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A Birthday is Just a Number

Never celebrating birthdays sounds like a very good idea because if you don’t celebrate them you do not have to fit into an age bracket

By Warren Miller

Apparently, on Oct. 15 I am expected to celebrate yet another birthday, my 90th. But let it be known, I am planning to celebrate at least another 10 or 15 birthdays. At least, with my health still good, I’m letting myself think that way.

As I’ve led a very wandering life, I can’t recall ever having a bad day with a camera in my hand or a rucksack on my back. I’m so glad I have these autumn years of my life to recall and reflect on all those adventures.

My 39-cent, black-and-white still camera let me share my Boy Scout trips with my junior high school friends who otherwise spent their weekends playing football or baseball. We were lucky that there was no television in the 1930s. The enjoyment I got out of sharing those early trips to the mountains spilled over into my enjoyment of documenting the growth of skiing on a worldwide basis.

When Gerald Ford was president and skiing at Vail, my ace cameraman, Don Brolin, was the only one who the Secret Service let film the president up close and personal. That was quite an honor for him.

During the Vietnam War, when I was in my 40s, I was honored to send a lot of my films to the troops and I have a photograph of one of them who had my ski bum cartoon tattooed on his shoulder after watching my movie and drinking too much beer one night. I have another photograph of a platoon of soldiers in Iraq holding up a poster of one of the feature films I sent over there for their enjoyment.

Back to my birthday: Never celebrating birthdays sounds like a very good idea because if you don’t celebrate them you do not have to fit into an age bracket.

As a young kid nobody in our family ever celebrated anybody’s birthday. My first recollection of a celebration of my birthday was when I was 60 when my daughter Chris hosted hamburger feed at the California Yacht Club in Marina Del Ray for 10 or 12 of our friends.

For my 70th birthday I thought my wife and I were to be on our boat for three or four days when she decided to come home the day before my birthday. I was clueless as to what was going on. Our neighbor, Hobie Alter, took several of my family members who had come up for my birthday, as well as my older sister Mary Helen and me for a barbecue on his catamaran. When we came back to Hobie’s dock, about 150 our friends came out from the hiding singing Happy Birthday. I was totally surprised.

She went one better for my 80th birthday when we again went out on our boat to British Columbia for a few days and had planned on coming back to a fundraiser for the University of Washington on Mike and Lee Brown’s nearby islands called Big and Little Double. We motored in to tie up to their dock, got out and walked up the ramp to their house and a cannon was shot off. This time Laurie had rounded up 250 people for a total surprise party just for me.

I’ve spent half of the last decade, up to out my 90th birthday, working on my autobiography, and the major problem now is that it is way too long at over 700 pages. But then, I’ve had a long life.

Initially, I’m filling the book up with lots of stories from lots of places in the world and the people who have changed my life along the way. When I find a publisher, their editors can decide what to leave in the book and what to cut out. The other problem with the autobiography is that I have several thousand still photographs from all over the world documenting the growth of skiing. It’s difficult to leave any of them out.

Most of the stories in the book that I think are really interesting are of all the normal people that I met along the way. Just because somebody is a famous doesn’t make them any better or worse when they are making turns just like you and I do. We’re all the same on the side of a mountain.