Chapter 7: For the Love of Skiing

Remember my friend Skip Adams? He wrote to me, saying he was thinking of taking a tour of Europe with another friend of ours, Frank Robinson, who had just finished his military service. The three of us decided to do this together, and we met in Bremen.

Our first excursion was to Scandinavia. We went by ship to Norway. We toured all the way to the north of Norway by bus to see the fjords. For three days, I went off on my own from Narvik on a little postal boat that delivered mail and picked up milk from the various islands. Daylight lasted all night long, because of its location close to the Arctic Circle. It was a beautiful experience.

Returning to the Continent, we traveled on together. In Belgium, Skip and Frank met my friends. In Munich, we decided it was time to motor ourselves, and we bought an old VW van.

For some reason, we wound up in Landeck, Austria, and consulted with a carpenter named Mr. Czapeck about converting this van into living quarters. It would need to be insulated inside and outfitted with bunk beds, which is precisely what we did. We stayed in the back of his workshop for what turned out to be an itchy week. We were working with glass wool for insulation—awful stuff, like wool but made out of glass particles—and it found its way into everything, even our clothes.

After the paneling was up and sealed, we said goodbye to Mr. Czapeck and started a tour of Europe. We traveled all the way down to the Amalfi coast, camping out in the newly outfitted van. Personal hygiene was a little bit wanting, as you can imagine, because those lovely mountain streams were extremely cold.

In Amalfi, we stayed for a week or so with a very good college friend who was a naval officer. We lived the life of Riley there—girls and everything—in this absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful locale.

At this point, my companions decided to return to the States. I kept the van and moved to Kitzbühel, where it was my intention to camp out. Except it was November in the Alps. And I didn’t have any method of heating the van.

That lasted two nights, until I rented a basement apartment—complete with a kitchen with a wood-burning stove—in a family house. I spent the next three months living in this wonderful place.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Patsy von Schlegel and Nancy Vesterby—not girlfriends, but we knew one another quite well—showed up in Kitzbühel for a few days. We went out for Thanksgiving dinner, which consisted of hot dogs.

My intention in coming to Kitzbühel was to learn to ski. I had started skiing very late, after I graduated from college, because I just couldn’t afford it before that. I could ski a bit, but very poorly. Until the real snow arrived, I kept in shape by going up to the Hahnenkamm every day on foot.

Now, Kitzbühel and St. Anton were the main skiing areas of Austria, and there were a lot of young ski bums in those days in Kitzbühel. One of the people I met there was a man I called Little Hugh. (I was Big Hugh.) He was a halfback or quarterback for the Montreal football team. (The Canadian league played American football, but with slightly different rules.)

He was a real athlete, the first person I’d ever known who went jogging when it was still dark in the morning. The people of Kitzbühel would look at him and say, “Who is that crazy guy running through the village every day?”

At that time, there was a very famous ski instructor, Karl Koller, the head of a ski school in Kitzbühel, who took Hugh under his wing. He must have thought, “Here’s an athlete I can teach parallel skiing from day one.” That’s what he did, and Hugh was, predictably, really very good.

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