As I stepped off the train in Kitzbuhel, Austria, I had two jobs ahead of me. One was to film the European portions of my annual ski film and the second was to lead a tour of 14 skiers on a once-in-a-lifetime ski trip. I had promoted this adventure from the stage as I traveled that fall and winter, narrating my film in person.
I was in for a bit of a surprise when I went to the tourist office and discovered that the executive at Scandinavian Airlines who would make our reservations didn’t think anybody would sign up for the tour so he didn’t bother making reservations either in Kitzbuhel or any of the other resorts we would be visiting. I definitely had my work cut out for me. We were somehow able to find a room for everyone in several different hotels.
After I showed them some of the endless runs in several of the resorts, we got to the point where the skiers were enjoying themselves and I finally got to take a few shots for my movie.
The cable railways were then as they are today, the highlight of the trip, especially the one in Zermatt, Switzerland. If viewing the Matterhorn in all its glory doesn’t change a person’s perspective on things, I don’t think they ever will.
In those three weeks among the 14 people we had thousands of good times but I should have learned my lesson and never done a second one. When I stayed in Zurs that first year, I spent four nights sleeping in a small bathroom on a sheet of plywood on top of a bathtub.
If you’re a slow learner, you’re a slow learner.
To get those European photographs of skiing in the early days, most of the skiing was on south slopes because the Swiss ski resorts had been tuberculosis sanitariums in the years before they were ski resorts.
I have a lot of memorabilia from those days, most of which is in boxes somewhere in the basement of our Orcas Island home. One thing I do have is only good memories, such as 14 people and myself all clomping onto a Scandinavian Airlines plane in our ski boots to save excess baggage weight. We were only allowed 44 pounds of stuff when you fly to Europe and a man from Montreal on one of my tours took his curling stone with him instead of a pair of skis. I found out after we got there that he put most of his clothes on under his overcoat to save weight.
Another one of my ski trip travelers was a veteran of World War II who had been fighting his way across Europe a decade earlier and was afraid to go out of the hotel unless he was with me.
Over the years several people came on the tour because they thought they were hot skiers and would wind up in my annual film. They weren’t as hot as they thought so that never happened (except in some of the comedy sequences).
A long time friend of mine always drove a new Volkswagen bug and went everywhere I took my tour group. The last three years we skied together when the tour was over I climbed into Sam’s Volkswagen bug and traveled to some resorts that I had never film before, such as Cortina, Italy.
Sam explained to me that I could buy a Volkswagen bug in Germany for between $850 at $900, drive it all over Europe and then ship it to Los Angeles and sell it for $100 more than I paid for it. So I did that for many years, including in 1960 when I purchased a Porsche. It was quite a car but after getting it back into the states, I was driving down a windy road in the rain and began sliding. Scared to death, I put the car up for sale the next day. It was such a new car design to U.S. drivers that it took a while to sell but I finally got all my money out.
The money I saved, of course, was spent on Kodachrome so I could bring better movies to the audiences across America.