The day after Labor Day is when suddenly almost anyone who owns ski or snowboard equipment stops by the closet where it is stored. They get out their gear and fondle it as though it is there magic carpet to freedom. And it is.
As soon as the snow arrives everyone who can gets to the top of a mountain. They are all playing by the same rules: gravity is the great equalizer.
Many years ago, getting the wooden skis and boots ready to use again involved unclamping the pair of skis from the 2-by-4 that they had been fixed to all summer to keep them from warping, rubbing the tops with steel wool and applying another coat of varnish, putting yet another coat of lacquer on the bottoms (no P-tex or any of the more recent, faster bottom materials back then), and then checking all of the dozens of screws that held the edges on.
Then you turned your attention to your leather ski boots that you had weatherized with numerous polishing sessions of Dye-and-Shine shoe polish. It was the best. Your boots always looked new and shiny, at least for the first month or so. Some people rubbed their boots with Snow Seal over a hot stove to help it melt in but that really came later and they weren’t nearly as shiny and sharp looking.
Your ski pants could stand up by themselves by the end of the last winter, so you had soaked them in the bathtub rather than spending the money on dry cleaning. They finally dried and you put them away. Who cares if they would be a little bit fuzzy?
You have now started making trips to all of the ski shops within driving range to see what was new and exciting … I know this to be true because I started doing all of this when I got out of the Navy in 1946 and have had the same experience every September since then.
In the summer of 1946, I bought a half-dozen pair of Army surplus stiff wooden skis for $5 a pair. I figured that I could sell them at $10 a pair and double my money. I did just that, but one pair I sold to a friend who stood only 5-foot-6-inches and was just starting to ski.
To make the skis work for him and complete the sale, I just used a saw to take 18 inches off the back of the skis. I didn’t even charge him extra for the custom modifications. He sanded down the saw-marks and stripped off the white paint that all the Army surplus skis were painting with, and varnished them. He spent the next two winters having a great time.
He didn’t know the difference between where his bindings were and where they should have been until years later. He was such a happy guy his hand-knit sweater collection was the biggest of any other skier in Southern California.
Using shoe polish on ski boots was the best waterproofing for our soft leather boots. Among the ski school instructors at Badger Pass there was an unofficial, polished ski boot contest going on all winter with some of the boots looking as shiny as patent leather, tap dancing shoes. Boots were shiny but not very supporting until the mid 1960s when Bob Lange invented the plastic boot.
In the early 1950’s, some ski clubs ambitiously built lodges on mountains less than 100 miles from where all of the members lived.
An exception to that was the San Diego Ski Club. It had built their club at Mammoth Mountain, over 350 miles away. One member set the record when he drove to Mammoth every weekend, both winter and summer. He logged 129 weekends in a row working on the cabin every trip. He never did learn how to ski; he just liked to build things.
The winters of 1946/47 and again 1947/48, I spent September outfitting my teardrop trailer for the winter. The floor plan was simple at best. It contained a double bed and an outside kitchen under the hatch at the back. It was very efficient, Spartan, and best of all, for Ward Baker and myself, it was very cheap
Now more than 65 years later, I still get excited after Labor Day when the temperature drops a few degrees and I see the first leaves starting to change and drop.
Time to check my ski sweaters for moth holes.