Skiing pioneer Otto Lang dies at 98

Skiing pioneer Otto Lang dies at 98{mosimage}SEATTLE — Otto Lang, a Bosnian-born founder of ski schools on Mount Rainier, Mount Baker and Mount Hood and ski instructor to the stars. had died.

He also had a Hollywood career, directing the film ''Call Northside 777,'' with Jimmy Stewart.

Lang, 98, died Monday at his Seattle home. He had been suffering from heart disease.

''It's the absolute end of an era. He was the last of that generation. No one else is left,'' said Warren Miller, a legendary ski-film producer who first met Lang in 1946 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Lang came to the Northwest in 1936 looking for a place to film a ski-instruction movie. What he found was a lot of snow and mayhem, when he watched the running of the Silver Skis Race on Mount Rainier, the opposite of the controlled, graceful skiing style he had honed in the Austrian Alps.

''People flying through the air, crossing their skis, falling, somersaulting,'' Lang recalled in a Seattle Times interview in 2003. ''It was just unbelievable the mayhem and danger – twisted knees and ankles and everything. So I said: 'Well, this is a place they need a ski school very badly!'''

Born in 1908 in a small town outside Sarajevo and raised in Austria, Lang opened the ski school at Mount Rainier in 1936, and the next year he added schools at Mount Baker and Mount Hood in Oregon.

In 1939, he left for the ski school at Sun Valley, where he ran the school for years. There he met movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox. Zanuck put the skier in charge of the ski sequences of the movie ''Sun Valley Serenade'' starring Sonja Henie.

Lang eventually produced several movies, including ''Call Northside 777,'' a 1948 thriller with Jimmy Stewart, and directed episodes in a number of TV shows, including ''The Man from U.N.C.L.E.''

He returned to the Northwest in 1987 and wrote a memoir, ''Bird of Passage,'' and later published a collection of photographs from his travels, ''Around the World in 90 Years.''

He is survived by his longtime companion, June Campbell of Seattle; and sons Mark Lang of Coronado, California, and Peter Lang of Santa Rosa, California.

– The Associated Press