When it Was Aspen
Photography by David Hiser
Ned Vare running for councilman.
I lived in that luxe enclave at the head of the Roaring Fork Valley on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies when it was Aspen. There and then, Aspen was what was left of a prosperous silver mining town high in the Rockies more than half a century after it lost its reason for being. By the time I got there in 1953, it was less a place than an idea for a place—spare, faded, worn, but pristine, as if it were scrubbed hard and swept clean every day.
In 1879, silver in some quantity was found in the lower reaches of the mountains at the head of the valley. A town took shape. Not a makeshift mining camp, but a substantial sort of town with large Victorian houses for the bosses and tidy cottages for the miners, resolute brick commercial buildings, an opera house, elegant hotels and 12,000 residents.
Fourteen years later, with the stroke of a pen in Washington, silver was demonetized, and Aspen was rendered obsolete. The withering town and the remaining townspeople fell off the map. Like some lost tribe, they became their circumstances—plain, hard, and hopeless.
The town’s resurrection was as inevitable as weather, but the townspeople didn’t know that. Ajax mountain, rising more than 3,000 feet from the center of town, was still in its wild state, and a growing number of ardent skiers believed it was potentially the best ski mountain in America, owing to the variety, rigor and length of its slopes.
In those days, skiing was an elite sport that verged on a cult. But following America’s entrance into World War II, the Army recruited some of the nation’s best skiers for its 10th Mountain Division, which was based at Camp Hale near Leadville, just over the Continental Divide from Aspen.
When they weren’t training, the serious skiers, including a number of former Olympic ski team members, explored Ajax’s terrain and plotted its transformation into the ultimate ski mountain. Chief among them was Friedl Pfeifer, an Austrian who had emigrated to America when Hitler came to power.
World War II was barely over when America’s leaders began warning of new and more sinister perils. Our former ally, the Soviet Union, had become our enemy, and, in the view of the leaders, communism was a greater menace than fascism had ever been.
The irony was as ugly as it was inescapable: America, the world’s richest and most powerful nation, as well as its leading democracy, was savaging its Constitution and harassing its citizens to save them from the “Red Menace.”
Loyalty oaths and black lists were the order of the day. The House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy were conducting their infamous witch-hunts. It was a mongrel time, notable for the simultaneous emergence of the silent generation and the organization man.
And a truly odd lot of people began gathering in Aspen. Many of them were drawn to it because it was not only remote and beautiful, it was as far as they could get from America without actually leaving the country. Aspen had never conformed, and they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and felt like aliens in their own land.
It wasn’t a political movement. It wasn’t even a movement. If it was anything, it was unorganized, unterrified wanderers, some of whom were skiers, looking for home.
By then, the grooming of Ajax was underway. Some people had mixed feelings about ranking business over pleasure and inviting America back into their high-mountain hideout. Friedl Pfeifer, who had the demeanor of a Prussian prince, a fist of a face and patent leather hair, had no such misgivings. He returned to Aspen after the war with the express intention of putting it back on the map and in the money.
The crucial call was made by neither Pfeifer nor residents, but by Elizabeth Paepcke. She had happened on Aspen on a drive through the mountains nearly 10 years earlier and fallen in love with it.
The wife of Walter Paepcke. who headed the Container Corporation of America, “Pussy” Paepcke was, in early middle age, beautiful, smart and determined to make a major but very refined splash. All she needed was the right setting. Aspen was perfect—beautiful, off the map, incomplete and clearly in need of a fairy godmother.
The Paepckes and Pfeifer founded the Aspen Skiing Corporation in 1946 as part of their effort to reconstitute the Aspen economy. The largest investor was Mrs. Paepcke’s brother, Paul Nitze, a prince of Wall Street and one of the autocratic cold warriors who advised President Truman.
Longtime Chicago arts patrons, the Paepckes chose a truly audacious event for their debut on the national arts stage in the summer of 1949—a bicentennial tribute to the 18th century German master Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Organized by the University of Chicago, it drew 2,000 people from all over the world to an Eero Saarinen tent in a meadow in a small American town no one had ever heard of.
It was the prelude to the Paepckes’ arts and cultural programs—the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Aspen Music Festival and School and the International Design Conference in Aspen. The centerpiece of the Paepckes’ programs, the Institute, imported celebrity scholars and experts in various fields to force-feed arts, culture, social issues and ideas to businessmen in two-week seminars.
In 1950, the Federation Internationale de Ski (FIS) held its world alpine championships on Ajax, sanctifying the ascension of Aspen as a global ski capital.
The relationship between the Paepckes and the residents was, at best, cool. They had inevitably assumed some of the airs of Lord and Lady Bountiful and were hurt and angry when no one accepted their offer of free exterior house paint several years earlier.
Though he laughed at the time, Paepcke never forgot nor forgave an impromptu dinner party toast—“To Walter P. Possible, who has made everything in Aspen Paepcke.” Soon after that, the Institute began to withdraw from the town, putting its priorities and interests at increasing odds with the town’s.
The Aspen Skiing Corporation and the renegade old town were an awkward fit, too. From the start, the Ski Corp saw itself as the town boss and savior, but most residents had no interest in bosses or saviors.
A remarkable number of Aspen residents—longtime and recent, young and middle-aged, rich, middle class and penniless, skiers and non-skiers—had no interest in business. But, ironically, they, not the Ski Corp or the Paepckes, inadvertently sparked Aspen’s growing popularity.
There were other first-rate ski areas and other first-rate summer festivals. It was the Aspen residents’ rogue spirit, their outlaw attitude, their irreverent humor and braininess that animated Aspen and intrigued tourists. There were no rules, no models, no precedents. There was no one way to live. Everybody improvised.
I first heard about Aspen during the Goethe celebration and put it on my list of places to go. Some day. But the more I heard, the more interested I became. I decided to spend a summer there in 1953.
In the fall, I returned to New York, but, after Aspen, my life there felt like a chic cliché, and two months later, I was back in Aspen. Improvising. I was a journalist, but the only newspaper, The Aspen Times, was owned by a printer and confined its coverage to meeting announcements and social notes. I vamped. When I flopped as a photographer’s apprentice, I became a salesclerk.
But my improvisations paled compared to the truly artful dodgers: the man who scavenged lumber and other materials from abandoned structures, including outhouses, and built fanciful, but cheap, digs for ski bums; the chemistry professor who became a bass player/filmmaker/horseman; the Chicago man who became the perfect extra man at dinner parties; and the starchy Vassar girl who founded and ran the town’s first fleet of taxis.
| But the town’s improvisation king was Freddie Fisher, whose face was a rebuke of almost everything. By the time he got to Aspen, he had been poor, rich and famous, all his dreams had turned into nightmares, and he had become a pure anarchist. One day in the Epicure, he thanked me for the fine cheese. I had no idea what he was talking about. He said he’d found it in my pile at the town dump. I said I didn’t have a pile at the dump. By then, he had everyone’s attention. He said that every resident had a pile, and he knew them all. Several people gasped. Fisher grinned, tipped an imaginary hat and left. It was a trademark Fisher performance. The next time I went to the dump, people were flinging their trash every which way in an effort to foil Fisher. |
The most visible ski bums were the members of the Ski Patrol. They were arguably the most talented skiers on Ajax, and the most impudent, mocking the ski instructors, who outranked them, as gigolos on skis.
Ski bums who didn’t work on the mountain did all the menial jobs in town. One of the most popular Aspen myths was that they all had advanced degrees. Some of them actually did.
In those days, most residents made patchwork lives, dancing back and forth across the fading line that divided business from pleasure. Skiing was pure pleasure, a sport, an art, an adventure—everything but a business. But the Ski Corp and its allies in the enlarging and increasingly aggressive business community seemed bent on selling Aspen.
Soon after my short run as a clerk, Bob Craig invited me to collaborate on a daily mimeographed newspaper, the Aspen Flyer. It was a bizarre partnership. Having survived the disastrous 1953 K2 mountain-climbing expedition, he was ready for a grownup job and was actively campaigning to be named executive director of the Institute. I wanted nothing so much as to cover Aspen and expose everyone who was exploiting my town—including the Institute.
In that spirit, I made wicked fun of the people gathering for the Design Conference in “Well-Designed Designers?” the lead article in the first issue of the Flyer. I got a few grins and winks from locals that day. Craig got an icy scolding from from the wife of Herbert Bayer, the Paepckes’ chief designer.
By the end of the summer, the Flyer was known as either “the voice of Aspen” or “that damn troublemaker.” Craig, who had quietly withdrawn from the Flyer, got the Institute job.
Paepcke and I had only one conversation. He said, “I have more friends than you do.”
I said, “I wonder why.”
A veteran skier and ad salesman from Denver, Bil Dunaway, bought The Aspen Times in 1956. We merged our papers. He was the publisher and I was the editor, and later columnist, of the “new” Aspen Times. There was plenty to write about.
As Aspen became more successful, in the conventional sense, it became more conventional. Meaning timid, even servile.
The city council created a “smile committee” that mandated happy faces on all the people who served tourists. About the same time, it decreed that so-called hippies be run out of town, as they bothered the tourists. America was closing in.
My defense of the alleged hippies garnered me a pair of anonymous death threats. The game had got mean, and cowardly, in a town that had never been either.
Walter Paepcke died in 1960. His chosen successor, Robert O. Anderson, an oilman, had more money than Paepcke, relished the limelight and used the Institute to promote his various interests.
The Ski Corp warned against overdevelopment while developing Buttermilk Mountain west of Aspen, just as Whipple Van Ness Jones began building Aspen Highlands. The Ski Corp also participated in the creation of a new self-contained ski area, Snowmass-at-Aspen, some miles down the valley. The marketeers were no longer promoting skiing. They were selling “The Aspen Experience.”
The long-lost town that had been found again and cherished by a relative handful of people who had little or no interest in the American obsession with getting ahead was not simply attracting crowds, it was suddenly chic, which was as perverse as it was ironic. Real estate prices rose as more and more people wanted a piece of Aspen. And a sad, slow exodus began, as ski bums and disillusioned residents moved down the valley or on to Taos or Sedona.
City Hall, the Ski Corp, Anderson and the business community called it progress. Many residents disagreed. They believed that if the town’s leaders succeeded in moving Aspen into the lethal American mainstream, the odd, fragile town that was made as much of free spirits as of wood, glass and mortar would not survive.
By the late 1960s, the small unbusiness town was becoming a big business, and a kind of chaos ensued. Dingbat programs and harsh measures proliferated. When it became clear that the city council was creating problems rather than solving them, anti-politicians entered the arena.
Ned Vare looked like an Elizabethan poet but was, in fact, a Renaissance man. Captain of the Yale golf team, with a degree from the Yale School of Architecture, he toured the pro golf circuit for a while, then taught at alternative schools in Florida and Taos.
Once in Aspen, he was, by turns, a ski instructor, an artist, architectural designer, designer and maker of extraordinary furniture and a rancher. We were close friends, and I was constantly astonished by the heft, loft and reach of his talent. He also had an appropriately wry sense of humor.
As an athlete/artist/designer/builder/teacher/rancher, he had a unique understanding of Aspen, its workings and its residents, and, as it turned out, he was also an authentic revolutionary.
His campaign papers were brilliant—radical, original and workable, and his proposals, if enacted, would restore Aspen’s balance and character.
Having won a seat on the Aspen City Council in 1969, Vare ran for a seat on the three-man Board of County Commissioners in 1970 in the belief that by serving on both he could resolve urban-rural conflicts and coordinate efforts to preserve the natural integrity of the town, the wilderness areas and the ranches and farms.
Well in advance of the environmental movement, Vare proposed a regional land-use plan based on an environmental inventory, an ecological action plan, a public transit study, “fair cost” housing, tax relief for ranchers and farmers and a number of other equally innovative measures.
Vare’s double-barreled attack on the political status quo triggered cheers from many residents and howls of outrage from business interests.
The commotion compounded when Hunter Thompson, whose second book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” had caused a mighty ruckus in the literary world, announced that he would run for county sheriff.
With an “outlaw journalist” running for sheriff and a city councilman who had declared politicians “obsolete” running for Pitkin County commissioner, too, the surreal Aspen revolution was well and truly underway.
Thompson and I were friends, too, and I was actively, deeply involved in the Freak Power campaign, which was smart, substantive and original and attracted scores of dedicated volunteers, ranging from esteemed novelist James Salter to high school students.
Vare was running against virtual twins—an architect and a doctor—both beefy, genial, red-haired men who favored the status quo. Thompson was competing with the incumbent sheriff and one of his deputies. They talked about law and order. Thompson talked about justice and new ways of dealing with old problems.
As Freak Power gained ground, momentum and support, the defenders of the status quo, who ranged from leading citizens to the box “boys” at a local market, literally freaked out and hosed Vare and Thompson with lies and slander, tried to sabotage their campaigns with dirty tricks and spread the word that they’d be killed if they won.
It was the ugliest, dirtiest campaign I’d ever seen—surpassed only by Nixon in 1972. Aspen, that glorious American misfit, disappeared in the vile, demented storm. Vare and Thompson lost their races—but not by much.
Two years later, the standard liberals took charge of City Hall and the county courthouse. Vare and Thompson had left the arena. Vare had moved to his ranch 60 miles away, and Thompson was on the road, covering the ’72 presidential campaign.
What was left was a world-class ski resort, a culture capital, a chic spa, a real estate bonanza—but it wasn’t Aspen.
When it was Aspen, it was a small circle of light burning bright in a dark, twisted time in America. But, as it turned out, the light was not in the place, but in the people—those glorious, impudent, brilliant misfits.
