I never crossed paths with him, although for some reason I once found myself inside Robert Redford’s living room, snapping photos of what looks to be a movie script consultation. I’m guessing the subjects are players in the entertainment industry; however, I don’t recall their names because my attention was focused on a leather recliner in the background, where I presume Robert Redford sometimes sat. What a bummer, to be so near and yet so far!
It was my mother who dragged me to the theater to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, she for the second time. And although she covered my eyes during the scene where Redford demands that Katherine Ross disrobe, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It was one of the very few times in our lives that Mom and I were on the same page.
Not only were the two outlaws charming, but the scenery was familiar. Butch Cassidy’s gang once robbed a mine payroll in Castle Gate before fleeing south through Buckhorn Draw into a red rock hideaway known as Robbers Roost. Turns out that I, too, have ventured down that same draw and gotten myself lost in Canyonlands.
Following his breakout role in that film, Redford married a Mormon girl and purchased a small Utah ski resort, which he renamed Sundance. I well remember what was previously called Timp Haven, and also Park City, which in the Sixties was referred to by the villagers of Heber Valley simply as “Park.” From my humble one-room shack in Midway, I’d ride my motorbike up and over Cloud Rim and down the mountainside into Park, where I’d enjoy a banana split at Pop Jenks’ ice cream parlor. Had anyone told me then that a fading mining camp would one day become a destination for Hollywood glitterati, I’d have done a banana split take.
In other words, the film star and filmmaker Robert Redford changed a lot of things in Utah, even when he wasn’t living here. It’s too bad he couldn’t make a dent in the arch-conservative political mindset, but at least he tried. So I thank him for that, and also for bringing my mother and me together for one bright shining moment.