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March 19, 2008

Daughter of ex-Danvers man skis all seven continents

Ethan Forman

DANVERS | Victoria White turned 10 on Christmas Day while skiing on an island off Antarctica.

It was all part of former Danvers resident and skin cancer survivor Ken White's dream to see his daughter ski on all seven continents, shattering the world record for being the youngest person to do so.

The present record was held by someone 13 years and 204 days old, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

In taking on the record, the Whites managed to raise $5,000 for melanoma research at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.

On Sunday, Victoria skied at Winter Park, Colo., where she first learned to ski. These ski runs brought an end to an odyssey involving 45 days of travel over 51 weeks, covering 75,000 miles and all seven continents.

"It was nice, getting the weight off our shoulders," Ken White said about the end of the record attempt on Sunday.

The most difficult leg of the ski trip, he said, turned out to be Antarctica, which required a 15-day, 3,500-mile cruise, with limited opportunities to get off the ship and ski. At Half Moon Island, the Whites only had a brief time in which to make a landing in inflatable rafts.

There were no ski lifts, just penguins, and they had to hike up a glacier to ski. Victoria managed to get a run in before the weather turned and they had to head back to the cruise ship.

White, a 45-year-old airline mechanic who works on flight simulators, maintains ties to the North Shore where he grew up and still has family.

"We are certainly proud of our son," said White's mom, Evelyn. "He said he was going to do it, and he came through."

White was born in Peabody and moved to Danvers when he was 5, his mother said. He even worked as a Salem News carrier before graduating Essex Aggie in 1980.

"He was always the one to take the road less traveled," said older sister Sandy Ironfield of Peabody, a 1979 graduate of Danvers High. She was confident her younger brother and niece would break the record.

"It was something I had no doubt he could do," Ironfield said. "It was a soul-searching thing, as well as raising awareness" for melanoma, she said. She described her brother as a bit of a "daredevil skier" who used to like to fly straight down a mountain. The trek turned into a positive experience for a father and daughter, with the backdrop of the cancer treatments.

White's father, Rae, said he is proud of his son's and granddaughter's accomplishment.

"We have great pride because my son has stage III cancer, and he is very lucky to be alive with what he went through," Rae said from his home in Florida.

Rae White worked for the airlines as a crew chief on the ramps at Logan Airport, a job that allowed the family to travel the world, Ken White said.

Ken White said his job as an airline mechanic eventually took him to Elizabeth, Colo., one hour southeast of Denver.

White's cancer started out as a mole on his back in 2003, but it led to seven operations.

After beating the disease once, the cancer came back in February 2006, and he credits treatment he received at the melanoma clinic of the University of Colorado Cancer Center for saving his live.

The recurrence of the cancer spurred him to make the ski trip before he had a chance to line up sponsors.

"I don't know what could happen to me," he said in looking back on why he started the attempt last year, "and my daughter is getting older."

To learn more about the Whites' ski trip, you can go to mountainsformelanoma.com.



Seven-mountain story

To break the record of being the youngest person to ski on all seven continents, former Danvers resident Ken White and his daughter, Victoria, 10, of Colorado, skied the following locations:

r Zermatt, Switzerland, March 2007 (Europe)

r Marrakech, Morroco, March 2007 (Africa)

r Falls Creek, Victoria, Australia, July 2007 (Australia)

r Portillo ski area, Chile, August 2007 (South America)

r Half Moon Island, Antarctica, December 2007 (Antarctica)

r Bejing Huaibei ski area, China, February (Asia)

r Winter Park, Colo., Sunday (North America)



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