also have a better lawyer who will invest more time or has more lawyers sitting on the same case and giving that person better advice. Lawyers are value creators. They're not just ensuring that their clients are compliant with the law when they take certain actions. Some have argued that lawyers are transaction cost engineers so that in principle private parties might enter into transactions themselves and just do all the business with themselves and without having the lawyers on their side. They might be able to do this, but I think many of the transactions that they enter into really need legal advice and lawyers actually offer a little bit more than just the engineering. They're pushing the limits. They're suggesting new materials if you want. They're recombining existing materials to create new value. Lawyers don't like to hear this. Most lawyers do believe that they are in the packaging industry if you want. The client has an idea. They're packaged in the law such that it doesn't violate any principles of the law, but in truth I think they're doing much more. One metaphor, one picture you can think of is think of the existing rules and regulations that might constrain what we can do that say, no, you can't go further than this or this is prohibited. Think of them as the scaffolding, like a scaffolding around a building. And what really good lawyers do, they find new gaps in the scaffolding and use the modules of the code of capital, the property rights, the contract law, secure transaction law, the trust law, the corporate law to push new assets, new ideas through the gaps of the scaffolding. It's important not to conflict with the scaffolding because then the transaction might be void and then you can't enforce it in a court of law and you lose the benefit of having the law. But it's also important to fit through the gap because then you avoid the costs of legal constraints but you're still using legal institutions, the module of the code of capital to back your transaction. So this might sound a little schizophrenic and it is, but we have basically a duality of law where we have constraints and then we have enabling legal institutions and we can use the latter to get around the former and lawyers know how to do that. If you just step back a little bit, we have encountered many of these issues in the past. We have looked at property rights, how they have changed over time, how firms were coded into corporations and even before legislators enacted statutes for a corporation, lawyers had figured out how to mimic many features of the corporate form. In the end the legislation put a standardized form on the shelves so that lawyers and clients could easily use it but many of the developments that gave us something like a publicly traded corporations were already anticipated in the transactional work that lawyers did. Even if the lawyers had not formed a fully legal profession, were not fully organized, might not even have mandatory legal training, there were very often intermediaries in figuring out how to make sure that their client had a better right and could enforce it against others, not just with the guns but also with the help of the law. On the continent, both in what we now call Germany or France, the rulers, the king of Prussia or the monarchs in France were much more careful in allowing a private legal profession to develop. They had their tabs on it. In the early 18th century the Prussian king really purged the legal profession in Prussia and halved them because the sense was that they just do a lot of stuff that the king cannot control and that tells you something. It tells you something that lawyers can be actually quite powerful that they can do things against the interests of the state but also perhaps against the interests of democracies that are self-governing states in modern times. In the United States we saw a little bit of a wild west of lawyering for most of the 19th century still and of course earlier as well where people came from Europe and some of them had legal training that they brought with them. Some just learned on the job and they were out there in places where you didn't really have a state yet, not really administration and still writing deeds to be able to give people some rights or have some way of solving conflicts that might arise between them in a peaceful manner. Law school training in the United States became standard only in the late 19th century when basically the big law firm said we would like to have some pre-training by our lawyers and Harvard offered legal training. Many other schools popped up and started training lawyers. Nowadays we have hundreds of law schools in the United States, thousands of lawyers. The profession has increased tremendously and the competition amongst lawyers has also increased tremendously. We saw a lot of that already since World War II or after World War II. Before that we had big WASP type of firms, big blue chip firms that would advise the major corporations, the major banks in this country. But they also wouldn't admit everybody to become a partner in the law firms.  They might be associates but they wouldn't be promoted to partnership. So many of those who had been excluded from the club of the big law firms started building their own law firms and also would challenge the informal rules by which the big firms operated. So the big firms would not do a hostile takeover, basically buy up another company without the approval of the board or without even having talked to the board because this was just not done. And they would also have conflict of interest if they did this. But if you have a new firm that is not bound by this and you're trying to build a new client base, you might be much more aggressive. And so it was these new firms that also brought another level of aggressive lawyering to the table. In the United States they had the additional advantage that in the United States we have a federal legal system but most of the modules of the Code of Capital that I've been talking about, property rights, contract law but also tort law, corporate law, are all state law. That means you can pick and choose amongst different states and code your transaction or code your corporation in the laws of a particular state, say Delaware. But the corporation can also do business in California or in Illinois or anywhere else in the country because the courts have said that under the Constitution we have an integrated economy under the commerce clause people and entities should be able to do business elsewhere and another state cannot deny the legal status of a corporation. What this basically means is that lawyers figured out in the United States already for some time how to pick and choose amongst different legal systems to advance the interest of their clients. And they did then later transpose this knowledge, these techniques that they had developed to the globe after entry barriers to the legal profession entry barriers to trade and commerce and financial flows had been eliminated. The formal law makers of course are courts and legislatures and very often when transactions are challenged ultimately the court will say you're right or you're wrong. This is what you can do, this is how far you can go and no further, that happens. But as I mentioned before many of the transactions are never challenged and legislatures are even in the picture much less frequently because for a legislator to take action and reform a law or change something something big must have happened. Typically in the world of finance for example we see new financial regulations come after a crash. That's when you get the wake up call as a legislator you've got to do something and then they do a lot. Sometimes it's just window dressing but at least they want to create the appearance that they have now done a lot. But in most cases they basically are on the sidelines once they have enacted the law. Once you have the law on the books basically the task of adapting the law over time to changing circumstances to the needs of different clients to different interests really is handed over de facto to the lawyers. And the smarter they are the more agile they are the better their fees are the more they might be able to do. It's also worth recalling that the lawyers are not just outside the formal powers of law. They do talk to law makers. They also do talk to regulators or they do talk to tax authorities. If they have a new strategy for helping a client to get around taxes not to evade them but to avoid them which is a significant difference in tax enforcement. So if you evade you might be punished but if you just avoid that's okay. And the Supreme Court and other courts in this country have said actually nobody has an obligation in this country to pay all the taxes. If they find a legal way to get around it that's fine. And so lawyers have a niche here to provide services that allow you to get around them. They also talk to regulators if they have a new idea of creating a new instrument that might not be regulated as tightly as the regulators had said earlier they will call up the regulators and say listen if I do this will you take enforcement actions against us because the policing of much of the regulatory law comes through the regulators themselves that parties that challenge somebody in court. And then the regulator might take a look at this and say actually for this specific transaction I think you should be fine which basically means it's very unlikely that we will enforce. It's not binding on the regulator but they might they're very unlikely to enforce an action if they gave somebody a so-called no action letter. This is where a lot of informal lawmaking takes place. If I'm now got a no action letter from a regulator for this client comes along I said you know I have a new great quoting strategy and by the way I got a no action letter for this case which I can't really transpose but I think we're reasonably sure that nobody will come and do something against us if we now push the limits again. So this is how lawmaking occurs in practice through transactions in the private offices of law firms behind closed doors there's no public that can oversee this most contracts are private. We do not have access to them. We do have access to some contracts because financial assets that are publicly traded have to be registered with the securities and exchange commission in this country and with similar capital market regulators in other countries but also this was a relatively recent development. Before the 1930s in the United States people could just issue financial assets and tell people all kinds of nice stories what promises they would have and then run with the money and might be gone before anybody figured out that there was nothing gotten from this particular financial asset that it had been a fraud. So to avoid that regulation was created and at the very least if you want to issue securities financial assets to the public you have to register them with the SEC and you have to disclose certain information to the parties that will buy them to your investors and if you misrepresent you might be liable for fraud effectively but we needed the structure to contain the private coding of capital that had gone overboard because people were making so much money that they also pushed the limits of truth what they would tell investors. The lawyers are in a service sector but in a service sector of a special client. They advise clients how to create wealth by coding capital but at the same time they also have certain obligations to society because they are after all taking the law which is a social resource to code assets or do transactions or sometimes also defend a client in a criminal case. Most legal systems have some ethical codes for their lawyers which basically say your client is really important and you have confidentiality rights and privileges that we give you but at the same time you also have to be aware of the fact that what you're dealing with, what you're servicing about is the legal system and if you bring a lot of frivolous lawsuits or you abuse the legal system in a certain way we might sanction you for that. It doesn't happen all that often. You also have to remember that the courts who would have to take actions of that nature are also lawyers and in the common law jurisdictions in particular they're also recruited from the bar but it does happen and it can happen and so there is this idea of lawyers being in the service not only of their clients but also of the legal system. But just take a look at some of the figures the US alone today has a service industry in law that is estimated to be worth about $350 billion. Revenous increased in 2021 over the previous years by 14% and we were still in COVID but there were also a lot of conflicts and actually a lot of transactions were done. The top firms have about $7.5 million in equity per partner and entry level associates who graduate from a law school and just go in the law school law firm market they earn something around $200,000 per year a little less in Europe they're still catching up but that's basically the enterprise that you get and on top of that law firms have started to pay bonuses to associates and partners who had done particularly well in the last year it's almost like an investment banking business where the more money you bring in the more money that you get and some lawyers even have claimed that they would like to be paid like investment bankers not by hourly rates but basically by the money that they make and that turns of course the whole idea of a legal profession that is also in the service of the law and thus the people in a democracy it turns it a little bit on its head now I should also say of course that there are many lawyers who are devoted to other things to public interest causes to human rights the civil rights lawyers of the 60s and 70s they also coded law in a certain way they used existing institution and transposed them to different applications and many lawyers are still doing that but the highest paid lawyers the elite law firms there are in the business of coding a capital since the 1990s the legal profession has globalized and that came on the heels of actually also nationalizing the legal profession so if you go back to the 1970s in the United States most firms were still relatively small most firms were operating locally or at the state level and then increasingly there became national law firms some rose to the top and basically created the model for what it would mean to have larger law firms with lots of lawyers in the same building who would specialize in different areas of the law and you could harness the knowledge of all of them and then advise really big clients on doing innovative stuff so first you have the nationalization of the legal profession in the United States on a bigger level and you see similar developments typically 10 years or so later in Europe again the legal professions are governed mostly at the state level so you had to think about how to get around this or how to deal with that to create nationally operative law firms but once you had created them they were also really well placed in some global law firms very often they opened offices in some jurisdictions some countries that had just opened up let's say Russia after the change in 1991 you would see western law firms come in and start advising on Russian law nobody had told them not to so they just did that and the law caught up with them only later that said can you actually advise as a foreign lawyer on Russian law in Russia not so clear and it was solved differently but you could see that lawyers became basically aggressive bounty hunters also of new jurisdictions in which they wanted to offer their services with the established jurisdictions like Germany or France they actually started merging with law firms on the ground again you have to create the preconditions for that to be possible because as long as lawyers were deemed to be really sort of the servants of local legal problems and the servants of local law there were some restrictions to that but this opened up as well and that paved the way for the well established national and increasingly global players to start buying up and merging with firms in Europe as well so you see this towards the end of the 1990s that you have mergers happening in a really major way many fell apart because the cultures of lawyering and the cultures of legal systems were so different that they didn't work but many also were sustained so that today we actually have a whole roster of global law firms which are defined by firms that have at least one office in a different jurisdiction very often multiple offices in multiple different jurisdictions they can harness their knowledge they can pool their knowledge they can advise on complex transnational transactions so as the clients globalized because we were removing entry barriers not only to trade but increasingly to capital as we allowed corporations to incorporate anywhere and yet do business in other countries as well we had basically created the conditions for globalization globalization wouldn't without a legal network that makes it possible to still have contacts that you can enforce and to know where the law comes from that you have to observe which regulation you might have to observe but also which laws can you use to get around the regulation so today even in major countries with their own long legal traditions such as France or Germany in core areas that are relevant for capital the market share of globalized law firms is between a half and two thirds and these areas would be merchant acquisitions which is basically when a corporation acquires another corporation or capital market law everything that is governed the questions of can you issue certain financial assets and what do you have to do what do you have to comply with etc let me just make here a little detour because lately we have been talking a lot about lawyers and what they really do whom they really serve so to start looking a little closer what these law firms the magic circle of firms in London for example is doing was the Russian invasion in Ukraine as you might recall many countries immediately started freezing the assets of the oligarchs oligarchs basically being people who were very close to the Russian president Vladimir Putin and had made a lot of money in Russia during the transition had bought all these fancy yachts and had a lot of real estate bought in London London actually was called the laundromat or the money that they had gained in all kinds of different ways legal or non legal but then legalized them through structures that the attorneys helped them to build to be able to acquire real estate in London or to invest or buy their consumption goods because of the sanctions that countries imposed not only on the oligarchs but on Russia as well many had to pull out of Moscow and many afterwards also said we have to now go through our client list because we are exposed to many of the oligarchs that are very close to Russia and maybe to Putin the government itself so Alan Overy made a public announcement that they would basically go through their client list very carefully now. Now they defended themselves however for having taken on these clients earlier by saying well every client deserves a lawyer that's of course a principle that we hear a lot and that's a fundamentally important principle when we talk about criminal law. If I'm prosecuted by the state the state has the chorus of powers that can put me into prison in some cases there's even capital punishment everyone deserves a lawyer right. In civil matters for transactions actually law firms decide which clients they take on and which with which clients they might have conflicts and they charge fees that automatically price out a lot of clients from the market to the get-go. So to defend their actions by serving the oligarchs by saying everybody deserves a lawyer is a little cheeky. The other problem with this argument is that these law firms are enormously aggressive in trying to silence anybody who was critiquing the oligarchs and in England the major tool the major weapon for this were libel suits. So people who were writing books about the oligarchs looking at the structures looking where the money came from whether it was dirty or not the connections to the Russian government they were sued by them in a court of law in London at the very least they were delaying the publication of their work and very often forced them to make even just minor changes to show that one and lawyers advised them to do so. So many of the magic circle firms had lawyers who were experts in English libel law and pushed these kind of cases. So we're basically getting through these scandals. Crisis very often reveal what is actually happening underneath and there might just be the tip of the iceberg. It might be the worst apple and there's nothing else underneath but nonetheless crisis give us a good entry point to take a look at what lawyers actually doing and we're having the top law firms in the UK also in the United States involved in many of these transactions. That comes I would say after a long period in which law firms have aggressively tried to create market share where they have ratcheted up the fees and they also have ratcheted up what the lawyers earn and now they have to keep up going keep up getting income so they can meet their expectations and that creates a dynamic of its own as it does in any aggressively competitive sector in the economy.