Signmakers of the Times

to the Mad River Valley. He settled in Vermont “dirt poor,” he recalled, and landed a gig as a ski patroller at Sugarbush in 1971. In his spare time, he started “messing around with woodworking” and making signs for the ski area.

By 1973, Peggy graduated and moved to Waitsfield to be with Sparky. They had spent the previous couple of summers living in the Mad River Valley working in restaurants and painting houses. They had also started what would become Wood & Wood Sign Systems. Sparky’s interest in woodworking came naturally. In college, he would grab piles of scrap wood and start carving, sometimes imitating album covers and at other times “just inventing things.”

“Architectural elements just wow me,” Sparky said of his early inspiration, adding that he and Peggy became “addicted to doing things in public spaces.”

When Killington rebuilt its K1 lodge, they called them. When Saskadena 6 changed its name last year and rebranded, they called them. In fact, go to almost any ski resort in Vermont, and in many parts of the nation, and you’ll see unique, creative signs designed by Wood & Wood Sign Systems of Waitsfield.

The company that was founded by Sparky and Peggy Potter has been creating the signs you will see at the entrances to ski areas for 50 years. In Vermont, you’ll see their signs at Sugarbush, Stowe, Stratton, Killington, Okemo, Jay Peak, Burke, Magic, Bolton Valley, Trapp Family Lodge, and Mad River Glen, of course.

Wood & Wood also counts clients from Vail, Colo. to Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Heavenly Valley in California to The Canyons in Park City, Utah. Their signs are at The Breakers Resort in Florida, the Olympic complex in Lake Placid, as well as at colleges, restaurants, inns and hotels, retail shops and major outlets like the South Street Seaport in New York City.

And it all started with skiing. Peggy and Sparky Potter met at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York when he was a senior and she a freshman in 1969. Both enjoyed skiing, and after a sojourn in Aspen, Sparky came back

“The art work involved in making signs is the main motivation,” Sparky told Vermont Business Magazine “I realized then that art can be anything in three dimensions. Art is the balance, the scale of things…. But art is also the impulse…. There has to be some degree of personality that goes beyond bland; you’ve got to make it memorable.”

That desire to make things memorable came in part from their own sense of adventure. Sparky and Peggy, along with local residents Charlie Brown and Irwing ‘Rush’ Rushworth, formed a company in the early 1970s called Dream On Productions, a multimedia venture that married ski photos with music and images in a slideshow that served as entertainment at après-ski hot spots throughout Vermont and then across the country.

During those 10 years, Peggy was the goto coordinator in charge of staging and music. “I was the music editor and coordinated the scripts and did some of the photography. But mostly I did logistics. I organized models and coordinated with ad agencies and figured out locations for shoots... Dream On took us all over the world. We didn’t have children then, so it was like being paid to do something that was more fun than you could ever imagine.”

Dream On Productions became a hot commodity featuring hour and a half to two- hour entertainment acts, showing not only skiing at resorts, but extreme skiing at places like Silverton, Colorado, as well as shots from Mt. Everest to the jungles of Borneo. It became an act, the Potters recalled, that took them to major ski resorts throughout the nation and around the world. The work was not only fun, but got them pretigious gigs with Princess Hotels and Norwegian Cruise Lines.

It also paved their way to the 1980 Olympic Games in Lake Placid where Wood & Wood Sign Designs was hired by CocaCola to do numerous signs to promote their sponsorship, while the Dream On Productions team was contracted to shoot the games for various clients. That gig included covering the U.S. vs. Soviet hockey game in which the American “dream team” claimed the gold medal in an unforgettable match. After the Olympics, they toured with the U.S. hockey team showing their production to high acclaim wherever they went. “It was so much fun,” Sparky recalled, “so much fun.”

During these years, Peggy and Sparky built, on their own, their “Pottersville” compound — a hodgepodge of buildings that are intricately built, carved and painted in a style that J.R.R. Tolkein would love, complete with thatchedlike roofs in Tudor style.

There, they raised their three children: Charlotte, Grace and Lee, each artists in their own right. Charlotte became an artist, working in glass blowing; Grace made

When ski areas build or rebrand, Wood & Wood gets a call. Their Waitsfield operation has created signs for Vail Resorts, Spruce Peak at Stowe, The Canyons in Utah, and Maine’s rebranded Pleasant Mountain (formerly Shawnee Peak), as well as dozens of others. Most recently, they created the distinctive sign for Killington’s new K1 Lodge.

COURTESY PHOTOS