prologue
26 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019THE HUNTINGTONOriginsSnow Job
YOU DON’T HAVE TO SKI ON CORNFLAKES BECAUSE
HOLLYWOOD’S QUEST FOR AUTHENTICITY ON-SCREEN
TRIGGERED AN AVALANCHE OF FROZEN INNOVATION
By April Whitejukeboxes were his. Meanwhile, “Moon-
light Serenade” played on, such a big part
of the Miller brand that a 1941 fi lm featur-
ing the orchestra and set in an Idaho ski re-
sort was called Sun Valley Serenade.
In 1942, nine months after the attack on
Pearl Harbor, Miller enlisted in the Army.
By January 1943, Captain Miller was direc-
tor of bands for the Army Air Forces Train-
ing Command, developing bands at bases
across the country as well as leading an elite
concert orchestra and radio production
unit. He also became an Air Forces spokes-
man, a war bond fund-raiser and a recruiter.
In England, his band would make 300
personal appearances and nearly 200 broad-
casts. “We receive such sincere applause”
for “Moonlight Serenade,” Miller said, “I am
convinced that what we are doing over here
is worth far more than all the money I could
have ever made as a civilian.”
Miller was only 40 years old that De-
cember day he clambered aboard the C-64
Norseman and set out for France. He never
arrived, of course, a loss that it is no exag-
geration to say shook the United States and
its armed forces. Mystery and rumor long
surrounded the aircraft’s disappearance.
One prominent theory was that RAF Lan-
caster bombers returning from an aborted
mission had accidentally hit his plane with
jettisoned bombs over the English Channel.
I found a more plausible answer while
researching my 2017 book, Glenn Miller
Declassifi ed. Newly released government
documents described the Eighth Air Force’s
own investigation of the disaster: The plane,
which had a history of carburetor icing
problems and hydraulic fl uid leaks, most
likely froze up and experienced engine fail-
ure at low altitude over the frigid sea. To this
day, explorers seek the mangled debris of
the C-64 among the thousands of pieces of
World War II aircraft that litter the English
Channel. But the wreckage of the plane that
carried Miller has never been found.
Seventy fi ve years later, the Glenn Miller
Orchestra—still muted and satin-smooth—
continues to open and close every appear-
ance with “Moonlight Serenade.”N THE FIRST MINUTES of the otherwise forgettable 1934 fi lm As the
Earth Turns, something remarkable happens: The falling snow melts.
For years Hollywood’s “snowmen” had faked winter wonderlands
with a dusting of gypsum, banks of bleached cornfl akes, fi elds of
pyrocel (similar to the substance used for dental impressions) and
fl urries of asbestos. Now Warner Bros. technical director Louis Geib
had conjured a cold and wet blizzard on a sunny backlot in Burbank.
His invention—the fi rst known snowmaking machine—consisted of three
rotating blades that shaved ice from a 400-pound block and a high-
powered fan that blew the resulting particles into the air. A low-tech precursor
to the water-crystallizing snow guns that will be used this winter at about 90
percent of the country’s ski resorts, Geib’s machine was ideal for close-ups
and, as the movie’s child actors learned, snowballs, though they disappeared
quickly under the hot lights.
Geib’s innovation was also a hit off -screen, as the burgeoning ski industry—
which sometimes trucked in snow for big events—began experimenting with
the same technology. In the winter of 1934, the Toronto Ski Club repurposed
an ice planer from a local skating rink when Mother Nature did not provide
cover for a scheduled competition. The man-made stuff , the club reported,
was “much better than snow.”
Now winter could appear anytime, anywhere. It snowed inside Boston Gar-
den for a 1935 winter sport exhibition and it snowed the next year in Madison
Square Garden. It even snowed in Los Angeles.
On a 63-degree day in March 1938, the studio snowmen ground 350 tons of
ice to create four- and fi ve-foot drifts on a towering ski jump in the middle of
the Memorial Coliseum. Twenty-thousand people gathered for the competi-
tion, as skiers hurled themselves more than a hundred feet into the air.
Meanwhile, on the Warner Bros. lot nearby, Geib had already moved on to
a new big-screen weather dilemma: how to replicate hail.I
TO HEAR A RECORDING of Miller’s April 4,
1939, rendition of “Moonlight Serenade,” go
to Smithsonianmag.com/moonlight