There is so much wrong with the stories of Kerry on the slopes that I can hardly contain myself, starting with the spectacle of a 60 year old guy SNOWBOARDING, a sport for outlaw kids in baggy pants. When I tried it out about ten years ago (I’ve been a regular two-board skier since I was 7), two teen-age chicks went by me and my brother and said, “Hey, look, there’s two OLD guys trying it!”
And I was always taught that if you didn’t take some falls on skis, you weren’t trying very hard to get better at it. So when Kerry says, “I never fall,” all kinds of alarm bells about character and other things go off.
And my how Sun Valley has gone to hell, having to put up with the likes of Kerry. I learned to ski in Sun Valley in the mid-1960s, when it was mainly a Republican hangout. Now Blaine County, Idaho, is, s as the NY Times story noted, the one outpost of blue in red-state Idaho. It has been “Hamptonized,’ as the saying goes. In the old days, there were no private homes–just two large hotels where everybody stayed, including the Bobby Kennedys. One night Bobby Kennedy and clan barged the nice steak house in the then-little village, walked up to the head waitress and tried to pull a DYKWIA, saying he had a reservation for 12. This restaurant didn’t take reservations, however; we had been waiting about an hour for a table in the lounge, in earshot of the whole thing. The head waitress informed Bobby that he would have to wait 60 minutes for a table, whereupon he wheeled around and left. At which point, everyone in the lounge, led by my dad, gave the head waitress a great cheer and round of applause. In later years I used to note that Ted Kennedy was usually the subject of glares when he turned up at Sun Valley.
As I say, the good old days.