Frank Sacherer -- 1940 - 1978

Discussion Topic

Return to Forum List

This thread has been locked

Messages 121 - 140 of total 592 in this topic

<< First | < Previous | Show All | Next > | Last >>

Largo

Sport climber

Venice, Ca

Jan 14, 2009 - 09:09pm PT

It's intriguing to read about the guy we never met (back in the 70s) but whose legacy we chased from the Dihardral to flanks of Middle C.

True or made up, the famous Sacherer quote, "Don't grab that pin you chickensh#t," used to ring through my mind when I wanted to do just that. Now that's influence.

And looking over that Valley ledger, Frank had quite a year in '64, one for the ages.

JL

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 15, 2009 - 09:53am PT

This photo was taken in Marble, Colorado in 1967 and shows what an 80 ft.leader fall on a swami belt does to your ribs.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 15, 2009 - 09:57am PT

Domestic bliss on our first Christmas in 1965. Taken at Frank's parent's place in San Francisco.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 15, 2009 - 10:00am PT

Loveland Pass on top of the Continental Divide, Colorado 1968. The kitten was being transported from Glenwood to Boulder for my sister and husband, Judi and John Morton.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 15, 2009 - 11:43am PT

This photo was taken on the Mer de Glace Glacier in Chamonix- 1971. The ladder walker is a man named Ray Sherwood who also worked at Cern.

Roger Breedlove

climber

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Jan 15, 2009 - 01:27pm PT

Your last picture of you and Frank and the ladder walker roped together is a classic. What a great scene.

It sort of looks like it might be a re-enactment of the first ascent. Is the ladder walker anyone any of us would know?

And, if I may ask, what is your life now?

klk

Trad climber

cali

Jan 15, 2009 - 01:51pm PT

Jan--

Thanks so much for the comments and the photos. That shot with the kitten is simply amazing.

Too often, climbers remain entirely one-dimensional. We hear about this or that climb, this or that move, and see one hero shot after another of someone on the rock, but seldom get much sense of the social context.

Most climbers think of climbing as the only worthwhile public aspect of their lives, in some cases because climbing takes them out of whatever hardship or stress they face elsewhere.

Your remarks about the stress of moving out of the Catholic working-class of San Francisco and into the still very waspy culture of 1960s Berkeley and beyond are especially compelling.

Frank was pressing to excel in two very different but equally intense activities, and he was in the cultural capitol for each of them: Yosemite and Berkeley in the '60s. Toss in the fact that he was living at the very end of the era in which it remained possible for amateur climbers to dramatically impact the sport--

Clint Cummins

Trad climber

SF Bay area, CA

Jan 15, 2009 - 04:25pm PT

Cute photos! Thanks for sharing.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 16, 2009 - 05:55am PT

Roger-

There are many such ladders over the crevasses on the major routes across the ice in Chamonix, and it is not uncommon to see even elderly people crossing them on their way to some of the alpine huts. The ladder walker was a guy from new Zealand named Ray (Sherwood?) who also worked at Cern.

My own life after I left Geneva in early 1972, consisted of finishing my B.A. and M.A. at San Francisco State. I then taught the summer of 1973 for Colorado Outward Bound and traveled alone afterwards through S.E. Asia and India. After that I spent a year with the Sherpas of the Rolwaling Valley, just west of Mt. Everest - 8 days' walk from the nearest road, doctor, post office, and electricity. I wrote my Ph.D. in Anthropology at the Sorbonne and then rushed back to Nepal for a 6 month project where I walked 500 miles across the Himalayas west to east, surveying all the major Sherpa villages from just north of Kathmandu almost to the Sikkimese border. After that I got a job with the Swiss government on a foreign aid project with a Hindu population, and it was at the end of that contract that Frank was killed. By that time I was exhausted at every level, and came to the subtropical island of Okinawa where I've been ever since. I teach Anthropology and Asian Studies to a mixture of Americans and Japanese through the University of Maryland.

My climbing since I went to Nepal has been big snow mountains (20,200 ft) and crossing mountain passes with my Sherpa friends who sleep out in the open and cook on wood fires up to 18,000 feet. I haven't rock climbed in 35 years though that may change this May when I go to visit Layton Kor in Arizona. He's had a hard time this winter health-wise, but if he's up to it, we're going to do some easy climbs together again for old time's sake. After that I might come to the Valley for a week or so.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 16, 2009 - 06:00am PT

KLK-

I was very struck by your comment "Your remarks about the stress of moving out of the Catholic working-class of San Francisco and into the still very waspy culture of 1960s Berkeley and beyond are especially compelling. Frank was pressing to excel in two very different but equally intense activities, and he was in the cultural capitol for each of them: Yosemite and Berkeley in the '60s".

I suddenly had the revelation (hindsight is perfect) that the source of our trouble was that he perceived me always as one more source of stress because I never fit into his ideal wife mode of someone with no ambitions of her own, who would devote 100% of her time to him (his temper and personality quirks were never the real problem from my point of view). Before your comment I never could understand why he saw me as a threat when he was so much smarter than me and so accomplished. I can see now that in admiring his success, I failed to understand his own level of stress. A sobering insight though I'm afraid it would not have changed anything.

Meanwhile Ed has told me about a book that I've ordered entitled "Beamtimes and Lifetimes". It is written by an anthropologist also married to a physicist, and is a kind of ethnography of the culture of particle physicists.

Roger Breedlove

climber

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Jan 16, 2009 - 09:59am PT

Thanks for the personal introduction, Jan.

It is a small world, I think. When I decided that I wanted to return college--I quit to climb full time in 1969--I ended up getting my degree in music from SFSU in the late 70s.

There was a general shift in what young folks thought about the respective roles of men as husbands and women as wives that started in the 60s. I know that several 60s climbers that I was close to had very conflicted views about the role that they expected their wives to play in their marriages: they viewed themselves as cool and modern, but they were mostly grounded in a "Leave it to Beaver" view of domestic bliss (maybe with a little pot and weekend climbing thrown in) but could see that something was changing. Those of us who were in our 20s in the 1970s had a view that was based on some vague idea of a partnership, but still usually acted the same way our parents did (maybe with a little pot and weekend climbing thrown in).

As best I can tell—my kids are in their 20s with professional careers--it is still a struggle for younger folks to find a workable balance.

Although I don't make it back to the Valley much--so far I am up to a rate of once a century--I think that you would find ST campers who would be happy to meet you in the Valley for some climbing.

BTW, how did you find SuperTopo?

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 16, 2009 - 10:23am PT

Roger-

You are quite right about the difficulties the '60's generation faced over changing gender roles. I think both men and women suffered greatly. Now with my own students in their 20's, I sense the problem is more of finding enough time and energy to "do it all", but that the major issues have been solved. Then again, maybe this is just a woman's perspective since it was my generation that was so driven to prove what women could do.

Well do I remember, Frank and Chuck Pratt shaking their heads in Camp 4 when a woman climbed the first 5.9 crack and both of them solemnly predicting that 5.9 might happen once in a while, but no woman would ever climb a 5.10 crack. Then Frank went into a funk for several days when we got word in Europe that Bev Johnson had climbed the Crack of Doom!

Meanwhile, I found supertopo during a web search on Layton, trying to find out what he had been doing since I last saw him. I wanted to read a bit about him before I started writing my piece for the bio Cam Burns is doing. While I was at it, I decided to type in Frank's name and see what I could bring up.

hobo_dan

Social climber

Minnesota

Jan 16, 2009 - 11:31am PT

I have to say that all of you old fart '60's climbers are pretty damn good writers
Jan: thanks so much for sharing your stories-I admire your ability to express the emotion
Thanks again you guys. It was 30 below last night and that qualifies as PFC- too cold to ski if your a piton grabbing chickenshit like me and so I am really enjoy this read
murf

Roger Breedlove

climber

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Jan 16, 2009 - 12:55pm PT

So Jan, have you ever heard Bev's great oneliner to Ken Wilson, the editor of Mountain Magazine, on 5.10 climber(s)?

In an otherwise serious discussion on Valley climbing advancements, Ken brought up the subject of women climbing hard. I am guessing it was in 1972 or so, when Ken had travelled to the Valley for a first hand looksee.

Bev, in a serious tone, told Ken, "It is not about how many 5.10 climbs you have done; it is about how many 5.10 climbers you have made.

Then she smiled, sweetly, and turned her head just a bit.

Clint Cummins

Trad climber

SF Bay area, CA

Jan 16, 2009 - 02:06pm PT

Jan,

> both of them solemnly predicting that 5.9 might happen once in a while, but no woman would ever climb a 5.10 crack. Then Frank went into a funk for several days when we got word in Europe that Bev Johnson had climbed the Crack of Doom!

Haha, too funny! Us guys have such fragile egos sometimes! :-)

Later, Bridwell considered Bev Johnson his "5.11 detector" - if she could climb it, it was 5.10, if not, it was 5.11. Of course, better climbing shoes (EBs) helped in the advancements of climbing grades. But the Kronhofers that Frank used were good enough for doing hard 5.10s and sometimes a bit more.

Jan

Mountain climber

Okinawa, Japan

Jan 17, 2009 - 09:33am PT

Great stories of Bev and great cartoon!

Sheridan drew a cartoon of Frank and I once. He was climbing up an overhanging cliff with his rope hanging straight down to the ground. I am belaying him though this is useless since he hasn't clipped in to anything. I am looking up and saying, "Frank, Frank, don't you think you should put some protection in"?

Peter Haan

Trad climber

San Francisco, CA

Jan 17, 2009 - 10:47am PT

If people want to understand our early modern era in American rockclimbing more cogently, giving this thread a good read helps. I don’t think the central issue here comes up quite like this very often.

It becomes clear here that many of its principal figures had established or perhaps merely continued a proto-elite male society, an idealism, whose underpinnings included wacky fragile theories of womanhood, necessary for the exaltation of male virtue, however primitive. As it turns out we could not have been more incorrect---pretty much completely so---in the view that hardest climbing (and many other activities of course) somehow intrinsically would not be possible for the female and thus by extension, the men that could do it were practically supernatural in their masculinity even though most had rather thin sex lives and actually weren’t so masculine despite appearances. That is what it was like back 45-60 years ago. Hard to believe we were so lame then, isn’t it.

Perhaps the best aspect of very modern climbing is that we have discarded all notions that somehow our subculture is really all about a nearly sacred manhood instead of humanhood and humanhood for all, including not just men and women, but also children, oldsters and handicapped individuals.

The ferocious talent sometimes found in any of these sectors shows how laughably self-aggrandizing the original theories of climbing really were. I remember RR telling me that he believed when he had sex with “a girl” he was doing her a favor! And worse, our chauvinism that was nearly universal in those days in climbing also contained in it the self-limiting notions that had to be shucked for climbing to actually advance, frankly. And I think the whole setup was pretty painful for everyone even though this was not clear at the time.

Quite often to climb like a woman or to be a small person or child with an extremely high strength/weight ratio and tiny fingers, can be key to a section of rock or an illusive problem. This instead of being large rigid and simplistically ferocious.

Doug Robinson

Trad climber

Santa Cruz

Jan 17, 2009 - 12:00pm PT

See what you get for simply being real, Jan?

Thank you very much. Your thoroughly modern perspective on the medieval hangovers that were blurring all our perceptions back then amounts to piercing insight.

We set out here in awe of Frank the climber. Even at the time I was curious about the brooding part of him behind that. Drugs didn't crack his self control (wonderful story -- ooh, the lights!), but oddly climbing itself seemed to get closer, for him, to breaking that open. Really admire that relaxation in the vertical to the point of nearly falling off. Got to, cuz I'm so different -- careful up there, and maybe a little too loose at times on the ground.

It showed in the company I kept, maybe, hanging out a lot with Pratt and knowing Frank, and you, more at a distance. I was younger anyway, second string, runty and sarcastic.

We have changed a great deal in the 40+ years since. To me those changes you've been outlining and that Peter highlights are the best stuff of our generation, just the most exciting. I mean, advances like chips and binary and this 'net that brings us together here all these years later and with you halfway around the world -- pretty impressive. And the deepening understanding Frank contributed to, of the quantum nature underlying our world, including fundamental uncertainties -- even more awe inspiring.

But... For my money the truly big deal of late is the insight into our basic human natures, both individually and collectively, and the changes we've been able to forge in this quaint thing we call a civilization -- this is the most gripping and the most inspiring of all. "May you live in interesting times..."

TM Herbert, the man of a thousand faces and who knows how many personalities, the man who is always joking, said one of the most serious things ever: "I'll never be a chauvinist again." He was speaking from his own shattered marriage, and he had just been running himself down for every domestic failing from not stepping up to the dishes to always taking off to go climbing. He was so not kidding. Sad face on, actually speaking from the wreckage.

I hesitated to even tell that story. TM, if you're listening, I hope you can see I'm honoring your humanity.