Seven of us were jammed into my sister’s 1937 Buick Phaeton, which held four people comfortably. Seven pairs of skis were stuffed into the space between the spare tire on each front fender and the hood of the car.
It was December, 1943. World War II was raging in the Pacific and Europe and anyone over 18 was either in the armed services or worried about being drafted into the army. I drove around for 30 minutes, rounded up everyone and then used two of the passengers’ gas ration coupons to get the necessary fuel to get all the way up to Mount Waterman and return. It was a little over 50 miles from where I lived in Hollywood and it was already almost 7:30 in the morning. Since I was driving, I had the most room and the rest of my six skiing friends were jammed together on each other’s laps.
I drove the overloaded convertible through Glendale and up the long winding road to Mount Wilson and beyond. There was a long line of cars slowly grinding their way up the switchbacks that would get us, later than sooner, up to about 8,000 feet into snow country. Parking a car at Mount Waterman was a “get there early so there’ll be one left for you, or else walk a mile or two because all of the parking places were on the shoulder of one side of the road” situation.
One of my friends had just bought a new pair of $18.95 skis so the conversation during our drive revolved around “laminated hickory and ash, Micromatic instantly adjustable bindings, graphite base, and new aluminum tip protectors.” The collective ski knowledge of the people in the car added up to almost nothing. We were surfers, not skiers. We had all been surfing together since we were old enough to drag a 95 pound balsa redwood board across the beach.
Everything about skiing was pretty new to all of us and so far we had not collectively spent 15 cents on ski lessons. We had to save all of our money for the outrageous price of a chairlift ticket – $2.50 in 1943. Occasionally we would stop on the rope tow hill and stand where we could overhear what an instructor was telling his pupils. If it made sense to us, we would try and do what he was telling those people to do.
Just below Mount Waterman there was a ranch that was owned by Lynn Newcomb and his father. In 1937, they had gone to Sun Valley and they made pencil sketches and took photos of the world’s first chairlift on Dollar Mountain. They went from Sun Valley to Timberline Lodge in Oregon and made drawings of the Miracle Mile chairlift.
When they got back to Mount Waterman, they opted to copy the steel towers of the Miracle Mile chairlift and built the second chairlift in California. By today’s standards it was rickety and slow, carried less than 300 people an hour and today you would be afraid to ride it. But it got us up the hill after the usual half-hour or so wait in line. We didn’t have any basis of comparison, so any uphill device was better than putting sealskins on and hiking to the top.
No food was available at Mount Waterman so we stuffed our lunches into a rucksack and stashed them somewhere. Almost everyone brought peanut butter sandwiches with a variety of additions: peanut butter and bananas, or jam, or mayonnaise, or lettuce and all of the above. I know my generation would not have survived the depression and World War II without a daily ration of peanut butter.
Late in the day when our 18-year-old bodies were finally feeling the struggle of trying to learn to ski on the side of an ice-covered hill, full of moguls the size of Volkswagens, on skis that were soft and floppy at best, without offset edges and in ski boots that were soft leather and only came up to our ankle bones, someone in the “stacked together seven” would make the comment, “I think we should think about quitting for the day.”
By the time we rounded up all of the carload it was almost dark and a tough job was ahead. During the day the snow had melted and covered a lot of the road home with flowing water. By the time we hit that water, it had frozen to a perfect ice skating rink on a slant.
Driving very slowly on tires without tread, in a long chain of other cars whose drivers were also afraid of skidding, we slowly got off of the mountain and I began the chore of dropping off all of my passengers.
The last words we said to each other were: “Tomorrow, same time, same place, only earlier so we get a better place to park.
And we did the same loaded car drill on Sunday, but everyone brought an extra peanut butter sandwich for the ride home.