Warren's World

In 1933, with the months wages that I'd saved from my 10-cents-a-Saturday job at the neighborhood grocery store, I walked into the Sontag drugstore in Hollywood, California, and told the clerk, "I want to buy that camera in the showcase."That 35-cent camera with "sports viewfinder" turned out to be the most important purchase I ever made in my life. Two years after the purchase of that Univex camera, I spent some time in the Boy Scouts, where I used the camera to start one of my first entrepreneurial ventures—selling pictures of our hiking trips to other scouts. That in turn led to a lifetime of never having to work for a living. Instead of working, I spent all day, every day, all winter, skiing or filming other skiers. During the summer, when the surf wasn't up, I glued the film together that I had shot during the winter months and then, during the gray days of October, November and December, I traveled from town to town to show the film and narrate it live, while hoping to sell enough tickets to make my next movie.Sometimes, when the weather didn't cooperate during the winter, I had to hang around resorts such as Chamonix, Mammoth, Zermatt, Mt. Cook, Zurs, Sun Valley, Vail or Whistler for as long as a week with nothing to do. During that time I just skied in the deep powder snow while I waited for the sun to come out so I could take movies of yet another ski resort. There were days when the sunshine, skiers, snow and mountains truly became a "symphony on skis."In 1950, the year I showed my first ski movie in the Sun Valley Opera House, only a handful of people showed up. After the show, the theatre manager told me, "Always entertain the people who show up and feel sorry for the ones that don't." With that bit of advice, we split the $37 in ticket sales for the evening. I got 40 percent or $14.80, which was enough to buy gas for me to get to my next show.In 1990, after 40 years on the road showing my feature length ski films, I was offered a job writing a weekly column for a ski resort newspaper for $10 a week. The editor told me to just write stories about things that had happened to me—but had never made it into my movies. Now here I am, many years and tens of thousands of words later, gathering up some of those columns from the dozen or so newspapers—and the two national magazines—that have published my writings, and with the help of the folks at Mountain Sports Press, gluing them together into this book.After 65 years on skis, I still ski about a hundred days a winter, and if I live to be 123 I might be able to shoot my age on a golf course. But I usually don't keep score, because I've always believed in freedom-oriented sports where there is no score, where there is no winner or loser, where everyone who participates is the winner.One question I am often asked is, "When are you going to retire?" Since I never have 'worked', what is there to retire from? There are always more mountains to be skied, more trips to take in our boat, more stories to write about my life spent lurching from one near disaster to the next—This book is the real story of my life together with my great wife Laurie.