Bromley Mountain, 1945
Saturday Evening Post cover, February 2, 1946
Mead Schaeffer was born in Freedom Plains, New York, and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. He studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and he would have known Norman Rockwell, another Saturday Evening Post favorite, when they each had studios in New Rochelle, New York. In later years, the two artists were neighbors in Arlington, Vermont. In fact, Schaeffer’s family posed as models for some of Rockwell’s magazine cover illustrations and paintings.
Right out of school, Schaeffer began illustrating reprints of classic works of literature. He went on to do magazine commissions, producing 46 cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. His portfolio included work for McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan, among others. One source states that Schaeffer made more than 5,000 paintings, traveling throughout the United States to capture scenes of Americans that told authentic stories of the places where they lived and worked. Mead Schaeffer’s work is widely collected. Many museums own his work, such as: the National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
This Illustration, promoting Vermont as a ski destination, appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, which millions of people would have seen. The train out of Grand Central Station in Manhattan came right to Manchester Depot, barely seven miles from Bromley. No one needed a car to get this far north to ski. Most of the mountains opened during Christmas week, but Bromley owner Fred Pabst (whose family founded Pabst Blue Ribbon beer) opened the mountain early for Thanksgiving.