Jack Kemp and I rode a chairlift together hundreds of times during the last 20 years. He was a strong skier and an opinionated and brilliant conversational companion. If you would like to read a complete bio about Jack Kemp, just look him up on Google or Wikipedia. Plan on sitting in front of your computer for a long time because his biography is long and it doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story, just his highlights. The summary? Jack was a professional quarterback, a congressman, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a defender of minority rights, a vice-presidential candidate and 100 percent American.
But I knew a different Jack Kemp, because I knew him when he was out of the spotlight. I would try to keep up with him roaring down some ski run in Vail or at The Yellowstone Club in Montana, or spend a quiet dinner with him and his wife Joanne at our home in Vail.
I remember the first night that Laurie and I met Jack. It was at a New Years Eve party at the Saloon in Minturn, Colo., in about 1987. We had sat down next to him and Joanne and we were invited to ski together the next day. Our friendship grew from there. The Kemps began to leave their equipment in our basement between ski trips, and a few years later they bought a place in Vail, which became a hangout for the Kemp clan. Eventually, they bought another place right next door, so they could fit all of their four kids, the kids’ husbands and wives and their 17 grandchildren during the Christmas holidays.
Some of the things I remember most about Jack are the many great discussions we had on chairlifts and while having lunch at a place called The Dog House in Vail. It was a non-corporate hotdog stand off the beaten path. We would sit in the sun and talk and listen to our wives compare their ideas on how they could help make the world a better place. Jack and I also liked The Dog House because you could get a great bratwurst sandwich, fries and soda for less than $4. The corporate-owned restaurants on the mountain charged a couple extra dollars for the same lunch, the seating was inside and they were usually very crowded.
Jack had a lot of good one-liners that summed up his philosophy on life such as: “Winning is like shaving. If you don’t do it every day you look like a bum.” Or, “Pro football gave me a good perspective when I entered the political arena. I had already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, (to the Buffalo Bills for $100) and hung in effigy.” But the one-liner that makes more sense with each passing day is, “Democracy without morality is impossible.”
In 1996, Jack invited Laurie and I to dinner at a Chinese restaurant – his treat. At Hop Chings’ Chinese Coffee House that night, he introduced us to Tim Blixseth, who was just starting the Yellowstone Club in Montana (yes, it’s the ski resort that is involved in $400 million dollar bankruptcy at this time, and no, it’s absolutely no fault of Jack’s or mine). Two weeks later, we all stood at the top of Pioneer Peak in Big Sky Country. Two weeks after that, we once again stood at the top, and this time we watched as his wife Joanne become the first grandmother to ever ski off the top of that mountain.
Did Jack change my life? Of course he did. He also really solidified a lot of what I had been thinking most of my life in relation to politics. Probably the longest stretch of creative discussion we ever got into was when I made the statement that, “In the 1940s, 50s and 60s the gene pool of today’s potential world leaders was killed in World War II, The Korean War and in Vietnam. America lost more men on the first day of the invasion of Iwo Jima than we have lost in Iraq to date.” I could not prove my theory and he could not disprove it. Unfortunately, we have now lost another world leader in Jack Kemp.
There will be a lot of books written about Jack and they will all be hundreds of pages long, but I have a library full of memories of being with him, skiing together day after day and sometimes beating him to the bottom of the mountain where my wife would be waiting for both of us. Jack, we all miss you a lot already and please save some of the powder snow for us.