Until recent years, I always got out of bed early. It started when I got my first morning paper route at the age of 13. It was a great job because all I had to do was deliver 300 copies of The Los Angeles Downtown Shopping News to 300 different houses on my route. I had to have all of them delivered by 6:30 in the morning.
Most of my route was in a residential neighborhood where the houses all had lawns and the lots where I had to walk about 4 miles before I got ready for school. My boss wanted everyone to have the Shopping News before they left for work.
To do the job to earn my dollar for delivering that many papers, I had to get up by 4:30 a.m. I did this on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, with an occasional special delivery on Thursday.
Getting up early at the age of 13 set the pattern that I would follow all the years I worked for a living. That guaranteed $2 and sometimes $3 a week and was enough to buy 10-cent-a-gallon gasoline to put in my sisters car to go surfing once I got my driver’s license. I also was about to save enough money to buy a trailer that could hold four or five, 100-lb. surfboards to and from San Onofre on the weekends and in the winter to Palos Verdes when there was still a road almost down to the water.
When I started at USC in January 1942, I got a job spinning (polishing) the floors in the library. It paid 25 cents an hour and starting my job sometime between 4:30 and 5 in the morning in order to get them polished before the students showed up, but only five days a week.
My next job was at Arrowhead and Puritas Water Company in 1942. It was a good one working on the bottling line where the 5-gallon, glass bottles of water showed up at the rate of a 1,000 an hour. During that summer, I got to sleep until 6 a.m., but then I got promoted to help unload a truck and trailer three mornings a week and again I had to be at work before 5.
The next job was in the Navy and you had to be outside in the predawn darkness doing calisthenics before 6 in the morning, rain or shine.
Once I got aboard a ship, I was always the junior officer, so I got the 4 to 8 a.m. duty watch or the 4 in the afternoon until 8 at night. You had to get up at least half an hour early for the morning watch so that your eyes would be used to the darkness and you could spot Japanese submarines before they saw you.
Once I was out of the Navy, after I got sunk in a hurricane near Guadalcanal, I tried to go back to college and get my degree, but quit a few weeks later and went skiing and never looked back. Skiing with Ward Baker for two winters, we always were on the chairlift with ski patrol and that meant getting the 8 a.m. bus. To do that, we had to roll out of our teardrop trailer by 7 in the morning in order go to the skiers chalet and shave while our ski boots thawed out so we could get into them, thaw out the frozen milk for our oatmeal, then back to the trailer, and cook our oatmeal and make sure all of the feathers from our down sleeping bags had been picked off of each other’s sweaters.
My ambition has always exceeded my necessity for sleep. I have been lucky in that respect. I also got up early at Squaw Valley to draw my daily cartoon, unless there was powder snow for my new Bell and Howell 16mm camera. On a powder morning, if I had earned enough money on the side to buy film, I would be on the first chair up the mountain. That early morning photography not only guaranteed good powder snow but it also guaranteed the best light of the day.
As my film company grew, eight hours a day were not enough to do everything necessary. By this time I had three children, I was back to the 4:30 in the morning schedule so I could at least be home by 6:30 at night to have dinner with them before they went to bed. For about 10 years, my car was parked under my daughter’s bedroom window. So that I did not wake her up when I started my car at 4:30, I would push it into the alley and down the street a couple of houses before starting it. I would be in my office in 5 minutes and get four hours of work done before anyone else showed up. And, I could call people in New York after 6 a.m. in my office and they were always surprised by my early morning call.
When I was filming in the 1970s, I was still getting up early to make sure the camera was in perfect working condition, the lenses were clean, my heavy rucksack would not break under the load, and package and ship the film I had shot the day before.
Today, it is a real luxury for me to wake up at 4:30 in the morning and realize that I don’t have to hit the floor running, unless I have a deadline for a column, which is when I wrote this one.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
