Host: Dan Kennedy

Dan: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Kennedy. A few years ago, The Moth produced a Mainstage show in Big Sky, Montana. And it was our first show ever in Montana. On this week's episode, we're sharing a story that was told at that show by prolific filmmaker and ski legend Warren Miller. 

I remember hosting the main stage show that night in Big Sky. Warren was an unlikely influence on me early on. You're going to hear a little bit about that in my introduction from the stage that night, followed by Warren Miller telling his story, live at The Moth. [audience applause] 

Boy. What can I tell you about our next storyteller? I can tell you that in 1999, my girlfriend and I broke up, which is a quick way of saying that she dumped me, [audience laughter] which is also another way of saying I no longer had any furniture because of that. [audience laughter] So, I was living in a tiny apartment on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. I had a chair, and I had a TV and I had a VCR. I was just down the street from an amazing video store called Kim's Video. They had just all these documentaries that you would never find in a mainstream video store, amazing stuff. I saw these ski movies, and I thought, I got to check these out. 

So, I brought one home, and I was noticing the skiing. I was like, “This is really cool.” But more than that, I was noticing this voiceover that was like paternal and humane, and had this sense of humor about life. This voiceover would say things like, “You know, if it's something you don't try this year, you're going to be a little bit older the next time you do try it.” And I was like, “Oh, my God.” [audience laughter] [audience applause] 

I was like, “I need to watch every one of these movies.” [audience laughter] Like, I didn't even ski. I was in it for the life guidance of this man's voice. [audience laughter] I'm sitting there, I'm completely over Sarah the second I rent one of these. And he says, “Well, the first skier went up to check it out, and he realized that it was pretty steep, so he took the coward's way down.” And I was like, “Oh, God, I wonder if I'm a coward. I'm not as great as this guy. That's for sure.” 

And then, he said, “So, I walked up. When I saw how steep it was, I took the cowards way down too.” And I was like, “Yes, sometimes that just makes more sense. It's okay, you know?” [audience laughter] And I was like, “This is going to fix me.” So, I rent all these movies. I'm like, “Oh, the skiing is the skiing, but this guy is amazing.” I meet a new girl. I also started doing this thing with the movies, where I would research these places and I would send off online for brochures. 

So, I meet this new girl. She comes over to this tiny apartment with no furniture. [chuckles] But there is quite few brochures on places like Austria and all these places you can go skiing. I asked her, I said, “So, hey, you know, this would be kind of cool. Like, we've been out a few times together. You want to take a trip to Austria with me to go skiing?” And she looked around the apartment, she was like, “Can you really afford to do something like that?” [audience laughter] And I was like, “You're right. I don't have any money to do something like that.” And she said, “Also, do you ski?” And I said, “No, I don't ski.” [audience laughter] She's made two great points right off the bat. So, I love this woman. 

And she said, “Why don't we just go to the little local hill and learn there, you know?” So, we start going to the little local hill in New York. It's very icy, and we keep going and we're getting pretty good. She skis way better than me and still does. Maybe the fifth or sixth trip, we're up at the top of this little run, and I give her a set of keys to my apartment, so ostensibly she can come enjoy the chair and the TV whenever she would like. [audience chuckles] It's the only time I saw her fall so many times on that little run. She must have fallen five times, and I thought to myself, this girl has commitment issues as many as I do, this is going to work. [chuckles]

So, how many years later? 15, 16 years later, tonight, we're in the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center, and I'm happy to say that I'm still with that girl and I'm still trying to ski as good as her. And even happier to say please welcome to The Moth Stage, Mr. Warren Miller.

[cheers and applause] 

Warren: [00:05:04] Thank you very much. Freedom. Think about that word. Everybody defines it differently. Skiing, it's all about freedom. I bought a pair of skis when I was 13 for $2. What most people don't know, is that there's large mountains to the east of Los Angeles. Mount Baldy is 11,000ft high. It's 50 miles from the city hall, Mount Waterman one time in 24 hours, got 24ft of snow. It's only 37 miles from the city Hall. Southern California is upside down in almost everything they do. [audience chuckles]

I had good luck in my pocket my entire life. My good luck really got underway at the age of 18 when I had to register for the draft in World War II, October 1942. And instead of winding up in the army, I enlisted in the Navy Officer's Candidate School. I finally got shipped overseas and I wound up in a place called Guadalcanal. I was stationed on a subchaser that just drove up and down and up and down. 

And one day, we got sent to Pearl Harbor in that 110-foot wooden hulled boat to get converted to a shallow water mine sweep for the invasion of Tokyo. Everybody knew that if we invade Tokyo, there'd be a quarter of a million young American men die, and I would have been one of them. So, on the way, we very fortunately ran into a typhoon. The front of the bow of the boat sprung some leaks and we were able to stay afloat all night. Sunk the next morning. The other ships picked us up, took us back to Guadalcanal, back to Pearl Harbor, back to Guam, San Francisco, KwaZulu, San Francisco. 

We skipped forward to 1946. I got mustered out of the Navy in San Francisco in July. I was walking down Market Street with a $100 mustering out check in my back pocket. I walked by a camera store. And for some reason, I walked in, because I had seen an 8mm movie camera in the window. The camera was $77. I was able to buy an 8mm camera, three rolls of film and a little booklet on how to operate it. 

When I got back to Los Angeles, I grabbed my surfboard, went to Malibu and started taking surfing movies with this new toy I had. I surfed with a fellow named Ward Baker. And he wanted to ski like I wanted to ski. And during the summer, I bought a teardrop trailer and we decided to take a ski trip. We skied from the middle of November till almost the middle of May. We shot a lot of rabbits, lived on oyster crackers and ketchup for lunch in the restaurants. The first three weeks we spent at Alta, Utah in deep powder. 

And one evening, we invited some ladies to have dinner in the back of our trailer. [audience laughter] Anyway, [audience laughter], pardon me, they had better stories than we did, because they started telling us about this magic place called Sun Valley, Idaho. They had three great chairlifts, one above the other, 3,000 vertical feet. The lodge, the Challenger Inn, built by the Union Pacific Railroad. And above all, they had two giant round hot water swimming pools. And living in the parking lot at Alta, that sounded pretty good to us. [audience laughter] 

We were all packed up and left Alta by lunchtime. We asked some people where we could park our trailer. And they said, “Well, why don't you go hide out behind the post office by the employees cafeteria?” We backed the car in, we stayed there for those four months. [audience laughter] It seemed like four years. We really had a good time. As I said, we lived on oyster crackers and ketchup for lunch and those rabbits for dinner. And in those hundred days that we lived in the Sun Valley parking lot, we spent $17. [audience laughter] 

We got on the chairlifts. We never told anybody how, and they still haven't found out. [audience laughter] We were taking 8mm movies of each other and showing the surfing movies that I had taken at Malibu to skiers who had never seen the surf. And that worked pretty well. When the snow melted, Ward Baker and I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Storm King Mountain. And in Jackson Hole at that time, you could buy any vacant lot in town for $350. Times change. 

So, now back to California, Go to Sun Valley the next year, same thing. By now, I'm showing surfing pictures in Sun Valley to people who've never seen the mountains, never seen surf. And I'm showing my ski movies award, Baker and I, to people in Los Angeles who have never seen snow. A lot of the footage was shaky, and so I started saying what I still think are offbeat, weird things about what you see on the screen. People laughed and pretty soon I got invited to tuna casserole dinners. And by the way, bring your projector along. 

In 1949, spring of 1949, I was teaching skiing in Sun Valley. A gentleman in my class watched me take some 8mm movies one day, and he said, “How do you like the camera?” I told him how great it was. And he said, “I'm glad you like it. I'm president of the company that builds them.” I'd never met the president of anything in my whole life. And I told him that I wanted to make travel lecture films, because in those days, there was very little color television. There was a whole group of men and women who would travel to Australia, make a film in the summer, show it in the winter. Next year, they'd go to Amsterdam and make another movie. 

And I wanted to be one of those guys, except I wanted to make movies about skiing. But I just wanted to share what I had the privilege of seeing, Aspen. I wanted to show Austria, Switzerland, France. When I started making my movies, there were 13 chairlifts in the entire world. Right now, you're sitting in a theater that right up the road, the Kircher family who own big sky, own 160 other chairlifts. Think about how that has grown. Did I have anything to do with it? I don't think so. I just showed my movies. But I enjoyed sharing my freedom with my audiences. 

After making these movies for quite a few years, I have to click forward for about 35 years. I was invited to I call them an ersatz celebrity ski race. This was in the Los Angeles mountains. At that ski race was the March of Dimes, young lady at that time, a 11-year-old Tracy Taylor. She was about 32 inches tall and she weighed 31 pounds. She had spina bifida. Her legs were in casts from her hip to her toes. I picked her up in my arms and skied down to where her mother was at the bottom of the hills. I said, “Can I take Tracy for a ski run?” Without batting an eye, her mother said, “Sure.” 

So, I coasted over to the chairlift, got in the chair and riding up with this little bundle of wonderful human being. She gave me almost the best hug I've ever gotten in my life. When we skied down, by the time I made my third turn, she's high fiving people. [audience laughter] Yeah. When we got to the bottom, I asked her mom if I could take another run. And she said, “Okay, sure, why not?” On this run, I held Tracy and let her cast bounce off of the bumps. When I coasted over, I didn't get any air when I went over the bump, but I lifted her way up in the air. She giggled and laughed and hollered. 

So, on the way down the second time, I went over to the ski race and I said, “Do you care if we go through the race course?” He said, “Go ahead.” So, I held Tracy out in front of me. And by the second gate, she's hitting the gates with her hand. [audience chuckles] This little girl was an unbelievable person. When I got down, I gave her back to her mom. Next morning in my office, I called Hal O'Leary. Hal invented handicapped skiing and how to teach people with handicaps how to make turns. So, I called Hal at Winter Park and I said, “Have you ever taught anybody with spina bifida?” He said, “No, but I would sure like to try.”

So, that afternoon, I called Tracy's home, and I said, “Okay, Mrs. Taylor, here's the deal. I have it set up where you and your two sons and Tracy can go to Winter Park for a week, and Tracy can learn how to ski.” And so, we set it up. We sent a camera crew along with Tracy and her mom and two boys. And Halo O'Leary was so good, he had a little thing that he calls a brassiere that holds the ski tips together. He taught Tracy to go down the hill and put all the weight one foot. Right foot, she'd turn to the left. Left foot, she'd turn to the right. And we had a camera crew there to document it all. 

And so, when Tracy did learn how to make these turns, first freedom she'd ever had in her whole life. Think about that. She never walked without crutches or a wheelchair, but she's skiing down a hill by herself. The camera crew was really perceptive, because they got a wonderful shot of Tracy crawling through some powder snow on her elbows and her tummy. Over that particular scene, we laid Tracy's words. She said, “My mother taught me that God made me this way, so that when people see me do anything at all, they know they can do anything they want to do.” In my opinion, Tracy Taylor is probably the greatest skier that I ever filmed. And that includes spending five months with Jean-Claude Killy after he won three gold medals in the Olympics. 

[00:16:27] Today, Tracy is teaching. She counsels handicapped students at a university in the Middle West. And for that brief moment on that hill at Winter Park, Tracy had total freedom, just like you folks do every time you get off of the top of a chairlift. It's your basic instinct. And don't be afraid to reach out and put your arms around it. Grab it. Because someday, you're going to be as old as I am. It's almost 90. All of you folks in this audience, you really have the world in the palm of your hand. As long as you look at it as total freedom, that is all I've done my whole life, is to try to get more people out on the hill experiencing freedom. 

[cheers and applause] 

Thank you very much. 

Dan: [00:17:54] That was Warren Miller. Warren passed away in 2018, but his legacy as one of the godfathers of ski films lives on. His efforts to capture and share the excitement of that sport were groundbreaking. He was a man who followed his interests, created opportunities and then developed a global business that spanned six decades. He inspired a lot of people to adventure into the great outdoors. Myself, included. 

[00:18:23] Just a huge thank you to Warren Miller for also just reminding us of an era here in America when venture capital was the $100 you had in your pocket from being discharged from the service and vision was whatever you saw out the windshield. Thanks, Warren Miller. 

That's all for this week on The Moth Podcast. And remember, if you don't try it this year, you'll only be a year older when you do try it. We hope you join us next time. Have a story-worthy week. 

Julia: [00:18:54] Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with The Moth. 

Dan: [00:19:02] Podcast production by Julia Purcell. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.