After making ski movies for more than 50 years, I know that an editor can change the direction of the film right up until the time that it is handed off to the lab to print the images and add the soundtrack.
The same thing happens in publishing a book, and I have been involved in the creation of my autobiography/memoir for almost five years. The writing, at least, appears to be over and it’s ready to be edited and published. As other memories creep to the surface I will be tempted to make changes in the manuscript right until the very last moment.
While writing the autobiography I have encouraged everybody I know to do the same thing with their life. Unfortunately, most of the people I suggest this to say, “My life is not very interesting.”
I counter that argument with a very simple one. “Your children know very little about your life prior to when they got to be 12 or 14 years old. I found that as I wrote my autobiography, I found the reason for a lot of the mistakes I made in life, what I should’ve done and didn’t. Writing an autobiography is time-consuming, but it is very simple to do: just put 12 lines on a piece of white paper and each line is a month of that year.
For some reason your brain loosens up and you remember things that happen on both sides of that event. A case in point is I remembered in 1937 I built my first surfboard in the seventh grade in junior high school and I subsequently remembered the name of my junior high school woodshop teacher that year. His name was Mr. Breemeyer. He taught me an awful lot about hand tools, carpentry skills, cabinetmaking skills and that all helped me later in life.
I started out as a ditch digger digging the trench’s for the concrete foundations for houses and earned the generous salary of $1 per hour. I worked hard and within a year I got a full-time job as a rough carpenter framing houses and was able to get into the carpenters union and then I earned $2.25 per hour. With a union card, I could take a Friday or Monday off to go to the mountains to take more ski movies and when I got back I would go back to the union hall and go to work for another contractor.
I felt that my autobiography should include the bad with the good. I did some things that I am not proud of but they were legal at the time. I never spent a night in jail and am lucky because my grandfather gave me the best advice I’ve ever had when he said, “Never tell a lie because you don’t have a good enough memory.” But my wife accuses me of not telling the absolute truth because it might ruin a very interesting story.
There are some dates that cannot be juggled in the book, such as the day we were sunk in a typhoon while we were heading to Pearl Harbor from Guadalcanal at nearly the end of WWII. The logbook of one of the rescuing ships is contained in my memoirs. There’s some photos of my sisters and myself sitting on the beach at Topanga Canyon in Southern, Calif. I was 5 years old at the time and had already learned how to body surf. Surfboards had not yet come to Southern California.
I’ve included a conversation I had with astronaut Capt. John Phillips while he was orbiting the earth in a space capsule. The reason he asked NASA to patch through a call to me was that he took several of my ski film DVDs in the space capsule with him and had looked at them so many times he was bored. He also grew up watching my movies when he lived in the New Hampshire and learned to ski as a youngster.
Now that my share of the efforts in the creation of this autobiography is finished, I want to stress to all seniors that they should be writing all their memories down. So many people can learn from others’ experiences.