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Today's Featured Biography
Bill Grout
In the fall of 1961, after a summer working on a Pierce County road crew and playing with the almost-world-famous Capris rock band, I enrolled at WSU, primarily because I was convinced that the farther I went from home (without having to pay out-of-state tuition) the more “freedom” I would have. I was shocked to discover that living in Pullman without a car was like being confined to a military base. I have two vivid memories of my year in Pullman: 1) competing with my roommate to see how many pull-ups we could do while hanging by our fingernails from the door frame of our dorm room; and 2) spending endless hours in the student union playing Hearts while Dave Brubeck’s Take Five resonated from the jukebox.
Meanwhile, my parents moved from uptown Purdy to northern New Jersey, and I decided to follow them. New Jersey was woodsy and humid, but the pull of the Northwest was still strong. Early that summer I flew back to Seattle for a couple of weeks of climbing in the Cascades with Dick Gilbert. As a warm-up to our adventure, we climbed one of the buildings on the U Dub campus where Dick was going to school, happily avoiding the campus police. Then it was on to the main event in the Cascades, where I got third-degree sunburn and came within seconds of drowning in a raging mountain stream (I slipped off a crossing log and was sucked under, 35-lb. backpack and all). A few weeks later, lucky to be alive and already a little bored with the Garden State (not a good sign), I took a 25-year-old United Airlines stewardess out to dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. The food was good, the conversation was (I thought) remarkably intelligent, and by the end of the meal I was feeling pretty darn grown up. Then the waiter approached with the check and said, “Who gets this, you or your mom?”
That fall I enrolled at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, and almost immediately wished I hadn’t. In just about every way possible (geographically, linguistically, meteorologically and gastronomically) New Brunswick, New Jersey, was as far removed from Puget Sound as you can get. I was miserable, and my misery affected my grades. By the time the year was over I had flunked out. I felt more relief than shame.
But what now? I got a job at the Stratton Mountain Inn in Vermont. From the onset of the New England fall foliage season, when busloads of “leaf peepers” descend on the Green Mountains, all the way through the winter ski season, I worked the front desk, did the “night audit,” balancing the day’s receipts with the cash in the drawer, and even learned to ski a little better.
Just as the snow was melting, my parents moved again, this time from New Jersey to Colorado. I joined them and that summer enrolled at the University of Colorado in Boulder. With its abundance of skiing and climbing opportunities in the mountains nearby, this finally appeared to be the “higher education” I was looking for.
Two years later (June 1966), I got a degree in English and moved to San Francisco, where I worked as a reservations clerk at the St. Francis Hotel by day (suit and tie) and lived in the Haight-Ashbury by night (tie-die t-shirt). Because my job required a short haircut, I was the classic “plain-clothes hippy,” which is to say I was a flagrant poser. Actually, there was also a practical reason for living in the Haight—I needed a cheap place to live so I could save as much money as possible for my planned trip around the world.
A little more than two years after that (October 1968), I landed back in Denver, where my parents were still living, with about $10 in my pocket. I had been around the world on the cheap, visiting 27 countries, working on a yacht from Tahiti to Samoa, working in a factory in New Zealand and a construction job in Australia, teaching English in Bangkok, riding third-class trains all over India, hitchhiking from Afghanistan to Turkey, and just generally “having as many experiences as possible,” which I told people in those days was my primary aim in life.
One of those experiences was becoming a Buddhist monk in Thailand for two months. I didn’t think my mom would approve of that choice, so I didn’t tell her. After all, I was halfway around the world. How could she find out? It turned out that neighbors of my parents were vacationing in Bermuda, where they picked up a New York Times and read an article about me and a few other Americans who were trying on Buddhist monkhood in Thailand. They brought the paper home with them and gave it to my mom. Lesson learned: You can’t fool your mother.
A summer and winter in the ski-resort town of Breckenridge, teaching in the ski school and writing for the local newspaper, another year-and-a-half traveling around Europe, supporting myself by writing articles for newspapers back home under the title “The Student Traveler” (a better title would have been “The Cheapskate Traveler” since I hadn’t been a student in years), finally led me to the conclusion that maybe it was time to think about a career. For a year I eked out a living as a freelance travel writer based in Colorado, then sold a few articles to SKIING Magazine, they hired me as a junior editor, and I moved to New York City where the offices were located. I loved the job but hated the city, a conflict that continued for years as I moved up the ladder at the magazine but always felt claustrophobic in the concrete canyons of Gotham. After a year or two I would have to abandon the mother ship and become a remote contributor for the magazine based in a more conducive mountain environment somewhere else. After a year or two of fresh air, ambition would grip me and I’d move back to New York for a while. My longest uninterrupted tenure in New York was from 1985 to 1990, when I held the editor-in-chief job and commuted into Manhattan from Connecticut, an hour and thirty-five minutes each way. I had a family by this time, but I mostly only saw them on the weekends, because I usually left for work at 7:00 am and got home at 9:00 pm or later. The only thing that kept me going was love of the work I was doing, some great travel benefits during the ski season, and the fact that I knew it would end someday. (Some of the Wall Street types I met on the commuter train had been making the same commute for over 20 years!)
The idea of actually getting married first dawned on me when I was about 30. It took another five years of trial and error (mostly error) before Barbara Shaw and I found each other. We got married, spent five years having some great adventures as a couple, and then, when I was 40, had our first child, followed by our second when I was 45. Parenting turned out to be its own great adventure, the details of which would make this narrative four times as long as it already is. Our daughter Claire is now 28, and John is 23. Barbara and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary this year. She has been a piano teacher for most of our married life. In fact, she has more students now than she ever had before.
My career with SKIING Magazine lasted almost 30 years. In the first half of the ‘90s, I worked out of a company branch office in Burlington, Vermont, and the Grout family lived deep in the Vermont woods. In 1997, the home office of the magazine moved from New York City to Boulder, Colorado, and I brought my family west, making the full circle back to the town where I had gotten my “higher education” in the ‘60s. In 2004, after a final four-year stint as a book publisher for the company, I took a six-month sabbatical to think about my life—and then resigned. I had decided to change careers. I took the required training and became a corporate/executive coach, starting my own business for the first time in my life. Much to my surprise, coaching executives turned out to be less about how to hit quarterly financial targets and more about helping people get their priorities straight and their lives in order. It’s been extremely fulfilling work.
I think I’ll be happy to keep on doing it for as long as I’m able.
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