Around 1962, I realized I couldn’t stay in California. I missed the seasons, which I had experienced again while traveling in Europe. Consequently, I decided to go East.
George was by that time working for an air freight firm in the East. He was thinking the company should open a new office in Hartford, Connecticut, at Bradley Field. He said, “Why don’t you come and run that office in Hartford?”
I, of course, was thinking: Hartford, the insurance capital of the U.S., must have girls, typists, masses of them. I was prepared for self-defense.
I got into my ’61 VW Bug—an old one with divided windows in the back—and drove East. I found a companion, probably through an ad. One of us slept in the back seat while the other drove.
We didn’t stop much, except in Cheyenne. I was a big Western fan, and I thought Cheyenne was going to be the real stuff. But it was nothing of the sort!
Anyway, in three days, we were in New York. I moved up to Hartford, to the airport. There were some sheds, and that’s where my office was located.
The goal of my job was getting air freight orders, and that turned out to be a problem. The big plum would have been Pratt & Whitney, the jet engine manufacturer, which was headquartered in Hartford. A single order to transport an engine would have been very profitable. But that order never happened. The next best thing was insurance, but that was tough as well.
I never got out of the office much before 9 o’clock at night. There were always night flights, for which I had to complete paperwork.
And there were no girls.
Hartford was an awful place for another reason: It was dead asleep on its feet at night, and the only place I could eat after work were diners. No, I thought, I can’t live like this.
I wrote to my mother: “Mami, send me a recipe. I have to look out for myself, because diners are not my thing.” There was a two-week interlude, while the letters went to California and back.
After I received her response, with a recipe, I started cooking. It was just one dish—a Hungarian dish, obviously, maybe chicken paprikás. After a week or so, I had mastered it. I knew what it should taste like, and the result of my efforts was pretty good.
I sat down and wrote to Mami: “Next recipe.” I received it, I looked at it, and I realized: The basic recipe is the same, and all that’s required is changing the meat. I quit bothering my mother and started cooking on my own.
(Ever since, I’ve become fairly adept at cooking. I was never very good at following recipes, but if I get a general idea, I can personalize it with the ingredients available to me. No preparation can take more than an hour—I refuse that!)
In the meantime, the business in Hartford was not developing as we had hoped. George told me to come back to New York, and I moved in with him. He was living with a young man, of French origin, who was a cook. And George was a cook, and now I was cook. Thus one of us would cook every Thursday night, which was a sure-fire hit with girls. I never had a problem getting a date for that night.
I joined George’s circle of friends too. As a group, we rented a shack in Lonelyville on Fire Island in the summers, and houses in Bromley or Mad River Glen in Vermont during the winters.
At this time, the charter ski flight business to Europe was booming. Gradually, skiing became our dominant vacation plan, our seasons traditionally opening with an obligatory viewing of Warren Miller ski films.
For one memorable trip in St. Anton, I managed to enroll in the ski trail grooming team, as Ratraks were as yet unknown. The crew was made up of young men and women, mainly English-speaking, of various nationalities. Our job was grooming, tamping down new snow, and evening out moguls and ruts.
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