Why so sad, Pete? Head Ski Company just gave you a new set of skis. (Photo courtesy of AMC)

Pity poor Pete Campbell. Well, actually, don’t pity him—he’s a nuisance of the highest order who each week deserves to have his ass handed to him by Lane Pryce or another colleague he’s managed to irk. But no one wants to be his friend… except for the Head Ski Company, which popped up on last night’s episode of Mad Men when Pete was gifted with two pairs of skis as enticement for taking the sporting goods company on as a client.

Though the company, through a series of mergers and takeovers, is now based in the Netherlands and Austria, Head was founded in 1950 in Baltimore by Howard Head, who is credited with inventing the laminate ski. Until Head’s tinkering, alpine skis were made of wood. Head, an employee of the aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, thought the same aluminum and laminated plastic used in making planes could make for better skis.

In 1954, Head was awarded a patent for his design that pressed a plywood core inside two aluminum sheets which were then covered by a shell of laminated plastic. The new skis were lighter, more durable and made it easier for skiers to turn while descending the slopes. By the mid-1960s, in time for Pete Campbell’s run-in with the equipment, the Head Standard was used by over 50 percent of skiers in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

And skiing wasn’t the only sport that “some schmo from Luthersville, Md.”—as Roger Sterling called Head—reinvented. After selling his ski company in 1969, Head went on to do for tennis rackets what he did with skis—replace wood with aluminum and later synthetic materials.

Today, Head’s skis are manufactured in Austria, and the company’s U.S. presence is in offices in Phoenix and Norwalk, Conn. But in a show awash in the culture of 1960s New York City, it was nice to see last night’s Mad Men give a bit of jet-age cred to Baltimore. (Which, after all, is the hometown of series creator Matthew Weiner.)

Even though his company is long gone from the region, Howard Head’s papers are in the care of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and several of his early skis and tennis rackets are on display there as part of the sports exhibit “Breaking Records, Breaking Barriers.”

As Roger quipped as Pete struggled to lug his new skis across the clean linoleum floors of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, “at least [we] got to see that.”