“We don’t want to make Aspen a mass skiing center, but rather have it fairly selective and just large enough to make it entirely profitable, but not overrun, especially on weekends.”
— Walter Paepcke, 1950
Aspen in the late 1940s was fertile ground for a renaissance based on a curious mixture of skiing and high-minded culture. The reborn city on the hill rose up from the ruins of a prior culture, and those ruins provided the fecund compost for a revived culture to take root and grow. Aspen was to completely shift from an industrial economy and, in the prophetic words of Walter Paepcke, nurture the pursuit of the “good life through the sharing of ideas that are more important to the preservation of our society and our liberties than the ceaseless striving for material gain.”
Silver mining was gone. The Quiet Years were at an end. Aspen found itself at a new crossroads. The Aspen community eyed, to borrow words from Robert Frost, a road not taken — one that “was grassy and wanted wear,” a road that would lead into the distant glimmer of an unknown and unplanned future. The unlikely guide was a brainiac from Chicago who plotted a very unusual course.
In search of community
A thorough examination of the evolution of the Aspen community requires the division of five historic epochs: the Utes, silver mining, the Quiet Years, culture and skiing, and the age of affluence.
As a subset of the “In search of community” series from Aspen Journalism and Paul Andersen, we examine this progression in a four-part story “Aspen’s embattled community.”
This is the third part, looking at the post-war rise of skiing and culture. Read other stories in the series here.
Peggy Clifford, in her 1970 book, “Aspen: Dreams and Dilemmas,” described Walter Paepcke this way: “A medium-sized, sharp-featured man with calm, blue eyes, who always looked a little awkward when he smiled. Paepcke moved quietly about Aspen — usually dressed in tweed coat, sports shirt and flannel trousers — tending to his properties, his projects, his visions. There was something outsized about both the man and his dream, but the character of the dream was always easier to analyze than the character of the man. He made decisions quickly, he spoke with assurance, and he always kept a little distance between himself and most of the townspeople.”
In a speech to Aspen Institute trustees in 2009, James Sloane Allen said, “Aspen was a quiet, long-faded but well-preserved silver-mining boom town when Walter Paepcke set his sights on it at the end of World War II. He sensed an economic and social opportunity for the post-war years, but he didn’t want to tip his hand lest landowners catch on and prices start to rise, so he kept his intentions secret and instructed his secretary in Chicago to write to the local Aspen newspaper to inquire, in her name, where to turn ‘for some friends who are somewhat interested in possibly buying an old, very cheap, but well-located vacant house, if there is such a thing in Aspen.’”
Paepcke’s Aspen investments began in 1945 during his first day in Aspen, said Allen. “He had fixed his eye on dozens of houses and hundreds of lots, and he had agreed to buy the entire downtown Collins Block for $7,500. Paepcke had instructed a discreet local contact that he was ‘perfectly willing to spend up to $5,000 or $6,000 at the rate of $25 a lot, but that $250 for four or five lots is pretty high.’ Walter didn’t even tell his wife what he was doing.”
Paepcke then went on to purchase or lease and restore much of the town, and with partners, he founded the Aspen Skiing Corporation, which had its grand opening in January 1947 with the christening of the longest chairlift in the world. “Then, just a few weeks after this opening,” Allen said, “Paepcke had a conversation with Robert Maynard Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago and a close friend, that would send Aspen off in another direction.” Skiing and culture were soon to redefine community in Aspen as the city welcomed two new identities.
A game-changing event came to Aspen when Paepcke and an inspired team from the University of Chicago celebrated the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation in 1949, an ambitious and defining moment in recognizing a key strategy for Aspen’s long-term future: Skiing would be the stabilizing influence for Aspen’s economy. Culture would possess it with lofty airs.
The Goethe event conjured a utopian revelation when, for 20 days, Aspen was transformed into a philosophically inspired utopia that preached the highest expression of ethics and morality in the city’s history, to date. Evelyn Ames, a participant from Long Island, New York, characterized Aspen’s seminal event: “At such altitudes everything was a little sharper, in clearer focus, a little nearer the sky. Here there was no superficially cosmopolitan gathering, no arbitrary elite, but the most surprising and heady brew of Europe and the New World, of Weimar and the corner drugstore, of Goethe and cowboy boots.”
Aspen had struggled in the lull between its silver mining past and its resort future, and the Goethe festival attracted the first crowd of cultural tourists to Aspen. The event was deemed an overwhelming success on which some Aspenites thought the city could capitalize in the long term. With the well-heeled Paepcke at the helm, it was time for Aspen to get down to the business of commercializing culture. In 1950, The Aspen Times reported a convening of Aspen decision-makers at the Four Seasons Club, which is now Aspen Country Day School and Aspen Music School campus on Castle Creek. The topic: “To Have or Not to Have?” a question offered up for discussion by Paepcke.
Paepcke had wanted a reading from city leaders as to whether Aspen would willingly host a second festival — Goethe Festival II — in the wake of the famous and inimitable first event. The resounding response of yes was a clear directive for Aspen to adopt the world of ideas as a launch pad for a solid tourist trade. With that unofficial vote of confidence, Aspen married economic development through cultural offerings and the glamour of skiing as a novel synthesis toward which few other resort communities had ever aspired.
“Some of the objections for Aspen having a celebration each year,” reported The Aspen Times, “are the lack of housing, the shortage of dining space for more than ordinary crowds, disrupting the free and easy life of some few Aspenites, and generally cluttering up the streets and shops with extra people, some of them with money to spend. On the ‘yes’ side for Aspen is the fact that the tourist season may be lengthened. … After considerable discussion, the group voted unanimously to support in every way possible a similar celebration next year.”
Instead of undergoing the Herculean labors of putting on another convocation, Paepcke and friends founded the Aspen Institute in 1950. An institute brochure proclaimed the constitution of a new Aspen identity where “Good conversation, one of the highest achievements of reason, requires a high degree of social and intellectual community.”
Here was “a unique opportunity to look with fresh eyes at the routine of one’s life … to gain a certain critical distance from which to get into better focus the dynamics of the society of which you are a part … for American business leaders to lift their sights above the possessions which possess them, to confront their own nature as human beings, to regain control over their own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting and hence more self-fulfilling.”
Such a cultural crusade was not a popular notion for some recalcitrant Aspenites, as characterized by Elizabeth Paepcke after an incident she witnessed in 1952: “One day under the Jerome porte-cochere, I saw Luke Short, the author of popular Westerns, holding my husband by the longer end of his necktie and shaking him as one would do a dog. The more Walter struggled, the tighter grew the noose, and Walter turned purple as he gasped for air. With each shake, Short shouted: ‘Stop! Walter, stop … trying … to … force … culture … down … the … throats … of … good … honest … laboring … Aspen citizens!’”
Luke Short (aka Fred Glidden) articulated a division in Aspen’s community amid a clash of historic epochs. “Many Aspen locals from the mining era,” said Glidden, “longed passionately to see Aspen’s skies murky with the smoke of a mill or smelter, and to them, a new shaft house is a far nobler work of man than the cunning architecture of a symphony.” This growing community rift was later intensified when Paepcke declared that a rodeo not be held at the Aspen Meadows while concerts were underway in the music tent, setting off a conflict in 1954 dubbed “music vs. manure.”
Paepcke unintentionally widened this community rift when, in the early 1950s, he brought in Bauhaus designer and artist Herbert Bayer to coordinate design elements for the nascent Aspen Institute campus, and also for the town. Paepcke made a gaffe that became legend when he offered free house paint to locals who would dress up their homes in colors chosen by Bayer and according to a color scheme that would make Aspen more attractive to the highbrow visitors Paepcke hoped to attract. The offer was met with sneers and denounced as a patronizing gesture from the grand pooh-bah from Chicago whose tastes were on a higher plane than this mountain town could then apprehend.
A third identity in Aspen’s congealing social milieu was the ski community spearheaded by a gung-ho cohort of 10th Mountain Division veterans who found common ground in Aspen just as skiing was exciting popular exuberance in the United States.
Paepcke had surmised that skiing would become a necessary attraction and cash cow, but not the centerpiece of Aspen. Skiing would furnish a pleasant distraction for visiting seminarians and, as a business, help to support the Aspen Institute’s intellectual pursuits, which were foremost in his fertile mind.
However, skiing promoted a far more rapid investment in Aspen’s social capital, as the Chicago Daily Tribune reported Feb. 11, 1954: “Aspen Confronted by Crisis; Meets It with a ‘Jeep Lift’:
“Skiers and townsfolk at this famed winter resort basked today in the warmth of a community spirit that wiped out disappointment for hundreds when it burst forth to offset a mechanical emergency.
The incident arose without warning. The little mountain village was aswarm with 585 skiers. The snow was at its best, the slopes in perfect condition, but the famous chairlift, longest in the world, had broken down. Replacement of a needed part would take days.
The morning sun revealed a fleet of 46 Jeeps awaiting the eager skiers assembled at a slope known as Little Nell. The Jeeps were manned by ranchers, tradesmen, lodge owners, and other residents who interrupted personal activities to help the grounded skiers. Loads of happy men and women were hauled up the road, through forest and snowfields, to the Sundeck [at the top of Aspen Mountain]. The improvised service enabled skiers to make the normal number of runs.
The whole town cooperated in helping provide the unusual service. Oil men donated tanks of oil for Jeep engines. Beer and sandwiches were carted to the scene for volunteer drivers. Skiers said they would never forget the thrill of the Jeep rides up the narrow mountain track thru breathtaking scenery.”
America was falling in love with skiing, thanks in part to Olympic ski stars such as Stein Eriksen and Jean-Claude Killy, who competed in international races that brought a European flare to Aspen and attracted a bevy of celebrity skiers who exuded a fetching style of outdoor glamour.
Gabardine pleated slacks and Tyrolean jackets morphed into form-fitting Bogner stretch pants and tight-fitting sweaters to provide just the right contours of style. Skiing in Aspen eventually expanded onto four mountains, and winter recreation provided an ever-greater share of the Aspen economy and community identity.
Further community divisions came with those attracted like moths to Aspen’s emerging brilliance — musicians, designers, Alpinists, physicists, philosophers, cyclists, authors, artists, dancers and others. Aspen’s once-moribund monoculture quickly expanded into a diverse community with a complex weave that city and county land-use planners later jumbled together as “messy vitality.” In that diversity grew competing elements that often worked at cross-purposes. However, as long as there was a perceived balance and an egalitarian inclusivity, the evolving Aspen community could attach itself to a common identity under the ephemeral and potentially overarching “Aspen Idea,” the enriching unity of body, mind and spirit fomented by Paepcke and the Aspen Institute.
To Paepcke’s disappointment, however, skiing was to eclipse the pursuit of high ideals and intellectual offerings. The “body” took precedence, rising head and shoulders above the “mind” and “spirit,” which Aspen savants decried as a vulgar submission to hedonism. “Recreation and culture do not mix smoothly,” said one critic, who observed the heady popularity of skiing in 1950 after Aspen’s first Federation Internationale du Ski race.
Paepcke had assumed that Aspen’s cultural foundation would be anchored not on physical pleasures or on greed and luxury, but rather on the unrelenting pursuit of moral and ethical principles as keystones to participatory citizenship. Aspen’s salvation would be ensured by a community consensus that championed the noble thoughts and righteous actions advanced by avatars of moral philosophy such as Wolfgang Goethe and Albert Schweitzer. Ideas would be disseminated through civil dialogue in Bauhaus-styled octagonal seminar rooms.
But the ethereal heights were beyond reach when one’s feet were planted firmly on the ground. Aspirants to Paepcke’s vision were required to stand on the shoulders of moral and intellectual exemplars. Enlightenment required an embrace of the realm of spirit by humbly respecting all of life and altruistically advancing humanism. All else is heedless distraction, they said. Goethe warned the hedonists: “A useless life is but an early death.”
Consensus on the higher plateaus of life and thought were often lost to those who peaked at the earthly elevation of Aspen’s bursting city limits at 7,908 feet. As multiple attractions caught on, Aspen’s population grew, and that growth forged a rift that the Aspen Institute’s resident philosopher, Mortimer Adler, observed when he pointed out that “Aspen is caught between two competing triads: the platonic — the good, the true and the beautiful; and the Machiavellian — money, fame and power.”
Ever since the Quiet Years, Aspen had ruminated on the “what if” of its own success. With every commercial advance, a segment of the Aspen community reflected more on what had been lost than on what had been gained. Hindsight is always 20/20, but in Aspen, self-reflection failed to arrive at a vital and honest appraisal of incremental change. Swayed by commercial and economic interests, there has long been a willingness to move forward into ever-greater, more-ambitious promotions at risk of losing heart and soul.
Looking back more than 70 years, the vote for Goethe Festival II in 1950 was not a true plebiscite, but it indicated a willingness to pursue economic growth as a lasting policy. For those few who resisted monetary values and instead championed what they had referred to as the “free and easy life,” well, that life had no financial bearing and was, in fact, contrary to boosting retail sales, property values and tax revenues.
Progress demanded more and better festivals, more and bigger promotions, more and broader commercialization to attract more and bigger spending guests. Progress demanded more and more of everything sellable, and that required ready access.
In the early years, getting people to Aspen in a critical mass that could enrich the resort economy was no mean feat. An airport was needed that could accommodate commercial airlines and private jets. Paved roads and four-lane highways were deemed essential for getting people from there to here and back again. Progress in Aspen became a loaded word — and still is — for portions of the community.
This emergent clash of opposing visions has, for decades, made Aspen an ideological, internecine battleground that threatens its very soul.
The next part of this series is a description of Aspen’s turbulent and embattled community, plagued with dichotomies and troubled by its own brilliant and unparalleled success. It will run on Feb. 11.