Fritz Benedict

Quiet Years Collection

Fritz Benedict        C155_1996.049.0014

 

Fritz Benedict [00:00:04] 1914.

Kathy Daily [00:00:05] 1914. And where were you born?

Fritz Benedict [00:00:08] Little town. Medford, Wisconsin. Northern Wisconsin.

Kathy Daily [00:00:11] Medford. M-E-D-F-O-R-D?

Fritz Benedict [00:00:14] Right.

Kathy Daily [00:00:14] Okay. And tell me about the first time you came to Aspen.

Fritz Benedict [00:00:20] Well, it’s sort of crazy. I, uh, won a race in Arizona. I was Arizona downhill champion.

Kathy Daily [00:00:28] Arizona downhill champion? {laughter} I love this. And so?

Fritz Benedict [00:00:35] That was 1941. And, um, I’d gotten to know about Aspen, uh, from Frank Mechau, who was an artist.

Kathy Daily [00:00:46] Spell Mechau

Fritz Benedict M-E-C-H-A-U.

Kathy Daily [00:00:49] Okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:00:50] He was living in Redstone. His widow is still there. Paula Mechau. And he came down to where I was, at Frank Lloyd Wright’s in Arizona.

Kathy Daily [00:01:02] Uh-huh. At Frank Lloyd Wright’s what?

Fritz Benedict [00:01:04] Well, he called it a camp. It was a school, winter headquarters.

Kathy Daily [00:01:09] Did Frank Lloyd Wright actually, um, teach there?

Fritz Benedict [00:01:12] Oh, yeah.

Kathy Daily [00:01:14] Okay. I went to Madison. Well, we both did. I went to Wisconsin.

Fritz Benedict [00:01:18] Well, that was the winter headquarters for the fellowship, what he called the fellowship. And, uh, I skied every chance I could up at San Francisco Peak, up above, uh, whatever that town is.

Kathy Daily [00:01:34] Somewhere in northern Wisconsin.

Fritz Benedict [00:01:35] No, northern Arizona.

Kathy Daily [00:01:36] Oh, Arizona. Oh my God.

Fritz Benedict [00:01:38] So I’d go up there on weekends, and I won this race. And then I knew that there was going to be this national race in Aspen in March, that spring. And because I had won that race, I applied to be in the race. And, uh, it was crazy, you know, for me to want to be in that race. I wasn’t that good. I had never been on a big mountain.

Kathy Daily [00:02:04] How old were you?

Fritz Benedict [00:02:05] I’d never skied a steep mountain.

Kathy Daily [00:02:06] How old were you at this time?

Fritz Benedict [00:02:07] I was about 27. 6 or 7. And, um, I managed to come up here. It took me three days to get here, by train and hitchhiking.

Kathy Daily [00:02:20] Oh, okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:02:21] From Arizona up here, you know, it’s a long ways up here.

Kathy Daily [00:02:23] Did you carry your skis on your back, hitchhiking?

Fritz Benedict [00:02:25] Well, I guess so, yeah. I must have.

Kathy Daily [00:02:27] Okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:02:29] And, um, I broke both skis practicing, and I had an excuse to drop out. But this town was, you know, so great to me those 3 or 4 days, you know? And I was sort of an imposter, really. So I’ve been trying to get even to this town ever since, by helping do civic things.

Kathy Daily [00:02:52] Uh-huh. And so where did you stay when you…? You want to lean forward on your knees, so I want to make sure you’re getting…

Fritz Benedict [00:02:58] I was at the Waterman Cabins. There weren’t very many quarters. That was on the west end of town.

Kathy Daily [00:03:03] Waterman. Is that by Waters Street or over there?

Fritz Benedict [00:03:05] It’s where the highway makes the first turn, coming into town.

Kathy Daily [00:03:09] Oh, the cabins that are still there?

Fritz Benedict [00:03:11] The cabins aren’t there. No.

Kathy Daily [00:03:12] Oh, because there’s still a little…

Fritz Benedict [00:03:14] There’s some big fake Victorians on that block.

Kathy Daily [00:03:17] Okay. So right by Cooper Street Bridge? Or up by…?

Fritz Benedict [00:03:22] Well, it’s a block and a half east of the Castle Creek Bridge.

Kathy Daily [00:03:29] Oh, the Castle Creek Bridge. Okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:03:30] You know where the turn is.

Kathy Daily [00:03:31] Oh, okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:03:32] On the highway.

Kathy Daily [00:03:32] I was going this way. I was coming out of town this way.

Fritz Benedict [00:03:35] I mean, there was two sets of cabins. There were the cabins out there, and there were Sparky’s cabins on the east end of town.

Kathy Daily [00:03:41] Right. And that was Sparky Sparovic, right? And where were his cabins?

Fritz Benedict [00:03:47] Right up where Knollwood is.

Kathy Daily [00:03:52] Those were… Blaine Bray used to have.

Fritz Benedict [00:03:53] Blaine Bray. Yeah, Blaine Bray had them.

Kathy Daily [00:03:56] Right. And so the town was really good to you. And where did you eat when you came to Aspen?

Fritz Benedict [00:04:00] I suppose the Jerome.

Kathy Daily [00:04:02] Yeah. What was the Jerome like?

Fritz Benedict [00:04:04] There were about two or three places. Well, it was, you know, just struggling to keep alive. Laurence Elisha and his wife were doing most of the work, and they hired 4 or 5 people to help run it.

Kathy Daily [00:04:19] And what about, uh, did you meet any great European skiers and stuff? Was it like a big thrill for you or…?

Fritz Benedict [00:04:29] Well, I don’t… you know, my memory is very bad. And I can’t remember too much about it, except that it was one of those marvelous March weekends when it was beginning to warm up, and a still blue sky and marvelous powder snow. And it was just, you know, a day like this every day. I thought I was in heaven.

Kathy Daily [00:04:57] Did you ever… did you think at that time I want to come back and live here?

Fritz Benedict [00:05:00] Oh, yeah.

Kathy Daily [00:05:01] Oh, okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:05:02] Yeah. I, uh, as soon as I got to Wisconsin, and Taliesin there, I was drafted for the war. But when I got back here, Camp Hale. I came over every chance I had when I went to Camp Hale.

Kathy Daily [00:05:18] So what years were you at Camp Hale?

Fritz Benedict [00:05:20] Uh, ‘4-… I think it was ’43 and ’44. Yeah.

Kathy Daily [00:05:29] So what did a week…?

Fritz Benedict [00:05:30] Late in the fall in ’43.

Kathy Daily [00:05:32] What did a week in… when you were in Camp Hale, they just trained you for outdoor… I mean, mountain… I mean, I don’t really know what they did at the camp. What did they do? They trained you for what?

Fritz Benedict [00:05:42] Well, there was the ski school. But then there was typical, uh, infantry kind of practice, training. And we had maneuvers in the mountains, you know? We’d camp out and…

Kathy Daily [00:05:54] Did you actually… did you use this in Europe? Did you go to Europe?

Fritz Benedict [00:05:59] Life was easier when I got to Europe.

Kathy Daily [00:06:01] It was easier?

Fritz Benedict [00:06:03] In the war, in a way, because it was so cold on these maneuvers at Camp Hale.

Kathy Daily [00:06:09] Yeah. Oh, it was? And so Europe was warmer.

Fritz Benedict [00:06:13] And the atmosphere was so polluted. The hospital was full of people with respiratory problems. Of course, in Europe, you had the bullets, but… We normally stayed in farmhouses, at least before we went into action.

Kathy Daily [00:06:32] So in Europe, you stayed in a farm. And when you went into action, did you see a lot of action in Europe?

Fritz Benedict [00:06:37] Well, we were only in action for about three and a half or four months. We had a lot of, you know, a lot of activity, a lot of enemy action. A lot of people were killed.

Kathy Daily [00:06:48] A lot of people were killed. So what country were you in?

Fritz Benedict [00:06:52] In northern Italy.

Kathy Daily [00:06:53] Northern Italy. Now, did you actually put your skis on over there and take off with a rifle?

Fritz Benedict [00:06:58] Well, there were a few pairs of skis that went over. Not very many. And I took a reconnaissance, one reconnaissance on skis. And there was some patrols on skis. Steve Knowlton went on 1 or 2 patrols, you know.

Kathy Daily [00:07:14] Uh-huh.

Fritz Benedict [00:07:14] But you didn’t even see skis because there were so few taken over. Everybody had skis over here. All 14,000. But they sent very few over. We didn’t go over until about Christmas time. We didn’t go into action until February.

Kathy Daily [00:07:32] And then was a war over at that time?

Fritz Benedict [00:07:35] No, the war was over in April.

Kathy Daily [00:07:36] April. Okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:07:37] And then we got up into the foothills of the Alps, north of the Po Valley.

Kathy Daily [00:07:43] So what did a weekend, when you came over to Aspen from Camp Hale, what did a weekend in Aspen entail?

Fritz Benedict [00:07:49] Well, you’d check in at the Jerome Hotel, for a dollar a night or whatever. And, uh, in the winter, we normally, uh, would get one run down the Roch Run, the race course.

Kathy Daily [00:08:05] Wait a second. You have a noisy house. {dogs barking, birds squawking}

Fritz Benedict [00:08:08] I guess they’re barking because {unintelligible}.

Kathy Daily [00:08:09] Right, they heard that.

Fritz Benedict [00:08:11] Shut up.

Kathy Daily [00:08:13] So we’re living at Camp Hale, and you came over and stayed in the Hotel Jerome. Came over to Hotel Jerome, at a dollar a night, you stayed there, and then what did you do? What did it cost to ski?

Fritz Benedict [00:08:28] Oh, well, there wasn’t any charge because you had to climb up.

Kathy Daily [00:08:33] Oh, you did? Okay, that was before the rope tow?

Fritz Benedict [00:08:35] That was, uh, on the boat tow.

Kathy Daily [00:08:40] I mean, the boat tow.

Fritz Benedict [00:08:40] That was maybe $0.10, and that would get you 500 foot vertical, and then you had to climb up 1000 feet above that.

Kathy Daily [00:08:49] Did buddies from Camp Hale come over with you?

Fritz Benedict [00:08:51] Yeah.

Kathy Daily [00:08:52] Just to ski. Okay. And what did you do at night in Aspen? Just go to the bar at the hotel.

Fritz Benedict [00:08:57] Yeah, the, you know, the bar and the ice cream parlor were…

Kathy Daily [00:09:00] Were the same.

Fritz Benedict [00:09:02] …one thing, on the corner. And that’s how that Aspen Crud came into being, mainly because you had ice cream there. And I’d just go over there drinking and {unintelligble}… wasn’t much wenching, there weren’t too many girls then. {laughter}

Kathy Daily [00:09:19] And so after you, um, you’re done with the war, and you came back to Wisconsin for a while?

Fritz Benedict [00:09:26] Oh, no, I came directly west.

Kathy Daily [00:09:27] You came directly to Aspen from the war.

Fritz Benedict [00:09:29] Because when I was at Camp Hale, I discovered that ranch up on Red Mountain, and I wanted to try to buy that and then ranch it.

Kathy Daily [00:09:37] Now, whose ranch was that?

Fritz Benedict [00:09:39] His name was Fred Gagnon. G-A-G-N-O-N. He was one of the Val d’Aosta people.

Kathy Daily [00:09:46] Okay. Val d’Aosta?

Fritz Benedict [00:09:47] Yeah.

Kathy Daily [00:09:47] Okay. And so, Fred… where did Fred go after that? When you came back?

Fritz Benedict [00:09:54] He moved to Denver and bought a little grocery store outside of Denver.

Kathy Daily [00:09:58] Oh, okay. And so when did you meet Fabi?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:02] Well, she came to visit her sister, Joella Bayer.

Kathy Daily [00:10:06] Oh, in Aspen? So you didn’t know Fabi before you moved here?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:10] No.

Kathy Daily [00:10:10] Oh, okay. I thought you were…

Fritz Benedict [00:10:11] I was a bachelor then.

Kathy Daily [00:10:13] So you lived up there by yourself?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:16] Well, there were guys helping me there, in and out.

Kathy Daily [00:10:20] Did you have any chickens up there?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:22] Oh, I had… I was, you know, I was trying to be a subsistence farmer.

Kathy Daily [00:10:26] Oh, you wanted to be a farmer?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:27] I had a milk cow. And I inherited six horses.

Kathy Daily [00:10:28] Okay. Did you know how to milk it?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:31] Oh, yeah. I’d done that when I was a kid on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. But I acquired six horses when I bought the place. And the cow and chickens and a pig.

Kathy Daily [00:10:45] Now, when you were little, where were your parents from?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:48] My father was of English extraction, and my mother was German.

Kathy Daily [00:10:53] And so is that where Fritz comes from?

Fritz Benedict [00:10:57] Oh, I lived in sort of a German neighborhood.

Kathy Daily [00:10:59] Oh, okay. Wisconsin German. Yeah. My dad’s Wisconsin German, too. So you had the horses and you had all that stuff. And then what year did Fabi come to Aspen?

Fritz Benedict [00:11:11] You know, I raised my own grain for the chickens. They didn’t lay a lot of eggs, and somebody, some guy stole my pullets one night.

Kathy Daily What are pullets?

Fritz Benedict [00:11:25] About 25 little chicks, you know, but growing up, and they were at the back end of the meadow, and one night they all disappeared.

Kathy Daily [00:11:33] It could have been “Chicken Bill.”

Fritz Benedict [00:11:35] There was a little gang here. I think it’s the same gang that stole Friedl’s mink. That was about the same time. He was trying to raise mink.

Kathy Daily [00:11:42] Because there was a guy in town called “Chicken Bill” who stole chickens. Maybe it was Chicken Bill.

Fritz Benedict [00:11:49] No, I don’t know who it was.

Kathy Daily [00:11:51] Um, so what did you, did you just work the ranch? Did you make money off your ranch, or did you also…? What did you start doing to make money?

Fritz Benedict [00:12:00] Well, I started, uh… Well, I was going to make a dude ranch out of it.

Kathy Daily [00:12:06] Oh, okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:12:07] And, uh, that first winter, I tore down an old barn that was falling in. But it had some good logs in it. So I hitched up the team of horses, dragged those logs across the meadow, and built a cabin. The first thing I built here, that first winter, I started building a cabin by myself. I was living up there alone. And that was the start of this dude ranch. And then I started designing one house at a time and hired a couple carpenters. It wasn’t…there were practically no building tradespeople in town {unintelligible) since the Depression. And so I hired my own carpenter and started building. Designing and building one house at a time.

Kathy Daily [00:13:00] Did you actually have people come, like tourists, come and…?

Fritz Benedict [00:13:04] Oh, yeah, I did for a couple of years until we got married and then Fabi didn’t do that. {laughter}

Kathy Daily [00:13:09] Did you take them on horseback rides? Up…like by the ditch and Hunter Creek and stuff?

Fritz Benedict [00:13:12] Oh, yeah. Hunter Creek.

Kathy Daily [00:13:14] So it’s kind of like a Had Deane operation.

Fritz Benedict [00:13:17] I fixed up the barn into a loft space. It was going to be for square dancing.

Kathy Daily [00:13:26] Oh, wonderful.

Fritz Benedict [00:13:27] We had some square dances up there.

Kathy Daily [00:13:28] Oh, how wonderful.

Fritz Benedict [00:13:29] The lower level was the lounge and bar. And I told Fabi, “You can sing French songs there at night.”

Kathy Daily [00:13:40] On the piano?

Fritz Benedict [00:13:43] {unintelligible} But she did initially.

Kathy Daily [00:13:44] Did she sing too?

Fritz Benedict [00:13:46] Well, she had a beautiful voice, but she didn’t do that.

Kathy Daily [00:13:49] Oh, she did have a beautiful voice? I didn’t know that.

Fritz Benedict [00:13:50] Oh my God. Wonderful.

Kathy Daily [00:13:52] Oh, I didn’t know that. Oh, we’re gonna have to get her to sing sometime.

Fritz Benedict [00:13:57] Oh, you won’t get her to.

Kathy Daily [00:13:58] No, she won’t do it. Did she sing in the bar a couple times?

Fritz Benedict [00:14:02] No.

Kathy Daily [00:14:03] She wouldn’t do it. Too shy.

Fritz Benedict [00:14:04] Well, we had been married in the fall, so the dude ranch summer season was over. But then the next winter was the FIS in 1950.

Kathy Daily [00:14:21] So you got married in ’49.

Fritz Benedict [00:14:22] And she cooked meals for 30 people for breakfast, cooked breakfast. So she didn’t get to go to the races.

Kathy Daily [00:14:30] Bummer.

Fritz Benedict [00:14:31] That was bad.

Kathy Daily [00:14:33] So how did you meet Fabi? You got married in ’49, so what year did she come here to visit Joella?

Fritz Benedict [00:14:40] Well, it must have been the year before.

Kathy Daily [00:14:42] Oh, you got married… you had a short, short courting.

Fritz Benedict [00:14:46] Well, she was already married.

Kathy Daily [00:14:48] Oh. She was? {laughter} Well that… well, why not?

Fritz Benedict [00:14:52] She was living in New York. She had to go to Reno for six weeks to establish residency for the divorce. It wasn’t easy.

 

Kathy Daily [00:15:01] Oh, so she met you, fell head over heels in love with you, and divorced her husband.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:15:06] Guess so.

 

Kathy Daily [00:15:11] You guess so. {laughter} And so… Fabi’s going to love correcting this, I can tell, when we give this to her. So you… did she stay in Aspen for…? How did you meet her? At a party or something?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:15:20] Oh, yeah. Everybody went to the same parties.

 

Kathy Daily [00:15:23] Yeah. Okay, so you met her at a party, and then you courted her. And then a year later, you were married.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:15:28] Oh, yeah.

 

Kathy Daily [00:15:34] And so Fabi played Dale Evans on the Dude Ranch for a while, and then decided she didn’t want to do that anymore. When did you start doing architecture and all that stuff?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:15:44] Well, I already was doing some, one house at the time.

 

Kathy Daily [00:15:49] Okay, so that was…

 

Fritz Benedict [00:15:50] And that kept us pretty busy.

 

Kathy Daily [00:15:52] What were your first impressions of Aspen? Now you’re actually living, you know, here. And what was your what was your impression here? Did you feel like you were home? Did you just, I mean…?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:16:08] Well, yeah, I just liked everything about it. I liked the mystique of the West, you know, the horses and the cowboys and all that. And I loved the climate. I loved the mountains.

 

Kathy Daily [00:16:24] Loved to ski.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:16:25] Loved everything about it.

 

Kathy Daily [00:16:27] What about the people?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:16:28] And there were wonderful people, you know, at that time. And Fabi appreciated them too.

 

Kathy Daily [00:16:32] How would you describe them?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:16:35] You know, it’s interesting that she grew up in Paris, but luckily she spent some time out in the country, on a farm. Her mother sent her, boarded her at a little farm in Burgundy, in the countryside. She was at the gamekeeper’s cottage up there for a year. Winter, fall, summer. Just lived this primitive life, and it really gave her an appreciation of simple people and an appreciation of nature. It’s lucky for me that she really liked the countryside.

 

Kathy Daily [00:17:19] Now, how would you describe the people in Aspen?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:17:24] Well, you know, it was so tough economically here that a lot of people left, but those that stayed on… I think, you know, so many of them really loved the place, and many of them are characters. There’s a lot of individuality among them. And they, of course, didn’t, uh, they weren’t interested in the idea of this being a tourist resort. They wanted mining to come back. And they didn’t welcome… most, you know, the majority really weren’t interested in it becoming a resort. But there was a hard core, you know, people like the Willoughbys and the… Laurence Elishas and Mike and Maggie Magnifico, to realize that, well, they loved skiing. You know, they loved talking about skiing. So they fell in love with that, and they realized that, uh, that could be the future of this place rather than mining. The tourism.

 

Kathy Daily [00:18:37] What do you think Aspen…?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:18:38] And they, you know, they didn’t see it being a huge resort like it is now.

 

Kathy Daily [00:18:43] Right. And what did… what do you think that they had back then in the ’40s that we don’t have now in Aspen?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:18:55] Well, it’s just like night and day. Everybody knew everybody else. There was no social strata. Which it must have been during the mining days. More of that during the mining days.

 

Kathy Daily [00:19:21] Right. There were the rich and the poor.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:19:22] But everybody was broke. Even most of the people who came to live here were struggling to make a living, and everybody was working. And, in fact, there were no retirees, and very few tourists, and very few second homeowners. You know, the condominium wasn’t developed yet. So if you had a second home, it was a house. And there wasn’t the opportunity to rent it because it was {unintelligible}. And, uh, the people that came with money really wanted to be part of the community and, uh, didn’t flaunt their wealth at all. And they built modest houses, they bought old Victorians to fix them up. They didn’t expand them and tear them down like they do now. It was just an incredible period there. Quite a few interesting people were coming to town who’d been in the service, Navy or Army, Air Force, and they didn’t want to go back to their old lives.

 

Kathy Daily [00:20:38] They just wanted to start something new.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:20:39] Yeah, they were intrigued by what Paepcke wanted to do here and what Friedl wanted to do. And it was just very unique. It was… the kind of social life there was and the simplicity of everything.

 

Kathy Daily [00:21:05] Could you move closer to… I want to make sure… you speak so quietly. Yeah, you do.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:21:14] Well, it was such a simple life. And, uh, compared to now, there was, you know, there wasn’t much in the way of diversions here. All the smorgasbord of things to do now, all the ballet and the music and… It was just, you had to be, you know, attuned to that kind of thing.

 

Kathy Daily [00:21:45] When did you know that Aspen was going to change?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:21:51] Well, it was such a creeping thing. When the condominium law came in…

 

Kathy Daily [00:21:58] And what year was that?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:22:00] Oh, I don’t know.

 

Kathy Daily [00:22:01] Was that the ’60s?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:22:03] Yeah…

 

Kathy Daily [00:22:05] I think it was.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:22:06] Around 30 years or so, yes.

 

Kathy Daily [00:22:08] Yeah. And so you knew that it was…

 

Fritz Benedict [00:22:10] I designed the first luxury condominium, the Aspen Alps. George Mitchell was the developer there. And we actually, when we started designing it, it was going to be a co-op. Because the condominium law didn’t exist, but… And then it became a condominium. And well, that’s kind of the turning point. About the same time, I guess, the wooden skis were replaced by synthetic skis, which made it a lot easier to learn.

 

Kathy Daily [00:22:46] What would you…?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:22:47] And then the Bogner pants…

 

Kathy Daily [00:22:49] Right. Head skis. Standard skis. What about, um… if there’s anything that you would wish for Aspen today, what would you wish for? If you could bless the town, somehow, bring something back, or, um…

 

Fritz Benedict [00:23:07] Well, I had lunch with Marc Friedberg today, and George, uh, guy that owns the restaurant up at… Gordon. George Gordon. We were talking about how Aspen is… you know, they travel a lot and I travel quite a bit, but there’s nothing like Aspen, even now. You know, it was so unique 50 years ago, but in its own way, it is still… we, you know, we agreed that it’s the best place, we know it, in the world, to live. But there’s so much dissension here. That bothers me a lot. It just… it puts a sour note on life here, I think. I can’t wait to read the papers, but there’s so much controversy in the papers that I wish people would relax and realize that we’ve just got such a paradise. Why fight all the time? I mean, we mostly want the same thing. You know, the fast buck developer is long gone. Um, that was a bad period there where there weren’t enough controls and there was too much development too fast. But you know, a lot of this dissension is necessary. Like there should be more controls in those huge houses going in on the West Side. You know, they should be preserving the small scale that existed, if it’s possible. But you know, it just seems like there’s so much bitterness and fighting all the time.

 

Kathy Daily [00:25:19] So what you really want is people to relax and get along.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:25:23] Yeah. I mean, it’s paradise. It really is.

 

Kathy Daily [00:25:27] And I think that the community is the thing that’s been lost more than… I mean, the beauty is still here. The valley is still here. But it seems like when I’ve been interviewing these people that there’s a sense of community and trust that’s not here anymore. You don’t trust anybody anymore. You don’t even meet your neighbors anymore unless your lawyer calls them.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:25:47] Oh, I know it. Well, I was pretty interested for a while to try to develop some housing down at Bartos’ land, where Aspen Village is. And I got to know Ellen Anderson there, who was kind of a leader in that… {break in recording}

 

Kathy Daily [00:26:04] I’m going to go backwards now. Back to Aspen and Red Mountain and… I’m not going to go a lot into your… like what… I’m trying to… how to phrase this. So after Red Mountain and the dude ranch, you didn’t do that anymore, what did you decide to do for money after that?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:26:26] Well, I was building up my architectural office, and Fabi steered me into that, and she was a big help in my business.

 

Kathy Daily [00:26:40] Well, I think I kind of like you as Cowboy Fritz.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:26:46] Well, those days are so long gone.

 

Kathy Daily [00:26:48] I mean, you and Had Deane would have been in competition, right? From one end of the valley to the other.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:26:53] Oh, yeah. Sure.

 

Kathy Daily [00:26:54] Right. Yeah. And so then from Red Mountain, you moved to where? When did you move? You’ve lived…?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:27:01] Well, we moved down to the old Bowman Building, where the, Les Chefs is.

 

Kathy Daily [00:27:08] Right. Did you live upstairs there?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:27:10] Yeah. That building was a wreck.

 

Kathy Daily [00:27:13] But that’s a neat upstairs.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:27:14] People had been stealing the windows and doors off it. And it was falling in. The back part had fallen in from the snow load. So we moved into that and fixed up those apartments and rented them out to locals.

 

Kathy Daily [00:27:27] Yeah. And how many of those? Three apartments up there?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:27:30] Oh no, there are about… there must be 6 or 7 for the whole building. It’s actually three buildings.

 

Kathy Daily [00:27:39] Oh, okay. And then, um, then what did you… where did you move after that?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:27:44] Um…

 

Kathy Daily [00:27:47] Do you remember what you rented those apartments for? What did you get for those?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:27:50] $75 a month.

 

Kathy Daily [00:27:52] Yeah. Good.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:27:55] And we rented the spaces down below, but they weren’t very profitable. We had my office down there.

 

Kathy Daily [00:28:02] There used to be a saloon there, in the old days.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:28:05] Oh, yeah. And there was a brothel, I think.

 

Kathy Daily [00:28:08] Yeah, there was a whorehouse upstairs.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:28:10] Yeah.

 

Kathy Daily [00:28:11] Well, that’s appropriate.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:28:13] Um, well, one of the tenants was Dave Lawrence, who was in partnership with Bob Oden. They tried to make the first plastic ski boot. Yeah. And Bob Cohen had a bookstore in there, and Bert Bidwell had his first shop in there, in the corner.

 

Kathy Daily [00:28:32] Oh, he did?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:28:32] Yeah.

 

Kathy Daily [00:28:33] So Bert would… did you know him from 10th Mountain?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:28:36] No.

 

Kathy Daily [00:28:36] Oh, okay. So where did you move after…? Do you remember where you moved after you moved out of that place?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:28:43] Well, I guess… we started to build our old house, down where the club is now.

 

Kathy Daily [00:28:52] Right.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:28:54] But then, uh, we sold the Bowman Building and moved… well, and bought that property, this ranch across here.

 

Kathy Daily [00:29:02] And who’d you buy this from?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:29:03] Roger Dixon.

 

Kathy Daily [00:29:05] Dixon?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:29:05] Yeah, he was a cotton broker in Dallas. This was his second home.

 

Kathy Daily [00:29:10] Oh, his second home.

 

Fritz Benedict [00:29:11] He was one of the early people who came in and had a second home. Paid $10,000 for 160 acres.

 

Kathy Daily [00:29:17] Oh… {laughter}. And what did Dixon…. who did he buy it from? Do you know?

 

Fritz Benedict [00:29:22] Well, it was the Barailler family, I guess. The Baraillers were chiefly up there, but I think relatives of hers had this ranch.

 

Kathy Daily [00:29:32] Yeah, they owned a huge stretch. Also, somebody else owned…. who was I just reading about? I just read their interview. Um, someone’s uncle owned this property up here. Well, you’ll have to read it in the book because I can’t remember who it was. I just read the interview, and I have a feeling it was Puppy and Junior Smith’s uncle.

Fritz Benedict [00:29:58] Oh…

Kathy Daily [00:29:59] Uh, and his name was…