“First thing on the agenda was to remove the skis from the 2 x 4 piece of lumber that they had been clamped to for the summer to prevent them from warping and twisting in the semi-moist atmosphere of sea level.”
If you’re lucky enough to have skied as long as I have, from way back in the late 1930s, you’ll know that the ski season then was different than today.
In 1940, the day after Labor Day, I would stop by a sporting goods store, go back to the seldom-visited ski department and look at a blackboard with all the local resorts listed and the snow depths. It was written in chalk so it could be changed as soon as any snow arrived.
First thing on the agenda was to remove the skis from the 2 x 4 piece of lumber that they had been clamped to for the summer to prevent them from warping and twisting in the semi-moist atmosphere of sea level. Then you would check your edges. Nearly always that would result in a trip to the hardware store to buy $2 worth of stainless steel Phillips-head screws to secure the edges for those that were missing.
While there, you also bought a handful of copper rivets. If your skis were as almost as worn out as mine usually were, with the hickory so soft it could no longer hold a Phillips-head screw, then you drilled all the way through the ski. I would insert the rivet with a big copper washer on the top of the ski and somehow I thought the skis would last another winter. But they never did.
When I made sure that the edges were firmly attached, I would remove the bindings and sand the tops of the skis and apply many layers of varnish to them.
Next, I started working on the bottoms, sanding off the lacquer from the previous winter and applying all new coats of lacquer, reattaching the bindings and then going back to the sporting-goods store and ogling all the new skis and new boots that I wanted more than anything in the world; that is, with the exception, of early snow.
Perhaps you put in extra shifts at the drugstore or the malt shop to earn the extra money to buy some other new stuff. Perhaps a new pair of gabardine pants with the seam in the front and they tapered to fit smoothly inside of your boots. The prices for those pants started at $7 a pair but the super deluxe gabardine went for as high as $19.95. If you wanted a new pair of poles or gloves, you might have to spend as much as $3.95.
The November issue of the ski magazine usually arrived within one or two days before Labor Day so you dreamed and coveted the vacation ads at places such as Sun Valley, the Sugar Bowl and Stowe, Vt. Aspen had not been invented yet. The Union Pacific Railroad advertised a round-trip train ride from Chicago to Sun Valley, Idaho, five days of ski lessons, a dormitory room and three meals a day and lift tickets for seven days for $85.95. That wasn’t in my world of possibilities, but I did dream.
At that time I was skiing at nearby Mount Waterman on a single, rickety, old single chairlift for $2.50 a day. Another prerequisite was to have friends who had enough money to help pay for 15 cents a gallon gasoline to get you there and back. Since there was no restaurant at Mount Waterman, it was peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches, with Fig Newtons in a brown paper bag.
You put your boots on while sitting on the running board of the car in a muddy parking lot, and then with the heavy hickory skis and bamboo poles, over your shoulder we’d walk the mile or so to ride the chairlift. If you were lucky, you got in the chairlift line early, but the line was probably already 45 minutes long.
The first few years I was able to drive, but during World War II the country was on gasoline rationing and stamps were hard to come by. I knew who was going to go skiing with me long before I knew where I was going skiing and all you cared about was you were going skiing and you had enough gas rationing stamps lined up to get you there and back.
Today, you just have to add a couple of zeroes to most of the pricing of equipment in 1940. For example, a cheap pair of skis and bindings today start at approximately $1,200 a pair and hold on to your wallet for this one: last spring a pair of top-of-the-line pair of skis without bindings was offered to me for $2,695.
About the same time last spring I was introduced to a pair of ski boots that had to be a combination of woven gold and silver. How else could a pair of ski boots cost $2,000, not including sales tax?
When I was paying $2.50 for a day to ride the Mount Waterman chairlift in 1940, I was earning $2 every Wednesday and Saturday morning delivering 300 copies of the Los Angeles downtown shopping news.
Today, many people don’t even buy skis because its such a hassle to get them back and forth from your hometown to the ski resort and back so they just demos and get to try out a new pair of skis every day of their vacation. Makes a lot of sense.
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.
