Mary Eshbaugh Hayes

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes

C235 _ 2006.054.0001

Interviewer: Sara Garton

Sara Garton [00:00:04] With Mary Eshbaugh Hayes on behalf of the Aspen Historical Society for the Oral History Project. It took place on September 18th, 2006 at the interviewer’s home. Sara Garton and I am the interviewer. Well, Mary, first I want to ask a little bit about your personal history, because you seem to have almost lived an enchanted childhood. Where were you born?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:00:34] In Rochester, New York, but I grew up in Geneseo, New York.

 

Sara Garton [00:00:39] Which is lake country?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:00:41] Lake country, the Finger Lakes country. And we lived right on Kinnisis Lake. We lived our house was in a cove and it was just beautiful. The summers were outstanding and the winters were awful.

 

Sara Garton [00:00:58] And um, you seem to have had a very close relationship with your father, which seems to have influenced you throughout your life. Can you talk about that a little bit?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:01:10] Um, I had a sister who was very ill and a brother who was a year younger than me, and a brother a year ahead of me who was a genius. And so my mother had practically no time for me. And I was a very good child. And so you had to be good in that circumstance. And so my father sort of raised me. He was the one who rocked me to sleep at night. And he couldn’t sing, but he played his harmonica. And I spent a lot of time with him. Even when I was little. I would go to work with him in the. He was a civil engineer. And he always did his own surveying and everything. So when I was little, he would take me to work and his crew would all give me things out of their lunch pails.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:02:12] We’d sit under a tree and have lunch. And then when I was in high school, I did. I was his rod hopper on the survey crew, and he and I, well, it was wartime and he couldn’t get a crew anymore. And so he was getting ready to build the Taylor Winery and the, um, bird’s eye factory of frozen foods. And he wanted to start as soon as the war was over. So I was in high school, and.

 

Sara Garton [00:02:48] This is in the 40s.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:02:50] In the 40s, and he and I and the math professor at the college. There was a college town. We were his crew. And so I got to do all the running with the rod, which gives you the sea levels. And that was my job for several summers. And we would even go out in the winter if he had a surveying job.

 

Sara Garton [00:03:18] And then you chose to go to college in Denver. Is that right?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:03:22] No. In Syracuse.

 

Sara Garton [00:03:23] Oh. That’s right. Pardon me.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:03:26] Um, I was supposed to go to Bard on the Hudson. And that’s where my mother wanted me to go. And we went down, and I was all signed in and had a roommate and everything. And we walked around the campus, and I thought, this is not for me. They were all very rich, uh, upper class kids. And I. And all they offered was liberal arts. And I wanted journalism because I had also, during my high school years, been working on the local newspaper. I would go up every Thursday when they went to press and work that day. And so I really wanted journalism so I could go to work. I was very independent and I thought. So I signed myself in at Syracuse. And when I told my mother she just had a fit.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:04:30] But my father was still doing war work. And he came home that weekend and he said, what’s the matter? You know, I wasn’t my mother and I weren’t speaking. And I told him. And my mother’s attitude was, it’s our money, and we know what’s best for you. And so, my dad and I talked it over and he told. He said, no, it’s your life. You make your own decisions. And if you make a mistake, that’s fine. But it’s your life. You get to make the decision where you go to college. So he always stuck up for me that way.

 

Sara Garton [00:05:16] Oh, wonderful. And, um, that independence is still evident today.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:05:22] I think so.

 

Sara Garton [00:05:23] And how did you happen to get West? I think Denver was in between.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:05:28] Yes.

 

Sara Garton [00:05:29] New York and Aspen.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:05:30] Well, when I was a junior in college, I had there again, um, my dad was working terribly hard, and my brother was at Cornell, and I was at Syracuse, and we went home at Easter time. And my mother went on and on about how we were working my dad into his grave. And so I went back to college, went in to see the dean and said, you know, I have to work. And she said, no, your father makes too much money. We can’t give you one of the jobs. I said, well, then I’ll quit school because I can’t take this tension. Tension. And so she gave me a job waiting on table. You know, I was a hasher. That’s what they called us. And so I worked all that year as a hasher and was signed up for my senior year. And in the spring, my father got a big check. A refund because he had paid, you know, in the fall. And he said, what is this? And I told them I hadn’t told them I was working. And so both my parents said, well, it’s your money. Do what you want. So I went to Europe with the American Youth Hostels.

 

Sara Garton [00:06:53] With your dad’s refund check. You bought a ticket to Europe.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:06:57] And actually, at that time, it was 1949. And it was right after the war. So there were no cars. You know, we bicycled 2000 miles that summer and we went and made a big circle. Holland, Belgium. Austria, down to Italy, along the French Riviera, up to Paris, up to the Loire Valley. I mean, it was just magic. And it was, I’ve heard since it was one of the most beautiful summers in Europe. So we had all this good weather, and we slept on the beaches, and we slept out in fields in Switzerland. And it was just fabulous. But my favorite place was Salzburg because they have the Mozarteum, which is its, um, Mozart concerts. And it’s a wonderful city. It’s there’s a castle on the hill and it’s an ancient city. So a lot of history. And so then we rode on to Paris and I read in the, I think it was the New York Herald Tribune that about the Aspen Goethe Bicentennial. And I thought, there is Salzburg in America. That’s where I’m going, because I had taken ten years of piano and I loved music. Again, my father and I used to go to concerts together at the college, and music was a big part of my life. So I went back to college to do my senior year and I told Jenny, my roommate, I said, let’s not go home after graduation. Let’s go out to Colorado. I want to go to Aspen. And we’re both skiers. We both were skiers and we had read all about it. So, um, we told our parents we both both had jobs. I was supposed to be the managing editor of my hometown paper. By that time, I had worked up to managing editor.

 

Sara Garton [00:09:22] Because you had summer jobs there.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:09:24] Summer jobs all through college. Even the summer I went to Europe, I went and spent a month on the paper before I left. And so we both resigned from our jobs. Jenny was an accountant. She was, I think, with a bank And, uh. But our parents said, who ever heard of Aspen? This was, you know, way back 1950 we graduated, and so we we compromised. We said, well, we’ll go to Denver, and and it’s a city. It was a little city. It was about like Grand Junction is now. The highest thing in Denver was the May D & F Tower. So we went to Denver and Jenny worked for Farmers Union, and I worked for the Aurora Advocate, which was a weekly paper in Aurora. And we met with two other college friends, and we rented a little house all together, and we mostly dated Air Force guys, because Lowry Air Force Base was right there. And we had wonderful times. We came up to the mountains skiing, but of course I worked on the newspaper and it was the first photo offset paper west of the Mississippi. And so I learned photo offset. Before that, I had worked, of course, in hot lead and.

 

Sara Garton [00:10:58] Typesetting.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:10:59] Typesetting with the Linotype. But, um, we we had a photo offset, and I learned that whole system, which was we had a Vari-Type machine, and you typed everything in twice and then it justified. It was really quite interesting. And I, I worked as a reporter photographer. I had a column very much like I have now with people. And I took, I would go out on the street and take pictures. Um, you know, the weekly. They still do it on the Aspen Times. The, you ask a question.

 

Sara Garton [00:11:40] The Box Talk, people on the street.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:11:43] People on the street. I did that and I was society editor, and but I got to go to a lot of things like the, um, big rodeos and what, what do they call that in Denver?

 

Sara Garton [00:12:01] The stock show.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:12:02] Stock show.

 

Sara Garton [00:12:03] And the big rodeo.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:12:04] They interviewed the trick rider, and it was just a good job. But we came up weekends to Aspen, and I decided one night the lights were. We walked by the Aspen Times and the lights were on. So I knocked on the door and Mr. Ringle came to the door and I said, can you use a good reporter photographer? He said, come in and talk to me.

 

Sara Garton [00:12:29] This is Verlin Ringle, the longtime editor publisher of The Times in the 40s and 50s Oh, no. Early 50s. Yeah.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:12:39] He sold in ’56 to Bil Dunaway. So, um, he said be here in June because that’s when my reporter leaves. And he had been wanting a photographer. And I told him, well, I could set up the darkroom and do the photography because I could do all that. That was part of the journalism course, which was wonderful, that they taught you all of these things you needed to know. And, um, so in June, I was supposed to go up to come up to Aspen, but on Easter weekend, my family from the east came to visit me and Pete and Lorna and my little brother and sister were just 11 and 12 and. So my father had just finished the Rochester airport and he’d had the flu, and he’d told the doctor, you’ve got to give me some strong medicine so I can go to Colorado. And so the doctor gave him some pretty strong medicine. I don’t know what it was, but they came out and it was they were here for just a week. So I took the week off from the paper, and we went to Cripple Creek and we went to Central City. My father was so excited as an engineer. He knew all about Aspen and Colorado and the mining days and everything. Well, the last night he had a heart attack.

 

Sara Garton [00:14:13] Oh, Mary.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:14:14] Yes, it was really scary. But one of my roommates worked at, um, the Denver University clinic. She was, uh, not a nurse, but a lab technician. So she called, and we couldn’t get anyone but, my editor at the Aurora Advocate got a doctor and it was very lucky, actually. That doctor was Italian and he put my father into Mercy Hospital, which was a small hospital in Denver run by nuns. So it was a charming place to be. He was there for two months. Back then, with a heart attack they didn’t know what to do, really. You know.

 

Sara Garton [00:15:03] Except bed rest.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:15:04] Bed rest. And of course, he went into pneumonia and almost died of pneumonia. But the nuns were just wonderful. And they sort of adopted my mother and Pete and Lorna and had them into all sorts of things at the hospital. And, uh, my mother got a room in the house next door, and we got, um, inflatable beds and put them in the dining room in our house. And so and I got the kids into school. And so it was quite an experience for the whole family.

 

Sara Garton [00:15:43] But your career plans were delayed then.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:15:45] Delayed.

 

Sara Garton [00:15:46] To to move to Aspen.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:15:47] I called Mr. Ringle and said, I can’t make it, and I’m going to go home for the summer to the lake and take my dad’ sailing and hiking and things, so to get his strength back.

 

Sara Garton [00:16:00] This was June 1950.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:16:03] And so I did. I quit my job, and I went back to the lake and had an idyllic summer, you know, sailing and walking on the beach and just good and laid back. And then when it was time to come back to Colorado, because I had told Mr. Ringle I would come in September Because one of my roommates was getting married and I thought, well, I’ll go to the wedding, then I’ll go on up to Aspen. And I didn’t have a cent to my name. It had taken all the money I had to make the trip back east sort of somehow lived through the summer. Um, I put everything in storage in Denver because I knew I was coming back. And so we went to the cottager’s picnic. They always had a big cottager’s picnic in the in the fall. And I didn’t have money for a ticket. It was $25. I think.

 

Sara Garton [00:17:12] This was at the lake at Lake Genesee.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:17:15] Kinnisis Lake.

 

Sara Garton [00:17:16] Kinnisis.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:17:17] And so my older brother was married and living in Buffalo, and he and his wife came down for the cottager’s picnic. They always came. It was always a big family thing. And so he bought my ticket and they always had a door prize. I’ve never won anything in my life, but I won the door prize of $100. And at that time, you could take the train for $88 to Colorado. So there I was. I had the money because, see, I didn’t want to ask my parents for the money because they didn’t want me to come back out. They wanted me to, you know, my dad would say, well, why don’t you work on the Rochester Times-Union and we can drive to the city together? And, um, and actually, they offered me a job, but I really wanted to live in Colorado. So I took the $100, bought my train ticket, and came out to Aspen. Well, I went to Denver first for Lori’s wedding, and then I came up on the bus. I had enough money to come on the bus, and the Ringle’s had arranged for me to live with the Glendennings, an older couple, and had a little Victorian house on Aspen Mountain. But the day before I came, Mr. Glendenning fell off the roof and was killed.

 

Sara Garton [00:18:48] Oh, Mary.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:18:49] Yes. So I lived with Mabel Beckerman. She had a she had a boarding house on Main Street where the clinic is now. Aspen clinic. And I lived there for a month, but the teachers were looking for a fourth roommate. They lived right across the street from the school, from the Red Brick home on Hallam.

 

Sara Garton [00:19:15] Hallam.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:19:16] And they had rented a little red, red brick house from Luke Short’s brother. His name was Pete Dawson and Luke Short. They both were Western writers, and so I moved in with the teachers. And Loretta Kaufman was my roommate, and Dorothy Helmkamp and Pat Lumsden. So we lived together. And.

 

Sara Garton [00:19:48] This was the fall of 1950?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:19:50] Fall of 1950.

 

Sara Garton [00:19:52] The streets weren’t paved.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:19:54] Oh, no. And there was, you know, it was such a quiet little town. By the time I got here, summer was over and summer was busy, you know, with.

 

Sara Garton [00:20:04] The Music.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:20:05] Festival. But nothing happened in the fall, and there were very few of the young people, even still here, because they didn’t come back until ski season started. So, uh, Loretta was friends with a woman named Georgette Compton. She was a war widow and she had a little boy. And so Georgette invited us to tea because that was Sunday tea was something that everybody in Aspen did because there was no radio. There was no television. There was the Isis Theater. But, you know, it was they’d have a movie for a week and there really wasn’t much going on. So we went to the tea and as it turned out, it was just Loretta and I and Georgette and her little boy. And the little boy kept saying, oh, when is Jim Hayes coming? When is Jim Hayes coming? And I realized that, you know, she had a date with Jim, and she had invited us before, and he had just come back to town. In fact, the day before I was working in the paper and Mrs. Ringle jumped up from her desk and said, oh, here comes Jim Hayes. At that time, if a car came down the street, you knew who it was because there were no cars, and Jim had gone to Greenland and made all this money. As an earth mover. And, uh, I’ll digress here a little. It was pretty interesting one of the times that we came up to ski. It was in January of 1950, and, um. Lori, the girl, got married. She was quite outgoing and very pretty. And we were staying at the Roaring Fork. You could stay for $3.50 a night at the Roaring Fork dorm.

 

Sara Garton [00:22:12] Which is now, uh, Ralph Lauren Polo. Is that.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:22:16] No, that’s the other one.

 

Sara Garton [00:22:18] That was the was the Independence?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:22:19] Independence. The Roaring Fork. It constantly changes. Um, I think the corner. It’s. No, it’s not in the corner. It’s next to where the White Kitchen used to be.

 

Sara Garton [00:22:33] Oh, so it was on the Hyman Avenue Mall. Oh, right in the near the Paragon building upstairs, perhaps?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:22:41] Yes, it was upstairs of the Paragon building, which was a big dining hall then. And.

 

Sara Garton [00:22:49] And they leased apartments or rooms?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:22:52] No, it was bunks.

 

Sara Garton [00:22:54] Oh, really?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:22:55] Bunk beds. You know, like six girls to a room. But it was fun. You just stuck your skis in the snow out in front. And when you went out in the morning, they were there. And so Lori was very outgoing, and she immediately these two handsome young men came down the street. And she immediately went up to them and started talking and I was embarrassed. It was Jim Adams and John Doremus. They were bellhops at the Jerome and I was embarrassed and I sort of hung back. And John Doremus came over to me and said, would you like to go to the Golden Horn with me? The Golden Horn was the place for all the young people to go. So we went and we danced and had a drink or two. I didn’t drink, but I had a ginger ale. And he told me all about Jim Hayes, about this friend of his who had gone to Greenland and was had gone. Well, Jim had come to Aspen in ’49 and skied and partied and went completely broke. And so he had somehow gotten to Greenland to make some money to pay off his bills. And everybody thought he was such a hero because he came back, paid up his bill at Sardy’s. Paid up his rent. Did. Do you need to go to the door? And so, um. I had already heard all about Jim Hayes, and he was some kind of a local hero because he was handsome and young, and he was a Texan, and he had learned to ski on the East coast when he was in New York, learning to be a jeweler. And so then when I did meet him, you know, at the tea. So I was embarrassed again. And I stood up and said, Loretta, I think we’d better go home. And Jim jumped up and said, I’ll drive you home. And, uh, Georgette didn’t speak to us for a long time because then.

 

Sara Garton [00:25:09] She had set his cap, her cap.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:25:11] Her cap for him.

 

Sara Garton [00:25:11] For Jim.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:25:13] And, uh, you know, and he’s older. He’s eight years older than I am. He was more her age. And I think she thought they were going to get married. But he met me, and that was it. So we dated all, all winter. We skied together and. But we did a lot of fighting. He’s a Texan. I’m a New Yorker. He had been in the Air Force. He was a pilot. He was southern, you know. And I was this independent New Yorker. So we we had a lot of differences to settle. We really fought. I didn’t think we could. A marriage would last. And here it is 53 years.

 

Sara Garton [00:26:00] Later.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:26:01] Later. But, um, we got engaged. He made a ring and gave it to me in February, and we got engaged and decided we’d be married in April.

 

Sara Garton [00:26:15] And this is 1951, now.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:26:19] 52. We’re in the 52. Actually, 53 that we got married. I moved to Aspen in 52 and. Worked worked a year on the paper for the Ringles. And they were wonderful people. They.

 

Sara Garton [00:26:39] Yes. Tell me more about them. I know you thought so much of them.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:26:42] They were very well liked in town. And so they. Mrs. Ringle especially took me just everywhere and introduced me to everyone and all the old timers. At that time it was mostly ski bums and old timers. That was about all that was here. We had second homeowners, but there again, they weren’t here a lot. They James Hopkins Smith was the Undersecretary of the Navy. And so they were here in the summer. But then they would go back to Washington a lot. And Fred Glidden, who was Luke Short, was our neighbor. And so I used to babysit for them and some for the Smiths or the. They always ask the teachers and if the teachers couldn’t, then I would like Danny Glidden. I still tease him about.

 

Sara Garton [00:27:46] Our policeman, Dan Glidden.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:27:49] And so.

 

Sara Garton [00:27:53] And what sort of things did you do? Were you. I remember reading that you believed that Verlin and Ruth were such perfect owner publishers for the time And where it was still a sleepy town newspaper. But you right away started a society column around Aspen and a business of the week.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:28:18] It was already going. The Around Aspen had always been. I mean, even back in the 1800s. Um, but I started the business feature. I would feature a different business each week in a different lodge each week. So that, um, that was part of my journalism training. They taught you to do that because it helped generate advertising. And it also was interesting that people in town because. So I had done that on my hometown paper a couple of summers. And again, I always took the picture and developed it and printed it and did the interview. So it was something new and nice. And of course, after I after I married Jim, I worked that summer and then I quit because I was pregnant. So. So the thing that I started with the business died when I left. But they, they got Sistie Blanning to do the Around Aspen. She did a good job and, uh, then I, I took five years off from writing. I wrote some children’s stories and things like that, but I didn’t really seriously write. And then Bil Dunaway bought The Times in 1956 from he Ringles, because the Ringles felt the paper needed to grow, and they didn’t have the cash to do it with. And they, um. Dunaway walked in one day when Mister Ringle had caught his hand in the press. He was having a terrible day, and Dunaway offered him what he thought was an astronomical amount of money, and Verlin took it. And they stayed in Aspen for for a few years. And then, um, they took they were very religious. That was the only I at that time. I was pretty religious, too. I sang in the church choir and taught Sunday school, and, um, and that also helped me get to know a lot of people in town, because there were only 900 people here. And the, um, the Ringles took a they became, what do you call it? I can’t think of the word. Um, they went to France.

 

Sara Garton [00:31:02] And missionaries.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:31:03] Missionaries. They went to Provence, and Verlin taught printing. And I think that probably Ruth taught some accounting because she had run the business. Totally. And, uh, so they sold their house and left. And someone told Dunaway he didn’t start off really well with the paper. He had all kinds of health problems. And so and he wasn’t immediately accepted in the town because he didn’t have the Ringles to introduce him around and such. And anyway, he was a different sort. And so he called me one day and said, people have been saying that you should write the Around Aspen, that you That you have the connections and that you would be a good one. And by that time, the children were toddlers and I thought, oh, good, I’ll go back to work. So I did. The only time there were gaps in the column was when Bates was born in 1962. I got blood poisoning and was in the hospital for several weeks.

 

Sara Garton [00:32:26] Bates is Mary’s youngest child. Mary, I calculated, had six children within eight years.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:32:33] No, I had five within ten years.

 

Sara Garton [00:32:35] Five within ten. Whoops. Pardon me.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:32:37] That’s right. Yeah. Pauli in 1954. Elli in 1955. Lauri in 1956. Clayton in 1958. Bates in 1962.

 

Sara Garton [00:32:54] That’s eight years,.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:32:56] Is it?

 

Sara Garton [00:32:56] Yes. That’s eight years. Five within eight years.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:33:00] Yeah. So I was very busy.

 

Sara Garton [00:33:02] Yes. You were a busy lady

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:33:04] And so but I, I enjoyed doing the column because at that time I did it over the telephone and I would when the children were napping, I would get on the phone and I would call. I had a list of different people. You know, some people have a real nose for news. And I would call these different people. Ellen Nicholson was one. She became a very close friend. Joan Lane and Flossie Adams. Mrs. Mrs. Oh, I can’t think of her last name, but there were there were about 20 people that I called every week and Mrs. Glidden, she connected me with the richer second homeowners.

 

Sara Garton [00:33:58] To give you the news.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:33:59] To give me the news. And so that kept me. Sort of in the public eye and with my connections.

 

Sara Garton [00:34:10] And you had an amusing anecdote about writing that column that you knew your, um, your, uh, stringers so well, your contact people. But there were some you wouldn’t call until afternoon.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:34:24] That’s right.

 

Sara Garton [00:34:24] Because it was a party. I mean, some party ladies.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:34:29] Yeah.

 

Sara Garton [00:34:29] They would rather talk after a late a late,.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:34:33] Late breakfast. Yes. There were certain ones I couldn’t call until after, after lunch.

 

Sara Garton [00:34:41] Did you do some reporting then too Mary as well as. I mean how busy.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:34:46] Later on I did some reporting. Um, and I would do. Let’s see. It’s when the kids were in middle school, I began doing some reporting, again. A lot of the old timers began to die, and they their families came to me to do the obituaries. And I’ve always felt that obituaries were very important because it’s often when you’re doing research, it’s often the obituary that gives you the most information about a person. So I began doing obituaries and weddings and, um, and then some photo, some photo pages. I would go, like, I remember I went hiking with Jerry DeFries, who was the principal of the elementary school, and he was a great outdoor enthusiast. He’s one of the ones who got it started in the school system. And I hiked the Sunlight Trail with him and some fifth graders, and I did a picture story for the paper, and there was a group called Aspen Theater Institute ATI. It was a big deal. Clayton and Bates were both in it. So I did picture pages about children, and the children’s program was the most important one. And so I did I started doing quite a few picture pages and. Then the year that 1972 that Pauli graduated from high school and was going to go to Colorado University in Boulder, I thought, how are we ever going to do this? We don’t have any money. She got a scholarship. But even so. So I went in and told Bil, I’m ready to go back to work. I had for two summers before that, I had worked at The Arrow Shop for Ewing Taylor, because I knew jewelry, because of Jim’s work. And I worked at The Arrow Shop selling Indian jewelry. I love Indian jewelry. And so I was working there, and Bil called me one day and said, George Madsen’s quitting. So there’s a job for you because he had told me, you know, I had to wait until somebody quit. And so I went back to work in 1972. In the fall. And.

 

Sara Garton [00:37:43] And about that time you met up with Chris Cassatt and started doing these. Wonderful profiles. Yes, that is one of the first things I remember moving to Aspen was reading those profiles.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:37:56] We did one every week. We would. The paper was still just a weekly, and I had a list of people that I wanted to interview and do features profiles on because I had met them all through the column, and I was also in a church group with all the wives, and we called it the Young Mothers group. And so I knew these people and these.

 

Sara Garton [00:38:26] Wonderful stories were there.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:38:28] I knew that the stories were there. So I would call them and make an appointment, and Chris and I would go and spend a day, usually with the person, if it was Jens Christensen or.

 

Sara Garton [00:38:40] Chris. Cassatt, by the way, was the Aspen Times wonderful photographer?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:38:45] Yes. And see, he and I started back in 1972 at the same time. He was what they called the flyboy. He when the papers came off the press, he would pick them up and take them to the table where they were.

 

Sara Garton [00:39:03] Collated.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:39:04] Collated and all that sort of thing. So Chris started as the flyboy, and I went back as a reporter photographer. But we both love photography. And so. Dunaway realized that he needed Chris full time. So in about a year, Chris became full time. I was only supposed to be part time. I became full time.

 

Sara Garton [00:39:33] Aren’t you one of the people that urged editor Dunaway that there needed to be more photos in the paper?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:39:38] Mhm. He always said, oh, it’s too expensive. And but I would say, you know, and the, the Illustrated News had come out at that time and they used a lot of photography and they were giving him quite a battle because they used photography. That’s why it was called the Illustrated News. I think there’s copies of those of at the Historical Society. You should look at them sometime. That was the Pabst family, because Shorty Pabst didn’t like Dunaway’s politics. So he started his own paper, and Nick Pabst was the editor for quite a while. And then it finally collapsed. And Dunaway hired Nick to be our editor, which was wonderful. He was a very good editor. He encouraged me a lot in the he encouraged Chris and I in what we were doing. And so he was editor for three years, then Adele Dusenberry for two years. Then I became editor in.

 

Sara Garton [00:40:53] in 1977.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:40:55] 1977, Yeah.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:40:59] And Dunaway said to me, you can be editor if you keep on writing, keep on doing what you’re doing.

 

Sara Garton [00:41:06] So your workload was tripled. Yeah.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:41:10] Yeah, it was quite a bit heavier there for several years.

 

Sara Garton [00:41:15] You know, Mary, another thing I’d love to touch on is, um, your, your life as a mother and the family life in Aspen. When you talk about it, it just seems like a pastoral idle that you had special friends. As you said, one thing you all got together was there was no money. And you did picnicking, growing vegetables, sharing food is a way to talk about that a little bit. And the kids.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:41:47] Um, the kids, uh, we were so poor. And so, Jim, uh, we had our own trucking business for about ten years. And then Jim got up one morning and said, what are we doing? I’m an artist and you’re a writer, and all we do is haul dirt. So we sold the trucking business to Stutzman and Gerbaz, and it’s now a huge business. I didn’t want to sell because I could see that we were going to start making money. Aspen was beginning to grow, and that’s how we got into the business, was that Jim looked around and saw that there a trucking business was needed. So we bought out Fritz Benedict. Fritz had a tractor and a truck and we bought them. We went to the bank and Woodall wouldn’t give us the loan, but Fritz cosigned it. So we got the loan to buy the truck and the tractor. And so we were in business, and we did really grow. We were just growing by leaps and bounds. But then there was a recession in 59, I think it was. And business just dried up. And so we sold for just what we had in the by then we had two, two caterpillars and two big trucks, and we sold for just what we still owed.

 

Sara Garton [00:43:22] Like in 59 or 60.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:43:24] 61 we sold in January. So Jim went back to college. He wanted to take some fine arts. He felt he needed it for the jewelry. He had apprenticed in New York City and become a jeweler, but all he knew was New York jewelry, and he wanted to be more artistic. So he went to Denver University and studied abstract art. He still does abstract rings. He loves doing abstract work, and he painted quite a while, and he hung in The Delice and sold quite a few paintings. And he had a shop. He had a shop in behind what was Elli’s. And he had a shop in the front of the Aspen Times. He had a shop for over 14 years. And in Aspen. Well, then again, there was a recession and he went he joined the operating engineers in out of Grand Junction and he operated heavy equipment. He drove high speed scrapers and he worked on the Ruedi Dam and he worked in California. He was gone a lot those years. He was, but in a way that worked perfectly with me, because then I was alone with the kids and it was poor, but it was the children and I would go hiking. We would take picnics and go have a picnic down by the Roaring Fork or along the Salvation Ditch was one of our favorites, and we would go along the ditch until we get to Joan Lane’s, and we’d go down with our picnic stuff, and Gretl Uhl and her two children would often come with us, and. Thanksgivings were always with there was a group of us. We were all so far from home that we couldn’t and we were all too poor. We couldn’t go home for the holidays. So Thanksgiving was always at Hayes house because we had this big old, um, iron stove that cooked the turkey just perfect. And so we cooked the turkey, and then Joan would bring salads and Flossie Adams would bring potatoes, and Gretl would always bring dessert. And then when my girls got big enough, they would bake the pies. So and then at Christmas, we would all get together. And summers we were always on picnics at the Lanes.

 

Sara Garton [00:46:19] And up at Difficult.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:46:21] And up at Difficult. And we would pool our food, you know, maybe I would have. I always had a garden, so I had Swiss chard and things for and lettuce things for a salad. And somebody might have a couple ears of corn and Hilda and Buzz Thurston were friends of ours too, and one time we were all on a picnic and Hilda and I hiked down the river and there was a man catching fish, and he had a whole thing full of fish. We said, look at all that fish, and we don’t have enough to eat. He gave us all his fish, so we broiled the fish over the campfire. It was delicious.

 

Sara Garton [00:47:28] About the family life in the 50s and 60s in Aspen. And I remarked that beside you bringing food, that there are some wonderful photographs. You have a fabulous photo archive of life in Aspen.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:47:47] I, um, I carried I had a twin reflex, a twin lens camera, and it takes wonderful photographs. It wasn’t a Rolleiflex, but it was a, um. When I was in college, we worked with speed graphics 35mm in the Rolleiflex. Only the professor of photography said there’s an even better twin lens camera. And it’s being made right here in Rochester. And it was Germans who had worked on the Rolleiflex in Germany, but they started, it was called a Duroflex. And so I bought that’s the camera I bought and I used it. Totally up until the mid-seventies. And I bought my, bought my first, um, 35 millimeter just because they’re smaller. The, the big camera, I used to ski with it and take pictures. And so I should get into how I put together the first Potpourri cookbook. In 1966, I decided I, I had to do something to make some money. I was.

 

Sara Garton [00:49:13] Not back at work yet.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:49:16] Not back at work yet, but, uh, and still tied down pretty much with the children. But, um, when we sold the trucking business, I told Jim I don’t want anything except I want to set up a darkroom. So we went to Denver, to Lindahl photo, and I bought a wonderful Omega enlarger. I knew what I wanted because I’d worked with different enlargers and the chemicals and the papers. And so I got all set up and I began doing portraits, family portraits, and children’s portraits I got because I had taken so many of my children and people had seen them. People started calling me to do their children. I did a lot of children’s portraits. In fact, I had a show once of just my children’s portraits. My first show was at the library and that was before I went back to work. So I was doing portraits And I began to get so many wonderful portraits that I wanted to do something with them. One year I used to take the children would go back to the lake and my father would send us tickets. We never could afford it. So he would send us the train tickets and we would go for a month or two. And so my children sort of were comfortable on the East Coast because they went so often as children. So I was sitting on the dock one day and it hit me. Well that’s perfect. Take the portrait and get the person’s recipe. Everybody loves cookbooks, so I’ll put together a cookbook with people’s portrait and their recipe. So I began to do that. I began to call people and say, I’m doing this book, and I want to include you in it? But I need to take your portrait and get your recipe. We called it cookbook, and the kids always went with me. I’d call someone and say, we’re coming over this afternoon. And they would make their recipe and we would have a tea party and or dinner or whatever, you know, and this is these were the years Jim was gone almost all the time. So I had the freedom to do this.

 

Sara Garton [00:51:49] It’s the dark room in the basement of your house.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:51:52] The basement of the house. It’s still there. Um, I don’t use it anymore because it’s. Everything’s color now, and I don’t have the camera chemistry set up for that.

 

Sara Garton [00:52:04] When you return to the times, did you do your own developing for many years still?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:52:09] Um, up until about. Let’s see. I remember when the boys said, you don’t need to do that. We’ll do it for you. It was about 1982 or so.

 

Sara Garton [00:52:22] Chris and …(garbled).

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:52:24] They did the developing for me. But I still did like for my column for several years I used things around town. I would take a picture of a door or a window or a face on the Elks building. I used to go walking a lot and looking for things to put in the column, and I did that for about five years before I started using people photos. Now and then I would use a people photo if an artist was having a show or something. I mean, it’s still so hard to remember that nothing was happening. An artists show, like if Herbert Bayer was having a show or Paul Soldner, that was a big deal.

 

Sara Garton [00:53:18] Big gathering of people.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:53:20] Big gathering of people at Patricia Moore’s. I’ll never forget one of her first art shows. And John Smith had just started Grass Roots, and I was there taking pictures because I wanted to use them in the column.

 

Sara Garton [00:53:35] This is Grass Roots TV.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:53:37] Television.

 

Sara Garton [00:53:38] One of the first community access stations in the United States. Mhm.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:53:43] And so John was there filming it. I was taking pictures and it was so cute. Marian Davis, do you remember how her Pat’s gallery was? It was downstairs. Marian Davis came in and she trailed her fur coat down the stairway behind her. It was so decadent.

 

Sara Garton [00:54:07] Wonderful.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:54:10] It was such a I mean, it was such an exciting evening. It was a very. That was a Soldner Show I remember, and, uh.

 

Sara Garton [00:54:22] Was Aspen Potpourri, of course, is still a mainstay on the bookshelves of Aspen Books. And it was it successful? Did it help you out?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:54:33] In the beginning.

 

Sara Garton [00:54:33] Oh, good.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:54:34] Um, I was I was helping Joyce Macdonald, who is Joyce Murray now at the Chamber of Commerce. She ran the Chamber of Commerce. And I could take Bates with me, and Bates would color, and I would help answer the phone and type and do all kinds of stuff. Joyce was a good friend. And so one day a man came in from Hirschfeld Press from in Denver, and he said, we got to talking and he said, we’re looking for books to publish. I told him about my idea for the Potpourri, and he said, oh, that sounds like a wonderful idea, and I’ll tell Mr. Hirschfeld about it. And he did. And Mr. Hirschfeld called me and said, we’ll print it. We’ll need a deposit of whatever you can come up with. Came up with $600. Our tax refund. And, um, they were so nice. They printed it and gave. Let me pay it off as I sold the books. Well, I sold the first 3000 in a year. I mean, it was the first book, really a photo book about Aspen. So it was very successful. Well, then a lot of people jumped into the idea, and there are now many, many books about Aspen. But I was the first. So I got that first batch of money and I’ve done five editions of it. The first was 68, then 71, then 70 or 71. I can’t remember for sure. Then I got too busy being editor. I did one in 75 and then I was just too busy. I let it go out of print for 15 years, and then in 91, I began to see that I was going to someday retire. So I brought Potpourri back. And then in 90, in 2002, I did the fifth edition. I think it’s finished now. I said that every time, but each time I never took anyone out. But I added people. Each time I added at least 50 people. And I think for the 91 one added about 100 people. So the book covers 50 years in Aspen. There are people from all those eras, and people looked through it now and they say, I can figure out this one. Look at that hairdo.

 

Sara Garton [00:57:24] What era, what decade?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:57:26] What decade it was. The 60s were pretty obvious. Remember, everybody had pretty far out here. So the book has been very popular and it’s still selling well. I sold three last week, just myself.

 

Sara Garton [00:57:41] And we talked about Pat Moore earlier. But I believe from reading the foreword to your book, The Story of Aspen, that she was the one who just urged you and Chris to assemble your wonderful written profiles that you had done for the Aspen Times and his photographs and put them together in a book called The Story of Aspen.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:58:03] She encouraged us and she kept pushing us. But, you know, we were so busy at the paper. My kids were in high school. Chris and Lauren had babies. And so for a long time, Chris and I would get together on a Saturday and we’d get so excited and we would make lists of ones that we knew we wanted to put in the book. And but we, you know, we just couldn’t do it. So after I retired in 92, I said, now that’s the first thing we’re going to do. We’re going to do our book. And actually, Jeff Newman, who had worked for Fritz Stammberger, who had printed in Aspen in the back of the Aspen Times.

 

Sara Garton [00:58:51] This is a small publishing company.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:58:53] Yes.

 

Sara Garton [00:58:54] And printed in Aspen.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:58:57] Jeffrey worked for Fritz. He was a very good printer. Well, when Fritz disappeared, Jeffrey tried to buy the business, but Dunaway didn’t want to sell it. So Jeffrey went to Crested Butte and opened his own printing company called Crested Butte Printing. And he called me one day. This was about 1994 and said, Mary, we should do a book about Aspen. It should be a picture book. And I said, no, there’s already too many. There were already three, I think, that were, you know, photographs, just photographic books. That was the 100 year high. And there was Aspen What is it? Spirit, soul or something?

 

Sara Garton [00:59:50] Mind, Body and Spirit.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [00:59:52] Mind, Body and Spirit. And so I felt that we would be competing too much with what was already in print. So he called back a couple days later and he said, what about that history book that you and Chris have been talking about. So we got together. Jeff came over and we all met in my upstairs office and talked about, was it feasible? Could we afford it? And Jeff, of course, had the figures in his head, and Chris and I knew what we could do. And so we each did what we were good at. I went through all of the clips. I had kept clips of all my stories all through the years. I have all these file boxes full. So I went through the clips and I made stacks of 1800s. And, you know, the different eras in Aspen, the silver mining, the farm and ranch, the, um, we call it the happy go lucky years, and then the glitz years And. Because we didn’t know if we had a book, but we had all these stacks. And I saw that we did have a book. So then I put them all on the computer. I typed them all in and edited them. Some of them really needed to be edited a lot. Like if they were for a certain show, I had to forget about the dates. And you know, they all had to be rewritten to a certain extent. And then I also went in the files and pulled all the photos, and we had most of them reprinted from the negatives. And then Chris put the book together. He was the production.

 

Sara Garton [01:01:51] The layout.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:01:51] The layout, and he scanned all the photos and put, you know, and put them onto the scans with the stories. And he figured out, you know, the pages and all of that. And then Jeff printed it. So the three of us, that’s why we call it Aspen Three Publishing.

 

Sara Garton [01:02:13] Ah.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:02:13] And then, um, we did two printings like that. And then Chris got lymphoma. And so Jeff and I bought him out. We figured what he still had coming. We were practically through the second printing anyway, and we figured what he still had coming, and we bought him out because we didn’t know. We thought he might really need the money. So Jeff and I reprinted two years ago. We did our third printing, and it’s an expensive book. It’s $50, so it continues to sell. And Potpourri is already now up to $45. They’re both hardcover, So sales are slower, but they’re constant, which is nice. So Jeff and I are still partners.

 

Sara Garton [01:03:10] Um, you are such a natural writer, journalist, author. Um. And photographer. It has it. Have you felt fulfilled in Aspen with that career? Have you been able to?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:03:25] I really have. I think that Aspen offered me the opportunity to do a lot more than if I had when I graduated. Syracuse had a program that if you graduated from the School of Journalism, they guaranteed you a job. And so they offered me I was offered a job with the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia and with Mademoiselle Magazine in New York. And I told the counselor, we’re going west. We’re going to Denver. He said, well, we don’t place past the Mississippi. I mean, the country was still sort of primitive, you know. And so but he said, you know, I’m friends with Ed Bemis, who is the head of the Colorado Press Association. He said, I’ll call him and see what he can do for you. So when I went to Denver, that’s how I got my job on the Aurora Advocate. He called them and they were looking for someone. So they. Syracuse did place me in my first job. But if I’d stayed in the city. You know, I would have been restricted. I would have been on the woman’s page. I was offered a job on the woman’s page of the Denver Post. Um, her name was Catherine Dines Prosser, and she was the long time editor of the women’s page, and she offered me a job.

 

Sara Garton [01:05:04] How do you spell her last name?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:05:06] P r o s s e r. Catherine Dines Prosser. She was editor for such a long time, and she was quite a person.

 

Sara Garton [01:05:20] You’ve been able to stretch here then you feel you’ve been…

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes Much more.

 

Sara Garton [01:05:23] Able to grow? Mhm.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:05:25] The Aspen Times was a weekly. I was in on the ground floor of the big change. You know the big growth was in the 70s and 80s. And that’s when I was editor and working there full time. And I feel like I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do the stories and the photography that I got to do. If I’d been stuck on a, on a daily in the city, and it was so funny when I first went to Denver. I, I um, I, I went to see Ed Bemis right away, and he didn’t have an opening right away. So I did beat the streets for about a month. And at that time, you know, we wore a hat and little white gloves and a suit.

 

Sara Garton [01:06:19] For your interviews.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:06:20] For my interviews. And I remember I went in the Rocky Mountain News. They were so rude. They were it was at that time, newspapers were very much a man’s business. There were no I mean, sure, there was a woman’s page, but that was.

 

Sara Garton [01:06:37] That was the woman’s department.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:06:40] And um, so I went in and they all had on their hats with the cellophane, the green cellophane and their sleeves pushed up with a black elastic around it. And the man I was who was interviewing, we were in the big city room and he said, “looky here, this little girl wants to work on the Rocky Mountain News.” And they all laughed. You know, I mean, it was it was really, uh, segregated at that time. And I was so angry. So then when I was offered a job on the weekly, that was much, much better. And I knew I could do more there. And as it was, it was a great experience. There were there was Ollie Bell, who was the publisher, and me and Jim King, who was the reporter and the photographer and Field McChesney. I loved his name. And that was just the four of us. We put out that weekly and as I said, it was photo offset and I learned so much.

 

Sara Garton [01:07:54] And you’ve kept active through all the years with your association of the different writers and reporters you’ve known throughout the state, not just Aspen, but I know you visit in Denver at the book fair and over in Steamboat.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:08:10] Colorado Press Women’s Association. I belong to that.

 

Sara Garton [01:08:16] Through which you have won many awards. I’ll add for the tape.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:08:21] I think I was the most awarded woman writer in the state for years.

 

Sara Garton [01:08:28] So then the question I asked is really moot, because you have made quite a name for yourself in journalism and writing in the state.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:08:36] In the state. Yes. And nationally, I’ve won many first prizes with my books, always won first prize in the national, um, contests. And I’ve gone to. I was named Press Woman of the Year in 1987. And we it was in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was wonderful. And I, I stopped going to the Colorado Press Women’s. Um, maybe about the mid 90s. Jim’s getting older. And it was always at a time with terrible weather. Saint Pat’s day or a little earlier. So we stopped going because of the weather was the roads. Twice I was signed up and was supposed to go and we couldn’t go because of the roads. So, um, about the same time, I started going to the book fair in Denver, and that’s in the fall. It’s in September. It was this last weekend. I didn’t go because we had something else that conflicted. But I’ve gone to it for about ten years and I really enjoy it. And I, I have many writer friends. Nancy Wood in Santa Fe who does fiction and nonfiction, and Sandra Dallas, who was a journalist for years and was the editor of Business Week. And she now is writing fiction. They’re all pushing me to write fiction, but and I’ve tried to write a novel about Aspen, um, sort of incorporating my grandmother’s story with Aspen, and it’s not working too well. I don’t write fiction that well.

 

Sara Garton [01:10:34] Well, I think you have turned what a lot of people would consider small town community pieces into a real art form and into something that’s been recognized and I’m so appreciated by your community. It’s a remarkable life you’ve had and you’ve been able to convey that to.. to Aspen, I think, and to the rest of the world.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:11:02] I hope so. After I almost died, after Bates was born. That’s when I began to feel that I had to do something about the people of Aspen. And that’s when Potpourri sort of began to gel in my mind. So many people were so wonderful to us at that time. You know, they brought us food. They took care of Bates was a baby. Um, I remember Lotte Bresnitz came over and taught Jim how to make. Um.

 

Sara Garton [01:11:39] An Austrian stew or food containers and.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:11:42] Stuff to feed the baby.

 

Sara Garton [01:11:45] Oh, Formula.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:11:46] Formula because I was going to nurse her and of course I couldn’t. And I was in the hospital. And so and I had nursed all the other four. So that was very devastating to me not to be able to nurse her.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:12:02] And so and Gretl, I mean, she brought meals and Joan took over the column, so I didn’t have to worry about it. And all my friends, everyone, they were just so wonderful. And Sepp was always such a help. If Jim was out of town, something went wrong in the house. Sepp would come over and fix it. I mean, it was just and Shady. Shady Lane was a good friend. He’s such a reprobate. But he was a good, solid friend. And of course, Joan and Shady got divorced. I mean, we all went through life together and Sepp and Gretl are both dead now, and it’s, um, just so many of our friends have left or have died. But Aspen is still a wonderful place.

 

Sara Garton [01:13:01] And that’s something, as your friend and something that I think has kept you healthy and vital, is that you can accept change, Mary, and I wanted to ask you about Aspen and change. There’s also a non-judgmental part of you that no matter what walk of life, if you are a ski bum, or if you’re a big CEO, or if you’re royalty, you treat them all the same. And they and as a result, you’re trusted in this community. And how did that happen in your life? That all people are just people for you?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:13:48] I don’t really know. It’s just something, as I said, I did society, obits, and weddings and news on my hometown paper from the time I was 14, and it just grew on me. I mean, all of this. You never. You never pass judgment on anyone. And that’s what I was taught at a very young age. And I think it’s just it’s just settled into me.

 

Sara Garton [01:14:23] And journalism reinforced it to keep that objectivity.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:14:27] And my parents were both very objective. My mother was much more subjective, but my father was so objective and so fair and so kind that that I had patterned myself after him.

 

Sara Garton [01:14:45] And people are people, and that comes through in your columns. And.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:14:52] Everybody is interesting. Everyone has a story. You just can’t. I don’t find anyone not interesting. There’s always a story to find out about them. And I have that curiosity. And I think people people love it when you want to hear their story.

 

Sara Garton [01:15:12] And it’s not people, but something has slipped in to some of your writing and some of your comments that, um, what does too much wealth do to a community? And it’s not the people. It’s somehow the money, isn’t it?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:15:30] The money. Yeah. The money does strange things to people. And you just it’s like right now, anything in Aspen is for sale. And it’s it’s a sad thing. I did like the fact that the brouhaha over the Paepcke Auditorium, they didn’t step back and didn’t try to buy the name.

 

Sara Garton [01:15:58] You’re referring to the name change? Yes. That that was considered by because of a wonderful gift to the Aspen Institute that the name was going to be removed.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:16:07] The name was going to be removed. And I think that that that also gives me faith in Aspen, that some things don’t happen. Money can’t buy everything. And I like that. I like the fact that I’d begun to feel that money could buy anything, but now I realize it can’t.

 

Sara Garton [01:16:31] You have had a long association in and out with the Aspen Historical Society. And I think that’s a story, too. You’re very pleased to see the outcome. It’s returned to its mission, and it’s even better than at the beginning.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:16:49] Right. And it was it’s very necessary if you don’t keep your history. You’re not much of a of a town. And almost every town does have a historical society. They all have realized that they need to know their past in order to move into the future. So I’m very pleased with what’s happened with the historical society. Ruth Whyte was very instrumental. She has she has given so much money, and she gave a house that they were able to sell and fix up the Wheeler Stallard House now. Recently she gave 600,000 more.

 

Sara Garton [01:17:38] To do an endowment fund. Is that right?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:17:41] And some programs that really needed doing. So I think without Ruth we would have been in trouble and we were in trouble anyway. But it’s pulled ahead and Georgia Hanson by getting the tax base that’s really.

 

Sara Garton [01:18:04] The district.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:18:04] The district.

 

Sara Garton [01:18:05] Ensures the future.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:18:07] So it can go on.

 

Sara Garton [01:18:10] Mary, is there anything that we haven’t touched on in your story, in your story of Aspen that you’d like to talk about?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:18:19] I should mention the historical society there. That history was one of my beats. And so I became acquainted with it with the Wheeler Stallard house. Actually, I had worked on Joan Lane and Julie. Uh, well, when.

 

Sara Garton [01:18:39] They were working on the archives.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:18:41] They started it and I helped. I was very interested and then, um, when I began doing these stories, I had to do a lot of research. And what would we do without all those wonderful early, well, newspapers collection all through the years that are at the historical society? They have all of the papers and they have the Illustrated News, and they have The Aspen Times, and they have the Aspen Daily News and the history of the town is in the newspapers, especially if the newspapers were well done. And Aspen’s been lucky all the way through. They had B. Clark Wheeler was a strong editor. He wrote wonderful editorials at the time that Aspen was going down the tubes as a silver mining town. And then Dunaway was a strong editor, and the gringos were for their time. They were not strong in outspokenness, but they were strong in community feeling. So, the newspapers I used to spend hours down in the archives researching a lot of my stories because, like the silver mining days, those people are all dead. So to get my stories, I had to go into the archives and read the old papers. That’s so fascinating.

 

Sara Garton [01:20:20] And you must be so. Yeah. And you must be so pleased that it will be online for the world to access.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:20:28] I know, isn’t that exciting?

 

Sara Garton [01:20:29] Amazing that we can type in a name Mary with a digital. the digitization of the all the papers that existed in Aspen.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:20:40] And you’ll get everything about that person.

 

Sara Garton [01:20:42] Person. If we want we can go to different pages, different years. It’s a wonderful…

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:20:47] It’s exciting. That’s one of the I’m very excited.

 

Sara Garton [01:20:51] And you, who probably have one of the most wonderful photo archives that exist in the city. It will eventually have a home there. Is that right?

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:21:00] I think so, yes. Just I mean, that’s what I want to do and it just depends if they can handle it all. There’s boxes and boxes.

 

Sara Garton [01:21:11] Well, but this new district that will be possible, be preserved.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:21:15] They’ll probably put it on.

 

Sara Garton [01:21:17] And then it will be online for people. Mary, they can view your pictures, I would think.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:21:23] I just don’t know how it’s all done. I know the Berko family is struggling with that right now, so I’ll sort of see how they handle it.

 

Sara Garton [01:21:34] Is there anything else you’d like to leave for people? You’ve had a wonderful story here. It’s my one of my favorite stories.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:21:45] I love writing. I’m still writing. I write for Sojourner Magazine. They. In a way, it’s kind of frustrating. Everybody wants me to write about the old times, and I still love doing an interview and keeping up, you know, with what’s current. But, um, Sojourner has me doing a column every issue that’s called Looking Back, and it is fun to do, and I don’t have to do too much research. It’s all in my head, or I know who to call. I did the beginnings of cross-country skiing, and I just called Jim Ward, and we had a long talk because he was one of the ones who really got it going in Aspen. So I’m going to try to incorporate more of that. The last one I did was on Peggy Rowland, because she’s 92 now, and I wanted her story. She grew up in the 20s here, and I needed to get her quickly and have her story be in, and people have really enjoyed it. This last issue I did on our family’s all getting together for the holidays, making our own families.

 

Sara Garton [01:23:17] And so looking ahead. I see you tapping at that keyboard.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:23:24] Oh, yes.

 

Sara Garton [01:23:25] Forever and ever.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:23:26] That’s right. You know, writing has been. I used to be a very, very shy person. Um, and like, in high school and college, I would never raise my hand. And talking in class, I was just terribly shy. And one of my professors said to me, you’re going to have to get over that if you’re going to work on newspapers. And again, I had to force myself to do it, but I did. And I just found that you can learn these things that you have to.

 

Sara Garton [01:24:09] Writing has.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:24:10] In writing, it’s, um. Anytime I’ve kept journals most of my life, it’s been a way that I could speak, that I couldn’t speak. It was any time, for years when something came up, I wrote it down. I wrote it all out. I would get my feelings on paper. Then I could handle things.

 

Sara Garton [01:24:38] And now. And you have a wonderful voice. Now you have a voice on the page and a voice with this interview.

 

Mary Eshbaugh Hayes [01:24:45] Thank you. I still don’t think I speak that well, but I’ve learned, I had to. If you’re going to be in the newspaper business, you can’t be shy.

 

Sara Garton [01:24:57] Thank you, Mary, so much. It was a wonderful interview.