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Measuring Success

By Beacon Staff

In the Sun Valley Opera House in November of 1950, 13 people paid a dollar to see my first feature length ski film, “Deep and Light.” That meant that there were 337 empty seats. My income for the evening was 40 percent of that 13 dollars, or $4.20.

After the show that night, I learned a couple of very important lessons from the theater manager that I have never forgotten: 1) Entertain the people that show up and feel sorry for the people who did not – and assume that they had not heard about the showing of the film, and 2) You will work all of your life to be an overnight success.

Since I have not worked my entire life yet, this lack of success is apparent as I am still writing my biography.

Every time I think I am finished, I discover a note or something that triggers a long forgotten memory or I uncover yet another photograph that is pivotal for writing another entire chapter.

Last week I uncovered a long forgotten photo of a T-bar lift line in Lech and another one in Zurs and another in Davos. There were no chair lifts in those resorts in those days. Austria was gradually being rebuilt from the ravages of the Germans occupying it and neglecting it during World War II.

I was impressed with the fact that either trains or the Post Autobus could take me to large resorts, such as St. Anton, St. Moritz or Zermatt, but all of the good skiing still required at least one hour of climbing to film skiing. It was easy for me to emphasize the unique village atmosphere and the never-before-seen incredible mountain scenery.

It is unfortunate that the incredible mountain ranges of the west are prohibited from being developed for skiing anymore. As I drive through the Colorado Rockies, the Sierras, Idaho, Montana or Washington, the landscape is a great deal like Europe.
I pose another couple of questions: Why can’t Vail and Beaver Creek be connected through Minturn, as well as Vail connected to Copper Mountain?

Why can’t Squaw Valley, Alpine Meadows and Homewood be connected with ski lifts? America would suddenly be a completely different ski experience!

I think it would be a great experience to head west from Denver and drive right by the ever-crowded off ramps at Copper, Vail and Beaver Creek and into an almost deserted parking lot at Arrowhead. Then be able to ski back to Copper Mountain from there and have lunch. This would be after a couple of runs at Beaver Creek and a few at Vail. Then in the afternoon ski back through Vail, Minturn, Beaver Creek and maybe dinner in Arrowhead or the Minturn Saloon and miss the crowd on the way back to Denver.

Or perhaps park your car at Homewood on Lake Tahoe and ski to Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley for lunch and take different runs on the way back.

These ideas are a completely different ski experience than is available today. It would not just be pounding down the same runs time after time but new runs and new snow conditions.

These and hundreds of other far-out ideas are just some of the thoughts that came into my screwy brain while producing feature length ski films for over half a century.

The Swiss and Austrian tourist office did a great job of selling skiing. By 1958 my ski films were showing how great it was, but I never bored the audience with endless scenes of climbing up to the great ski runs.

Looking through photographs, I found one of a scaffold in the back of a pickup truck with a chair hanging from it in Omaha, Nebraska’s Union Pacific rail yard – the first chairlift for Sun Valley.

This was for the first ski lift in the world to be constructed on Baldy. It will all be in my book if I can ever get it finished.