In 1937, it all started on the side of a snow-covered hill that was less than 50 miles from the Los Angeles City Hall. My two-dollar pine skis were tied with a rope to the top of a five-foot long, two-passenger oak toboggan that I had made in my seventh-grade woodshop class. My Spalding pine skis had no edges and a mortise in the center with a leather toe-strap stuck through it. I was wearing knee-high hiking boots with a pocket on the side of one of them for a knife, in case I encountered a rattlesnake
My Boy Scout patrol leader had driven us to the hill in his Model A Ford coupe. He charged me 20 cents for gas, and I also had to bring along peanut butter sandwiches for both of us. I was 13 years old and had no idea that that day on the snow would change my life for the next 71 years.
In 1937, I was selling and delivering about 100 copies of The Hollywood Citizen News six afternoons a week, for about $8 a month. I was skinny as a rail, knock-kneed and stuck in a corrective gymnasium gym class five hours a week at school. Since that day, on corn snow on those two-dollar pine skis, good luck has been my constant companion.
This is how my autobiography will start. It’s a book that a lot of my weekly column readers have been asking me to write. Of course, there will also be stuff about the first 13 years of my life in it as well. The big question is how do you condense eight decades of great experiences into one volume? I have no idea and thus have been procrastinating about starting to write the book for the last four or five years.
Recently during dinner, there was a discussion about the people who made the ski industry grow from nothing to what it is today. Unfortunately, many of those pioneers are no longer with us. And even more unfortunate, their memory bank is gone forever. Their stories will never be told. Stories of staying up all night on a Saturday to get the rope tow engine repaired, or the rope spliced, or the endless traveling to raise money to expand the resort. In my case, it was endless traveling to capture and then share my photographic efforts with audiences all over the world.
At that dinner my autobiographical problem was partially solved. Since then, I have begun interviewing writers who might be available to collaborate with me and move the project forward. I have written more than 800 articles for newspapers and magazines in the last 15 years, and many of those articles are about stuff or events that could be part of my book. I have a large collection of old photographs, newspaper clippings and letters from people all over the world.
I will weave in all kinds of stories, from skiing on erupting volcanoes in New Zealand, to being one of five people in a two-passenger helicopter flying out after dark on Mount Cook, to escaping death in a helicopter crash because I ended up having to drive to Seattle from Vail on the day it happened.
I stood in ski lift lines for untold hours in the early days. In Switzerland I paid $10 to fly with Hermann Geiger for an hour when he first pioneered skis on an airplane with wheels and was practicing takeoffs and landings on a glacier. I remember riding to the summit of Super Chamonix on a piece of plywood that served as a construction gondola before the passenger gondola was built. I got an inside look at producing movies to sell stock for resorts such as Snowbird, Alpine Meadows, Sun Valley and Alpental. I did all of that while sharing my mean-spirited humor about people falling off of chairlifts at an unnamed resort somewhere. Those were the good old days and they deserve to be examined in detail.
And how about Friedl Pfeiffer and how he bought 10 houses in Aspen for only $100? And Everett Kircher – I was there when he bought an old chairlift from Sun Valley for $4,800 and then bought a mountain in Michigan called Boyne for $1 because it was too steep for the farmer to grow potatoes on and then built the Midwest’s biggest resort. Yes, I was very lucky over the years to be there and make movies about the ski scene from Australia to Zermatt to Southern California and everything in between.
I have no idea how long it will take to write the autobiography, but I imagine with good help, I will have it ready for Christmas of 2010. If your life was ever affected by watching one of my movies, send me an e-mail with your address and we will keep you posted on the progress of writing the book. Right now, I have reduced my list of thirteen very good writers down to four. Hopefully soon, I’ll be able to make a decision on which one of them will spend a lot of the next year working with me, prying my memory open and selecting the just right tales and photos to help tell my life story. As you read this column, the book is officially underway, so stay tuned …