FOUNDATION BLOG

Mr. Slutzky’s death was confirmed by his son Paul, who operates the family business with a sister and a brother.

Mr. Slutzky and his brother, Israel, a civil engineer known as Izzy, had been partners in a construction company when, in the late 1950s, they began bulldozing a ragged mountainside that a state engineering study had found unsuitable for skiing. But the proximity of a 4,000-foot-high mountain to New York City made it worth the extra engineering, Orville Slutzky later told interviewers. About 125 miles from Midtown, the mountain is one of the tallest within a desultory conversation’s drive of the city.

The brothers, who were known for working prodigious hours well into their last years (Izzy Slutzky died in 2006 at 92), seized on ideas that later became standard practice in their industry. They were among the first to heavily invest in snow-making equipment in the 1960s, when the technology was fairly new, and were widely credited as the first to install enough of it — there are currently 1,200 snow cannons — to coat a mountain from top to bottom. (There are about 240 skiable acres at Hunter, from its highest trail head, at 3,200 feet, to the base, which is 1,600 feet above sea level.)

The Slutzkys were also among the first to build condominium apartments at a ski resort and to offer floodlit night skiing; summer skiing on lubricated plastic chips instead of snow (which never caught on); free lift passes for skiers over 70 (which did); and discount deals for singles, families and corporate groups. The deals filled the place to capacity for years, leading some ski writers to complain of a Times Square rush-hour ambience.

Mr. Slutzky and his brother grew up poor, working on the family dairy farm in Hunter, and in the guest lodge their parents had operated to make ends meet. The brothers started their construction company in 1939. They had built many of the areas’ roads and schools by the mid-1950s, when they conceived of the ski mountain idea as a way of bolstering the local resort economy after years of decline.

Having grown up in a region dependent on tourism, they knew their venture would depend on people from New York City.

They retained a former Broadway publicist, Paul Pepe, who helped them gather investors, among them Jimmy Hammerstein, the son of the Broadway lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II. Whether or not Jimmy Hammerstein secured financial backing from Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Kim Novak and Christopher Plummer, as the New York tabloids reported at the time, mattered less than the fact that the appearance of those names in the same paragraph as Hunter Mountain gave the resort an aura of glamour.

Among the celebrities there when the resort opened on Jan. 9, 1960, were the playwright Moss Hart and his wife, the actress Kitty Carlisle, who did not ski but were photographed riding the chair lift.

The Slutzkys bought out their investors a few years later but retained the patronage of celebrities like Mr. Newman, Ms. Novak and Mr. Plummer, who were photographed skiing there, as were Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., in the days before Vail and Aspen became the more popular destinations.

In a 1992 interview with Ski magazine, the blunt, sometimes impish Mr. Slutzky articulated the brothers’ basic business plan. “The ski industry is about advertising, promotion and constantly saying, ‘We’re the best,’ ” he said. It was, he added, not that different from “a mouthwash campaign.”

Orville Andrew Slutzky was born in Hudson on Feb. 13, 1917. He was the third of four children of Isaac and Ella Miller Slutzky, both Jewish refugees — he from Russia, she from Lithuania — who had lived on the Lower East Side but met in Hudson. Isaac had settled there to try his hand at farming, and Ella met him on a visit several years later. As was common among aspiring immigrant families, Orville, his parents and his two older sisters put Izzy, the youngest, through college; he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Mr. Slutzky is survived by two sons, Paul and Gary; a daughter, Carol Slutzky-Tenerowicz; and nine grandchildren. Mr. Slutzky’s wife, Ethel Mildred, died in 2010.

In 1964, a reporter for The New York Times was among the members of the press assembled for the grand opening of the Slutzkys’ new base lodge. In an interview that day, Orville Slutzky wistfully recalled another time.

“My brother and I began skiing here 35 years ago,” he said. “In those days we climbed the mountain with skis in hand, and then slid down as best we could.” For skis, he added, “we used barrel staves.”