Today is an auspicious day for the Tatsuno family.  November 15th marks the 40th anniversary of my dad’s arrival in Sun Valley.  I can’t even imagine what would have transpired if he had never made that fortuitous move to that little mountain haven.  I mean, how many lives has he impacted through his years of service on the Sun Valley Ski School.  How many kids have grown up with some riding skills under their belt and some sage advice from an old ski bum.

I asked my dad to do a write up on his time spent in SV, so take some time, turn on that old radio playing some classic rock and get groovy on his story.

Tats

From Email Correspondence, Rod Tatsuno:

HI.   It’s a gorgeous and sunny morning.  I celebrated my 40th November 16th with a hike up lower River Run and a first descent on my board for the winter.  A little firm and slick in spots, with some man-made "grippy" in others, but  it felt good to find that I could still ride…

My buddy Jim Hindmarch and I arrived in Ketchum on a very cold (minus 10 degf) and dark night, with not a stitch of snow in sight.  The main intersection had that small green sign in front of Slavey’s (now the Roosevelt) pointing right to Sun Valley.  The mailed directions from our landlord said to turn left, go down two blocks and count houses on the right to find our rental home.  No stoplights in Blaine county and few stop signs, much less street signs.  The engraved wooden signs were unscrewed and taken by ski bums when they left town; empty poles indicated the corners, since there were few curbs and sidewalks.

When we found the house, we noticed a station wagon parked in a carport and deduced that a family lived there.  We instead checked out the house next to it.  The key slid into the doorknob, but wouldn’t turn.  Damn, frozen!  We searched around to the back of the house and my friend Jim (6′8") boosted me through a window that opened.  I knocked over a lamp and a few other things while fumbling around in the dark, before I found a light switch.  I opened the front door for Jim, and we stood there in shock as we gazed at the small interior.  Where was the huge living room with fire place, three bedrooms, two baths, dining room, large kitchen, etc?  Before us was a tiny kitchen, no dining room, a little living room and TWO bedrooms and a very tiny bathroom.  For this we were paying $500 a month when the minimum wage was $l.25/hr???

What were we going to tell our two buddies, who were arriving the next month?  Just then, there was a knock on the door.  I opened it, and an tall silver haired guy stood there.  He said, "You’re in the wrong house’.  Taken aback for a second, we then began to apologize for apparently breaking and entering someone else’s home.  "No, no", he replied, "I’m Al Peace and I rented you the house next door".  I exclaimed, "But there’s a family living there".  Al replied, "That’s my station wagon, which is good for putting my golf clubs in, since I play a lot of golf".

Taking us to the bigger house, we gazed on everything that we had hoped it would be, and then some.  We later scrounged up mattresses and charged visiting friends a couple of bucks a night to stay, and eventually got our rent down, including utilities, to less than a hundred a month per guy.  We had some great parties there.  One roomie, Jerry, dressed in a fringed leather jacket and a wide brimmed flat brimmed cowboy hat similar to what Dennis Hopper wore in the movie, Easy Rider.  He played solitaire almost every night, while listening to Iron Butterfly and The Stones.  He lives in Las Vegas and is a professional gambler still.  Jim met and married a nurse here and they moved to Colorado, where they raised two kids until their divorce.  Linda never remarried, but her daughter Jamie (6′2") graduate from CU, Boulder on a combined full ride scholarship in basketball and volleyball.  She’s now an attorney.  JIm remarried to a Playboy Bunny looking gal in her later 20’s and he has two children, now aged eight and ten years old.  Jerry, our fourth team member, returned to Silicon Valley and is probably a big honcho in the internet companies, since that was his bag.

My first job was as a bellman at the Sun Valley Lodge, which was a great way to see the Valley close up, with the ability to go into back hallways, etc.  One of my clients was Jean Claude Killy and his ski tuner, Leo LaCroix.  The next winter, Jean Claude had me take care of his then fiancee Danielle when he skied before the cameras for the Best Special of 1971, the "Jean Claude Killy and Peggy Fleming TV special at Sun Valley".  I carried a couple of bandalero battery packs for the 16 mm camera, for Joe Jay Jalbert, who did the on course skiing for Robert Redford in the film, DOWNHILL RACER, and was doing the camera work, holding a 16 mm camera while following Killy through a slalom course that we set up on Flying Squirrel run on Baldy.

One day, I drove over to Dollar mtn to see if I would be needed for setting up some short ski sequences there, with Jean Claude and two local gals on short skis simulating what Peggy and two guys from Hollywood would dance on the ice rink.  It clouded over, so apparently the filming was cancelled.  I felt someone walk up next to me, and with my wide perepheral vision, realized it was the ski school director, Sigi Engl!  I had engaged the idea of joining the ski school, but how would someone like me do that when the Sun Valley ski school was world renowned and had many ex Olympians on its staff?  I even sat next to Sigi in the Duchin Room bar and I couldn’t gather up the courage to even say hello.  I had more or less given up and reasoned that if it were to be, it would be.  If I had known French, I would probably had said to myself, "C’est La Vie".  But a linguist, I’m not.

I screwed up my courage and turned to Sigi and said, "How does one join the ski school?"  He looked at me with an impassive face and brusquesly said, "Be here next Tuesday at nine o’clock and don’t be late!" and walked off.  It turned out that he was there to check out the grooming by the single old Tucker cat that was working Half Dollar run, and his grandson was riding with the cat driver!  Thus began the possibilities of a Big Mountain skier gaining his momentum on snow…..