The good, the bad and the ugly: this has been the rhythm of my life so far. It kind of revolves or bounces between each of them. The alternating sequences are coming into focus as I write my autobiography. Like how good was it when I was windsurfing across the Molokai Channel in Hawaii when I was 65 years old? Or how bad was it when I was 20 years old and traveling from Guadalcanal to Hawaii so our ship could get converted into a shallow water mine sweep during World War II. Fortunately for us, we were sent into the eye of a hurricane and sunk in the giant waves and howling winds. The war was over a few days after that.
The bad might have been on a 32-degree-below-zero night in Sun Valley. After being invited to a dinner party in the lodge, we had to change out of our warm clothes, while freezing outside the trailer, before we could retire to our house in the parking lot. The good, then, was the army surplus sleeping bags that we had to ward off the cold. At the last moment before our trip, both Ward Baker and I had spent an extra $7 for a second down sleeping bag.
The best thing about writing an autobiography is that you get to relive your entire life again. For me, memories such as driving almost all night to Ogden, Utah, for my first big ski race at Snow Basin with Dean Perkins come to mind. We slept for a couple of hours in his mother’s basement before we went to the race. At least we didn’t have to sleep in the back of the car in the Snow Basin parking lot, and it was even better for me because I won the Eccles Cup Giant Slalom that weekend. That was a one of the goods.
Another good was when I was on my first filming trip to Europe in 1952 in a propeller-driven Douglas DC-6 airplane. I woke up at first light, and I looked out and saw that one of the propellers wasn’t spinning. The pilot came on the intercom and said, “Don’t worry, this airplane is built to maintain altitude on only two engines.” It was good that it could because about halfway through breakfast an engine on the other side of the plane clanged to a stop and we were still three hours from Copenhagen and the North Atlantic is very cold in February. We arrived safely and flew on to Zurich after changing planes.
Then there was the good during the third year of my film career when I was working by day as a carpenter, earning $2.50 an hour framing houses and working on my movie at night and on weekends. When I asked people in the different European resorts what they were making, the bad reply was that a carpenter in Austria or Switzerland earned 10 cents an hour in 1953.
The good was that gasoline was under 20 cents a gallon, so I could drive to a ski resort 300 miles away for about $10 a trip. That was the same amount that a roll of 16mm film cost. I could haul four other skiers with me for a weekend trip and they bought the gas, paid for an oil change and helped me drive. When the sun shone, I filmed all day or until I ran out of film or until the rope tow broke, whichever came first.
The good part of my life is that I cannot recall ever having a really bad day. Whenever I got sick or broke my leg, an arm or my back, I always had the attitude that, “At least this is not terminal and I will be better tomorrow than I am today.”
As I go through the file cabinets full of photos and memorabilia to compile my autobiography, I am enjoying every moment of recollection. Whether I was skiing with my wife Laurie, Jack Kemp, Jerry Ford, Netanyahu, or filming the ski patrolmen who let me do it before they opened the hill to the rest of the skiers, every single day has been great.
So my advice is: If you want a great experience, write your autobiography for fun and forget about doing it for profit. Do it for your kids, because they don’t know a lot of what you did or how hard you worked when you were getting your act together so you could finance their life from before their birth through college.
And in retrospect, the good, the bad and the ugly all become good because all of those experiences make you what you have become today.