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By Warren Miller
My trip to Los Angeles started normally. “That will be twenty-five dollars for your first bag and fifty dollars for your second bag.” Followed by a neck to stocking-feet pat down and wanding because I have a steel rod in my right leg from when I broke it in 1998. Then a ten-minute train ride, a two-story escalator, and then a two hundred yard walk to gate number N-247. I was bound for a Thanksgiving visit with my three adult kids and grandchildren in sunny, Southern California, the capitol of the trendsetters of the world, or so they think.
I wandered down the ramp to get on the plane, where they took away my carry-on luggage because they thought it was oversized. This was after I had carried it onto a few dozen other flights with no problem. The problem here was that I had a seat on a Bombardier Jet. A company that also makes a snowmobile in Eastern Canada. It is a toss-up on which method of transportation is the most uncomfortable. The small jet carries fifty passengers, but comfortably only twenty-five who are under the age of ten years old. I had changed seats with a family of four who wanted to all sit together because two of them were less than two years old. I wound up in seat Thirteen B. The number should have told me something. I was on the aisle less than twenty-four inches from the toilet, whose folding door hit my shoulder when it opened unless I leaned against the lady who was sitting next to me, snoring. With fifty people on board and it being a two and a half hour flight, I figured someone was using the toilet every three minutes. Without a doubt, it was the most uncomfortable flight I had ever taken. And my first one was in 1944.
The Los Angeles airport had 1,800,000 people pass through over Thanksgiving weekend and, of course, no one had any significance whatsoever. They took my carry-on luggage away from me on boarding, and when I got it back in Los Angeles, they returned it to me, but they had managed to drop a suitcase on it and crush my cell phone. There are no pay phones anymore in airports, so, instead of calling my daughter to pick me up, I had to pretend I was almost blind and have the lost luggage manager place a phone call for me.
There is as very nice hotel that I usually stay at in Redondo Beach. When I checked in, I was informed that they were remodeling the rooms and assured me that the workmen did not start working until after nine in the morning. That’s when they started working, but they started showing up about eight am, loudly discussing what they did last night and at nine o’clock sharp, the skill saws started running.
When my daughter drove me to the hotel, there were about nineteen white trucks in the marina parking lot across the street, surrounded by a fairly large crowd. It was a location shoot for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. It takes that many truckloads of stuff to film one guy. Arnold has his own house trailer and dressing room. There is a make-up truck that can handle from one to twenty-four people at a time, and toilets for everyone in another truck. A kitchen in another that can feed Arnold and the thirty-five or forty people necessary to handle the lights, the camera, and all the men who move stuff around. Electricians, plumbers, prop men, lighting specialist and all told, somewhere around fifty people. When I was making movies, I enjoyed the freedom of doing it all by myself. One guy, one camera, and two skis. What else did I need?
The morning after I checked into the hotel, my daughter drove me from Redondo Beach to Studio City in the Valley to play golf with an old friend. As we eased down the ramp into the freeway (with six lanes in each direction) it was amazing to watch that many cars moving at one time. If you added up all of their speeds, all twelve of them, we were averaging almost fifty miles an hour, or four miles per hour each. It would have been a long trip to the Valley on a clear, cloudless, smog-less Tuesday morning. In the old days, I used to have a super-secret short cut from the South Bay to Hollywood, so we took it and it was still secret without traffic that amounted to anything. The houses, apartments and stores all looked almost the same except for a couple of things. The trees where thirty years older and several of the retail mini-malls had plywood instead of glass windows, definite signs of too many stores for the limited customers. One apartment complex where a college girlfriend lived in 1943 was still in good repair, however, was completely surrounded by a ten-foot high chain link fence with razor wire on the top of it. Each one of the balconies also had a six-foot high iron fence across the front of it, and every window also had iron bars in front of it. Welcome to Southern California.
Memories flooded back as we drove by the Hollywood Bowl and drove on the old Cahuenga Pass Rd. where the big red street cars used to rumble along beside it. At the summit, the hill was where I saw my first skiers making turns on pine needles, and riding a rope tow in 1936.
I played part of a no-score round of golf with an old friend, Jack Smith. Jack and his wife, Abby Dalton have been married for a lot of years, but in the early years, had a bit of a rough time and got a divorce. A couple of years later they were remarried. Appearing on a TV show one night with several other couples who had married the same spouse for the second time, the master of ceremonies asked Jack what the most important reason for marrying his wife the second time was?
He replied, “I just wanted to get my money back!” Jack and Abby are a hoot and they have three great kids, three grandchildren, and Jack’s latest accomplishment. At the age of 85, he shot his age in a recent golf game!
The last morning when I was to fly back to Seattle, the hotel remodelers decided to wake me up at seven instead of nine. A bad ending to a great week in Southern California. All three of my kids, wives, husbands and grandchildren are healthy, smiling and looking forward to living as long as I have.
-Warren Miller
