Sepp Benedicter was a famous Austrian ski instructor who for some reason spent a lot of years in Southern California converting sun worshipers to skiers. My first experience with him was at his ski resort on Cahuenga Pass in Hollywood. It was located right where Universal Studios is today. He had brought a half-dozen truckloads of pine needles down from the nearby San Bernardino Mountains and hooked one end of a rope tow to an oak tree and the other around the rear wheels of his truck.
I was on one of my bike rides and watched a half-dozen people having a good time carving untracked, pine needle turns in the hot July sun.
My next experience with Sepp was at the gigantic Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona in September of 1951 when he had built a 250-foot high, very rickety scaffold that resembled a standard ski jumping profile. He had sold the county fair people on how exciting it would be to have Olympic ski jumpers hurtling a couple of hundred feet through the smoggy sky on a hot September evening.
They needed an announcer for the event and I already had one year of showing my ski films under my belt so they picked me. Announcing the jumping contest also involved driving all of the jumpers back and forth to the fair. Since the job paid twice as much each day as I was making pounding nails, I signed on and risked my life every evening climbing up to the announcing platform.
The process was pretty simple. Trucks full of ice would show up at about four o’clock and grind up these blocks of ice and spray them on the landing hill and the in-run. I have no idea how many tons of ice it took to make the scaffold look like a regular ski jumping hill but it was a lot. Once all of the ice was shredded and in the hot September, volunteers from Southern California ski clubs would side step the hill until it did not look like the in-run to death.
This is where I came in. My job was to stop by the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena and pick up the Olympic amateur ski jumpers who had been flown here from all over America. I would round them all up, load all of them in my van and drive them the long way to Pomona because it was before the invention of the freeway in that part of greater Los Angeles.
The first day I drove up to the scaffold, I realized if the skiers landed the least bit crooked they would shoot off of the side of the landing hill and land in an asphalt parking lot full of melted ice.
The volunteer skiers who came to pack the landing hill showed up in their best ski outfits and sweated in that hot September sun. Some wore knitted sweaters and Tyrolean hats and yodeled occasionally. A friend of mine was so excited to be on fake snow in the middle of September, he showed up with two left ski boots. He was a good skier and when the jumpers were through he made good ski turns down the landing hill and from then on everyone did the same thing – showing off for the half-dozen spectators who were still there and had a face full of cotton candy and mustard from their foot-long hotdogs.
For my part, I had a lot of practice trying to keep families with crying kids listening while I tried to describe the intricacies of a ski jump and how it is judged. Did anyone care? I don’t think so. All they wanted to see was a jumper landing out in the water soaked asphalt. I got the jumpers back to the Huntington Hotel in time for their midnight swimming parties and repeated this for the next 17 days or more.