Profile: Hank Seeberg

By Dawne Belloise

Hank Seeberg says he’s not doing too bad for an old guy as he was getting ready to head down to Gunnison to join in with the Silver Slippers, which he says is an “old fogey’s” fitness program. At 93 years young, this nonagenarian claims he may be the oldest of the elders still living in Crested Butte. He’s still quite the firecracker.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, he tells, “The only thing I miss about it is being able to ride my bicycle every day because I’m a wuss and it’s kind of cold and slippery in the winter here.” He didn’t seem to mind the cold and slippery slopes of the mountain when he worked as a ski instructor for 20 years though.

Hank started working for Charlie Farnan as a ski instructor at the age of 60. “It was the lowest paying, most rewarding job I’ve ever had in my entire life. Skiing has been the joy of my life and being able to share it with other people and teach it was a sheer delight.” Hank states that ski instructors have the highest injury rate in the industry and laughs that he essentially was let go after 20 years because, “the workers comp people won’t cover anyone my age.” A balance issue has also forced him to stop skiing altogether, otherwise, he’d probably still be on the slopes. 

Hank lived in L.A. almost his entire life, except for the time he was in the army, stationed at Ordinance Automotive School in Hapeville, Georgia, for two years from January 1953 through November 1954. “I never got shot at, never had to go overseas or anything like that.” He jokes that while he was in the South, when asking a girl for a date, “She’d ask if I was a damned Yankee and I’d say no, I’m from southern California, but they figured I was a collaborationist.” 

Los Angeles was very different when Hank was growing up there. He remembers it was safe, and his family lived in an upper middle-class community. As a child, Hank rode his bike a lot to his parochial school where disciplinary rulers and nuns still exist in symbiosis. 

In 1941, when Hank was only nine years old, his father passed away. Within a year of his father’s departure, he and his brother joined the Robert Mitchell Boys Choir. “A catholic school donated a building and two nuns to take care of us and teach us, and that was my intro to music. We sang every Sunday at a large church in L.A.” The choir was later hired to perform in the Bing Crosby film, Going My Way, which the young Hank participated in.

His mother had plans and hopes for Hank on the silver screen so going into ninth grade, she enrolled him at a professional school, “Because my mom thought I could be the next star like Shirley Temple. It was a four-hour-a-day school and if you were called to be in a movie or something like that, it wasn’t a big deal to miss school.” It was at that school that Hank says his 14-year-old self fell desperately in love. “There was this very pretty girl who was going to dance school, and she was friendly to everyone, but I was really shy. Her name was Mitzi Gerber.” That sweet girl eventually took the stage name of Mitzi Gaynor. Somewhere around his fourth year at ski school, in his 60s, Hank finally got up the nerve to write Mitzi and confess his love. He received a personal phone call from her to thank him for his letter.

Later Hank switched to a sister school, The Hollywood Professional School. As he really didn’t want to pursue performance arts, he relays that, “I fought my mother every step of the way as far as acting,” because what he really wanted to do was fly a P51, a WW2 fighter aircraft. At a young age, Hank says, “You want to be a hero, and you admire anyone who was one of those brave people up there flying.” He graduated from high school in 1949 and enrolled at UCLA. “Because I couldn’t think of anything else, I took geography – and I hated it. I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself which isn’t very productive. It wasn’t my life; it was what my mother wanted. I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted go.” 

He went to work as a messenger at Paramount Studios, mostly running from one building to another. “You’d take messages, scripts and notes then run to the offices to deliver them. Every time Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were making a movie, I got to enjoy it. I hung out and listened to them. They’d let me stay as long as I kept my mouth shut,” he laughs, “and that’s a struggle for me.” He wound up doing that for a couple of years. 

Hank and his brother had been in ROTC, and after the armistice was signed in Korea they both went down to the draft board in 1954. “We asked, please take us, because that was one way we could get out of the house. A lot of my friends enlisted to get their military service over with. You sign up for three years, but if you could prove you were from a farm family or starting college, you could get out in 21 months.” After he served, Hank returned to UCLA and continued with his geography studies.

After UCLA, Hank was employed at Hughes Aircraft Company, where he started as a timekeeper, a position that entailed checking all the punched timecards to ensure that people clocked in and out when they were supposed to. Forty years later, he had moved up the ladder to become a business manager on a satellite program. “There are some ridiculous requirements involved in government contracting,” he says, and his department kept track of money and schedules. He left the job because, “They said I was too old.” That was 1991 and that “old” 60-year-old went on to Crested Butte to ski while Hughes went from the largest industrial employer in the state of California with tens of thousands of employees to about 5,000. 

“As I look back, my life really started when I came to Crested Butte,” he says fondly. He had discovered CB when a couple people he worked with became ski enthusiasts. He’d make two yearly pilgrimages with them to Aspen, Snowbird and Alta. Once they realized Aspen had become too ritzy for them and they couldn’t afford it anymore, they started looking for another place to ski. “We found CB and I fell in love with it.” 

Hank was living in El Segundo, one of the California beach communities just south of L.A., and about 600 yards south of the runway at LAX. His first ski trip to CB was in the 1990s. “We came out in November because at the time CBMR did a free ski promotion.” It only took his second trip to CB for Hank to realize it’s where he wanted to be. “I’ve always wanted to live in the mountains, so I looked around and found the house I now live in.” He recalls that the duplex was an absolute mess and needed a lot of work. He sold his townhouse in California, packed up and moved here in August of 1992.

Hank began working on his new home. “It was in terrible repair and I learned how much I didn’t know about construction,” he muses. He signed up for the ski clinics that were a prerequisite for hiring, paid his $100 and was one of the 11 hired that year to teach. “Everyone was supportive, I was the oldest one they hired at 60, but the whole thing was so positive.” He was also the only instructor who used a two-way radio to teach. “You’re on the hill and you want to tell someone how to move. I could talk to them and tell them, in real time, how to ski.” 

During the summers he was still working on his house and riding his road bicycle, which he began riding to Gunnison. “I had done quite a bit of organized rides in California. My first big trip from CB was to visit my son in Bend, Oregon.” United Airlines offered a one-way deal for seniors, so he shipped his bike via plane and rode back to Crested Butte from Bend. It took him a week-and-a-half. “I did a lot of organized rides, some distance rides and some themed rides like Mohave by Moonlight, full moon rides that were an incredible experience. There were cuisine rides, wildflower rides along the California coast.” In Colorado, Hank has ridden over mountain passes, and Denver to Aspen.

Hank says that “CB feels like home seven times over,” and Greta the St. Bernard laying by his side agrees. He’s working to get his balance back. “I miss skiing a lot and I miss riding my bike,” and he claims he’s slowed down a bunch in the past year. “I have clients come back to visit me, quite a few return in the winter. I used to ski with them until I lost my balance, and they take me to dinner. I like being taken to dinner,” he smiles. 

Crested Butte is definitely Hank’s home and he light-heartedly jokes, “I’ve paid the town for my interment at the cemetery, one price for summer and one for winter so if I die in the summer, my kids should get a refund.” Hank, in his spunkiness, doesn’t seem to be planning on leaving this world anytime soon though.