It was the middle of February 1950 at this brand-new ski resort called Squaw Valley. At best, it was only half finished.
It was really hard to push the door open to our Navy surplus, unpainted barracks because of the four-and-a-half feet of snow that had fallen during the night. Suddenly Squaw Valley was a completely different place after this massive snowstorm.
I was surprised that the chairlift was not running – it was obvious that a tree had fallen on it or some catastrophe had happened to the chairlift during the storm. So the only option was to climb up and see what had happened.
Stan Tomlinson, Emile Allais, Brad Board and I set out for the long, hard climb to inspect the lift. About an hour or so later we found the problem. A massive avalanche had come down the headwall and tipped over Tower 22.
None of us were ski lift repairmen, but we had brought about 200 feet of climbing rope and several spanner wrenches that we would need to detach the lift from the ground platform it stood on, if we could.
Since I was the youngest and dumbest in the group, I was elected to remove the last bolt that held the tower to the ground. None of us had any idea whatsoever which way the tower would tip over when we were swinging it back and forth by pulling on the long rope as I removed the last nut and started tapping on the final bolt to release the tower.
The tower fell off of the cable, the cables shot up in the air and the chairs spun around the cables and the vibration of the cable went all the way down to the bottom of the lift – fortunately, not derailing from any of the other 20 some odd towers.
We considered our job finished and skied down to relate our story to the lift operators. With fingers crossed the lift was turned on and miraculously it ran without a problem.
The tipped-over lift tower, as I recall, sat in the snow the rest of that winter and I’m not sure if it was ever replaced.The only problem was when you road the chair at this point it was more than 100 feet in the air.
These kinds of extracurricular activities came along with your job description and pay scale of $125 a month, a place to sleep, and three meals a day. Management considered us part-time employees because we only taught a four-hour day.
I didn’t have a business plan for my film company in those days because I didn’t know what a business plan was. All I know is that I did everything possible to earn an extra $10 here and there to buy yet another roll of film to produce my first film called Deep and Light.
My boss, Emile Allais, was very understanding about my obsession with getting deep powder snow onto my Kodachrome film at every opportunity. Several times when there was powder snow, I had no money for Kodachrome so I pretended to change rolls of film and practiced camera angles. To help buy Kodachrome film, I drew a new cartoon every day after work, put it up on the bulletin board, sold it for a buck and did pretty well selling them.
Unfortunately, for history’s sake, I did not take my 16mm camera with me on the day of the lift tower catastrophe.
Fortunately, I became friends with a dentist from Marin County, Dr. Frank Howard, who had been making 16mm ski movies for free trips to ski resorts for quite a while and I asked him how to edit film.
If I had stayed in Sun Valley, Idaho, for a second year of teaching instead of moving on to Squaw Valley, the opportunity to produce that first film might never have happened. Everything starts somewhere and my film business started when I was living in the Navy surplus, unpainted, dormitory at Squaw Valley that first year.