I have a 6-foot-long, folding conference table in my office and under that table is a mattress designed for backpacking and sleeping on a bed of rocks. My office bed is so comfortable that I seem to fall asleep within 2 minutes when I lay down.
I don’t know how many times I’ve folded up conference tables, but you could tell how old they were by how much chewing gum they have stuck to the bottom of them.
There are few things in life that are designed perfectly for the task needed. Those tables surely are. I used to have one in my business office in Hermosa Beach. I spent a lot of late nights standing beside that table stuffing advertising in small envelopes to solicit more business for my ever-growing rental films.
When I bought the building that became home for that table, and as I bought a building that was less than a block away from the post office so I could use a shopping cart from a local Safeway to haul the films back and forth. One ski season, we shipped films to 11,347 ski clubs.
That was called secondary marketing. I only had time to visit 100 cities and narrate the feature film in person. After the first year it was shown, I added my voice and music to the film and simply shipped it to the clubs for their fundraising activities the next year. I cut the 90-minute feature film into 13 episodes for television broadcasting. It used to take two, full-time employees working in the rental film department just to keep up with the demand.
A dozen years after I started the company, I hired a lady as my secretary. Juanita McVey became such a valuable employee as she cleaned up my record keeping, managed the company and worked with me for more than 15 years.
Not too long after she came to work for me, she bought a piece of carpet that matched the one in my office, laid it over the mattress so that when I had a client sitting at a coffee table that we were negotiating a film with, they didn’t wonder about where I slept at night. I guess I’ve been an office sleeper all my business life.
A simple method of falling asleep is to count backwards from 100 saying each number at the end of each exhale.
When I was 16-years-old and started driving my sister’s Buick convertible phaeton to San Onofre for the weekend, there is no place inside the car to sleep, so I spent $25 for a trailer. It was built on a 1929 Model T Ford chassis and it could carry as many as six 100-lb. surfboards without a problem.
I designed it with a mattress on the floor of it, a kitchen with cooking gear hanging over the wheels. All I had to do was remove one of the many surfboards in the trailer and lay down. It certainly worked for me and particularly after I got drafted into the Navy in 1943. I was given one month’s notice to report for active duty, so I loaded up my trailer and drove to San Onofre and surfed every one of those 30 days.
There were weekends where I could only get one other surfer to go to San Onofre with me and I simply rolled up the mattress and put it in the back seat of the car. During that era, that mattress rolled out almost everywhere within a couple of miles south of San Clemente. One night, I made the mistake of rolling my mattress out on the loading dock at San Onofre. The 1 a.m. train came rattling through at 45 mph only 4 feet from my mattress. I don’t remember being more frightened.
I’ve had mattresses in cars, trailers, motor-homes and occasionally on just a pile of dirt beside the road. The worst mattress I ever had to spend the second night on was when I was dumped into the Navy and had to sleep on the top level of a metal bunk with coil springs on each end.
Anyone who has ever spent much time in a motel knows that you never sleep on the side of a double bed where the telephone is. That’s because 95 percent of the people that climb into that double bed are single people and always sleep next to the telephone. That side of the bed always sags at least a half-inch or more than the opposite side.
For the first six or eight years of my life, our family moved quite often. I went to six different grammar schools in six years and we always lived in a two-bedroom, or less, house. My parents slept in one bedroom, my sister slept in the other bedroom, and I had my own mattress in the corner of a hallway or a large closet. When you don’t know the difference, there isn’t any.
When my three kids were little, each one of them had their own mattress for sleeping on the beach, one for the back of the car, and one for sleeping on the floor of motels. I think that we were all fortunate that they got to spend a lot of time on each one of them as they grew into adults experiencing trips all over the country and Europe.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
