Margaret "Miggs" & Dick Durrance

Interviewee:      Dick & Margaret (Miggs) Durrance

Interviewer:      Annie Gilbert

July 8, 1994     C102 – 1994.041.0001

 

I had a couple more specific questions than I think you answered on the Aspen Historical Society videotape and one set of them was for you Mrs. Durrance about competing in skiing as a woman and I was wondering how many women were racing when you started racing about?

I think not more than about 30.

 

In the whole country?

Well in the groups I competed with, they were from the West, from California and I think in the first State Championships, or it might have been the second I was only in one and I think there were about six.

 

And when was this about?

1937

 

And where…did you know them all beforehand?

No, no. I only knew a few, a couple of the ones who had been to Yosemite.

 

Were they from all over California basically?

Mostly right around the Sierras.

 

And why do you think…well I guess I should ask you, were there a lot more men competing at the same time than that?

Yeah I think they were probably ten-fold, it would be a rough guess.  I would say the women were about ten at the most.

 

So how would you explain that or…?

Hard to explain, it was a very new sport.  It was new and the total number of men of course was very small too.  He started in the East and I think the skiing was further along there than it was in California.  Oh yeah, it moved West just like the population moved West.  Not by covered wagon but…Well then I went to Sun Valley the second year to race and that was an East/West race and there was more people.  That was more like 35 ladies I think.

 

Well see part of me wants…part of me thinks really that’s a lot of women to be involved in a sport like skiing you know and then the other part of me thinks well it’s still, if it’s still just a tenth of the number of men who were competing, I’m not sure what to think about that and so I’ll ask you.

Well it’s something that has never come up really, it was just accepted I think that it was primarily in the East where skiing got started early on it was mostly in colleges and most of the colleges that skied at that time were men’s colleges.

 

Like Dartmouth for example?

Like Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the Ivy Leagues primarily were the people who had started, most of them had started, or a lot of them had started in Europe just on vacations and a lot of them started taking it up at that time.  But it was not, it was slow to grow and it didn’t get into the girls colleges and they were pretty separate.  Into Bennington it did, well not very much there were a few.  Nancy and Kathy went there and that was the next year.

 

Still in the Thirties?

Uh huh.

 

Was the sport different for women, were there different rules or did you wear different kinds of clothes or have different kinds of equipment or anything like that?

No we raced the same courses that the men did.  They were usually shortened, the downhills were shortened.  No, not then.

 

Well you said this is all a bunch of lies anyway?  Right so.

As far as opinions.  I remember the Harriman Cup when we raced in it started in the same place.

 

How about skiing styles, you know, where…?

They were the same.

 

I remember in the other interview you mentioned something Mrs. (Margaret Miggs) Durrance about working with Friedl Pfeifer as a coach and how his coaching style was a little bit daunting in the beginning.

Very.

 

Why do you think that was?

Well I think he was an Austrian and I was very new to the sport.  I had only started the year before and I had not…I had been in one race which was the Culpworthy (?) Championships and I didn’t win that, I think I got third.  But I went to Sun Valley and the girls who had raced in the 1936 Olympics were all there and Alice Chair had brought Friedl (Pfeifer) over to train the ladies team.  I was just a little daunted by some of the things that we were told to do, I had never skied things like that before.  I had not…Yosemite is a very small place and little bitty hills and all of a sudden we were racing on things that were a whole mountain you know and it was quite a startling experience for me.

 

But you became the daredevil more or less, huh?

Well I liked it.

 

Did you find anything in common with the other women on the team, or the women that you skied with?

Oh yes.

 

Like what for instance?

Well we all did ski and we all loved to go into the Ram afterwards and have a beer and dance and so on.  I mean just the things young women liked to do.

 

Did you find that you all had started skiing for similar reasons or similar circumstances?

No, everybody, almost everybody, I guess everyone had started before I did.  I was sort of one of the last to start of that group.

 

Had they started with their families or just were they general outdoors types?

They mostly started in Europe.

 

Oh really?

Skiing in Europe, most of the girls anyway.

 

Uh huh, on vacations?

You know them better than I did (speaking to her husband).  Alice Chair organized the ladies team before the 1936 Olympics and it was a hobby of hers to get the ladies going and so she started them in Europe.  She invited a couple of them to come over and join up with a group from Boston and some were there already.  She got them going and decided that she wanted to see American women become competitive in the international field.  So Alice Chair is really responsible for ladies becoming racers, the racing aspect of skiing.  But of course there were ladies that were skiing for fun, just recreational skiing before that and they would join their husbands or brothers or families and they would ski wherever people were skiing which was not all that widespread in this country.  She was the one that just decided that she wanted to see American ladies or girls become competitive in the international field.

 

So she found folks who were already skiing, women who were already skiing or did she actually take someone who she thought would have potential and teach them?

No, no.  She didn’t select them, they were skiers who on their own had become good enough in her opinion to join the team.

 

So she found them?

She located them.

 

Oh ok.  Do you think that the same kinds of things that people look up to in a male racer were also respected for women?

Who me?

 

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter, there wasn’t any distinction between men and women as far as desire went or being competitive and so on.  So if you were good at beating the others you became more famous, so it was a competitive sport.  Men and women had the same goals and aspirations that anyone would.

 

Do you have anything to respond to about that?

No, I think that’s right.

 

Would you say there was a ski culture among skiers, a certain way of looking at the world or things that you liked to do, something distinct from…?

We liked to ski.

 

Besides that.

No we weren’t peculiar.  I say pretty healthy because we always had to walk up the mountains that we skied down.  We usually had to sidestep all of the way up to pack up the course, so they were all women and men who liked athletics and who were game to try new things and it was something quite new.

 

What did you do in the summer generally?

Ride horses.  There wasn’t…I mean ski training didn’t go through the full year, I mean in the early days it wasn’t nearly as organized or as serious.  It was more informal and when the snow flew then you went and got your skis out and went to ski races.  I think there was far more unencumbered because it was a small group and we all did have the same interests.

 

Yeah, I was just curious if there were similar summer sports that skiers were interested in?

We only came together you know for a couple of months out of the year.

 

I was also curious since you both have been so involved in the film world and the photography world, how important do you think films and photos have been in promoting young ski areas?  Because I understand that you made a…

Ski areas?

 

Yeah.

Oh I think film and photography, pictures, instead of words, as opposed to words say a lot for skiing and have been utilized a great deal to promote the ski areas.  In other words to show people what it is like there and I think people that can’t come and magazines and so on utilize pictures as well as words to describe what’s available.

 

Now you made one or two movies for Sun Valley, is that right?

Well let’s see, two, my first film one was called “Spring Ski Chase” and one was called “Sun Valley Holidays”.

 

Now were those…?

One was promotional and one was a documentary.

 

Ok, so for the promotional one then, what kinds of things were you thinking about when you made the film?

We were showing everything that was there.  What kind of ski school, the activities that went on there and you tried to convey the idea that this was a great spot to take a vacation and incidentally you learned to ski.  That was the main thing, however it did show what went on there in the summer which were the normal things that in the west could be classified as a what do you call the ranch?  Whatever, it doesn’t matter, in other words the summer activities like riding and climbing and fishing and so on.  You showed everything that went on there year round.

 

So Sun Valley was meant to be a year round resort?

It’s a place to come take a holiday.

 

So did you have a specific audience in mind when you made the film?

Oh anybody who could afford it.

 

Ok, that makes sense.  Then for your documentary did you have a different…?

The documentary film that I did was pretty much a copy or used the model of the original ski chase that was done in Europe in the Twenties by a fellow by the name of Funk.  He featured Hannes Schneider and Lanie Riesenstahl in one of his ski chase films and used the Arlberg group of teachers and shot it right around Senando (?)(?).  And the story was simply a bunch of guys chasing another fellow and finally catching him.

 

You were the one who got caught is that right?

I played the part of the hare, the guy they chase and we used all of the ski teachers at Sun Valley after the ski season was over.  So it involved everything that you went, skied down, you climbed up.  So there was a lot of climbing involved and it took some time to do and it was shot, that first film which was a documentary about a ski chase.  It was done in April as I recall.

 

In ’36,’37?

No, in ’40.

 

’40?  Ok.  Now how about for Aspen?  You also did some films for Aspen is that right?

Well I was asked to run Aspen the second year it was in operation.  It opened in January of ’47, it was the winter of ’46-’47 really and I came in October of ’47, so the end of that year.

 

So you were General Manager is that right?

I was General Manager, general everything, there was only just a handful of us that ran it.  I had one girl in the office, Elsa Fischer and she did all of the bookkeeping and made the payrolls and all that, wrote the checks. Then there was Red Rowland who was in charge of the mountain (Aspen Mtn.) and he had been in charge of building them and he was a fellow with broad experience in construction and he had worked on railroads and so on.  So he knew the mechanics and the others were all pick up people from local people who were miners originally.  Who had been here and who were born into mining families and so it was only a half a dozen or so of them.  So we were a very small operation.

 

Well I have so many questions now, I don’t know which ones to say.

Take your time.

 

Well let me stick with the film questions, during your stay in Aspen in the Forties did you make some films for them?

Yeah, the first one was in ’48, I think that was the second year I was here.  That was called “Ski Time in Aspen”, no, no that was “Aspen in the Winter”, I beg your pardon.

 

And that was a promotional film?

That was promotional film and then at that time the railroad was still coming in with freight, there weren’t any passengers except on special occasions.  There wasn’t a heck of a lot going on here and I featured in that film skiing by Friedl (Pfeifer) and Fred Iselin and Friedl (Pfeifer) brought Fred (Iselin) over from Sun Valley, actually…yeah from Sun Valley and so it showed Aspen as it was in the very beginning in which there was limited amount of skiing, there weren’t many trails cut.  Two lifts.  There were two lifts, there were two lifts up to the top, one was made by the American Steel and Wire who built the first lifts in this country at Sun Valley and they built the lower lift which was the longer one.  The upper lift was made from spare parts from mining, old mining equipment and was built by mining engineers, the Harriman brothers and it had its problems since it was made out of pick up stuff.  We had the two lifts that went to the top of the mountain (Aspen Mtn.) at that time.  It took 45 minutes to get up.

 

That was probably less time than hiking right?

Yes.

 

So when you were making this film with Fred Iselin and Friedl Pfeifer what kinds of things were you trying to show about Aspen?

We were showing everything that went on in Aspen.  It was a promotional film to entice people to come, to make them aware of what was here.  That we existed and that we provided ski instruction as well as good skiing, as good as there was in those days and better than most places.

 

So what kinds of things do you think were Aspen’s best selling points at that time?

I think the fact that it was a town that was informal, had excellent snow, it was reliable snow, it came and the snow was as good as you could find.  We were at an elevation that pretty much guaranteed good snow and good skiing, since the town itself was at about 8,000.  There weren’t many places in those days that high or that reliable.  Alta was a little higher, but there was no Vail at that time and so we featured the fact that we had good skiing, good snow and good instruction and fairly decent accommodations and food, fairly.  Not many of them.

 

In those years it seems like European instructors like Friedl Pfeifer and Fred Iselin were strong selling points for areas in the United States, would you agree with that?

Well in Aspen though that was true and in the East, the very first areas in the East and in Sun Valley in the beginning.  In the East it was Mitizel, Franconia and places like that where a few Austrians and Swiss had come over and had started the first small ski schools there and then when Harriman built Sun Valley in 1936 he got a fellow by the name of Felix Shoscotch who was a count from Salzberg to arrange to have a bunch of Austrians from Salzberg and their Austrian jackets and everything else.  So they started having European type ski schools.  This was not the Arlberg method, I mean it was the Arlberg method which was simply the snowplow method and then a few years later Friedl (Pfeifer) came in and started up, again with the Austrians but it had gotten to a point where they had to hire Americans too and when he came to Aspen I would say there was a predominance of American ski teachers, not of Austrian ski teachers.  He was the only one, Fred (Iselin) was Swiss, but all of the rest were Americans.

 

And then later Stein Erikson right?

Oh that was many years later, many years.

 

Well what I was thinking is that because skiing developed as a sport in Europe before in American and because of the Arlberg method and the things that Hannes Schneider had developed in Austria I was thinking that American ski areas, early ski areas tried to draw connections to Europe in order to boost their reputation or to give them a feeling of legitimacy?

I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think that’s true.

 

Why not?

They simply drew on people who knew how to do it and they were the ones that knew how and whether they came from Switzerland, Austria or even some from this country.  I had never heard of the Arlberg method before except in these conversations.

 

Well I was thinking more of the names you know – Friedl Pfeifer and Fred Iselin and all of those guys.

Friedl (Pfeifer) came over to coach the ladies team and then I think the next, for the next year he taught at Sun Valley but then the War came along and that stopped him.

 

About Aspen the place, what drew you here?  I know that you came in ’41 for a race.

The National Downhill and Slalom.

 

Right and then the Aspen Ski Company (Aspen Skiing Co.) invited you here to work with them later?

We were partners with James Laughlin at Alta.  We had talked him into going to Alta when we both married and in Sun Valley and I had been with Laughlin, Jim Laughlin in New Zealand and Australia in 1937.  The summer of ’37 and we had skied at Alta and we had skied at Aspen and while we were in Sun Valley we realized that Alta had real potential and so we talked Jim into coming up with enough money to finish building the Alta Lodge.  In return for doing that the Salt Lake City Winter Sports Association a group of businessmen in Salt Lake who had already thought that they would try to talk the Denver Rio Grande into putting $25,000 to build a lodge, but that wasn’t enough money.  So they were sort of stuck with that, but they had a homemade built chairlift made out of again, mining materials and so Jim agreed that would be pretty good and him and I are close and we had been together for a while and so we decided right after we got married that we would like to go to Alta and start our own resort.

 

What was it about Alta that made you think it had such potential?

The most fabulous snow in the country, it still does.

 

Better than Colorado snow?

Well it gets a ton of snow, it just so happens that it’s geologically situated so that it catches the western storms that get over the desert.  They are sort of sucked up into Little Cottonwood Canyon, into the Wasatch Mountains and forced to snow.  For the Rocky Mountains you get as much snow there as you do anywhere, if not more and it’s usually dry snow because the base of Alta is 8,700 feet and so then it goes up to close to 10,000 feet.  So you don’t have huge runs, but you do have lots of dry snow and lots of avalanches.

 

Did you have problems with that?

They still have problems with avalanches closing the access to Alta from Salt Lake City because it’s a 4,000 foot climb up from Salt Lake to Alta and it’s on steep roads that has gully after gully for snow at the top to come rushing down and you’ve got lots of avalanches across the road.  They would close the road because the highway crews don’t like to take a chance on getting caught.  Now they blow them down and it’s not as dangerous.

 

Did you have avalanche problems at the ski area too?

Oh yeah lots of them, because there were lots of steep gullies, there was a lot of steep skiing up at Alta except for the upper basin which is fairly simple and not too steep.  I think anywhere where you have good skiing you’re going to really have avalanches.  Avalanches and skiing go together.

 

So if the snow, the amount of snow, the quality of snow was Alta’s best thing, what other characteristics made it good?

It was our own and we’d be starting something of your own.  In other words we, I think at that time thought that we could run a ski school that was a little different than the European type of school.  It was more a friendly type and our, my opinion was that ski technique wasn’t all that complicated and it could be fairly simple and could be taught in simple terms and not as dogmatically as the Europeans wanted everybody to believe.  So it was starting something new, a new ski school and a ski area and we were gung ho for skiing.

 

So what were your impressions of Aspen and the valley when you came here as far as landscape and snow and all that stuff goes?

It was muddy, it was a run down old town and the Hotel Jerome had one little light bulb that came down in the lobby, sawhorses for tables.

 

How about the landscape though and snow and skiing in comparison to Alta?

That’s why we’re here, that’s why everybody came because the mountains surrounding Aspen were fantastic, again it was high it was at 8,000 roughly in the valley and you go up to 12,000 and 14,000 so it was well suited to skiing and the town itself had a great deal of charm.  I mean for young people who wanted to come here and start a new life whether it was to start a family or to find a family whatever and there was a lot of excitement about being sort of pioneers in a small town that had a history.  The history wasn’t important, it was the skiing that drew all of the people here.  Everybody knew everybody else in the whole town.  There was a great community and spirit because it was small and you did know everybody and you didn’t have to lock your doors, you didn’t have to lock anything.  If you left your ski coat that you rode up the lift on overnight at the bottom of the lift it would still be there.  We went to Europe and never locked the front door, we couldn’t find the key.  So it was a lot of camaraderie I guess you’d call it.  Everybody felt like they belonged together and were starting something that was exciting.

 

You’re speaking of a community of mostly young skiers?

No, it was divided, there was music (MAA) too.  The old-timers were here, people who had been born here who had lived here and had lived through the mining days and they’d stuck it out and stayed here.  And either they became farmers or they subsisted.

 

You said that a few of them became involved with the Ski Company (Aspen Skiing Co.) building lifts and things like that?

That’s right a few of them, not many.  But then Walter (Paepcke) came about the same time and he started a completely different thing, there was skiing in the winter and in the summer Walter (Paepcke) started the cultural part of it and he started a thing called the Aspen Company and then the other group started the Aspen Skiing Corporation.  Then Walter’s (Paepcke) brother-in-law, Pussy’s (Elizabeth Paepcke) brother Paul Nitze sort of raised the money to get the lifts and so on in.  And Walter (Paepcke) was buying land and starting the Goethe Bicentennial and all that and the Music Festival (MAA) and things like that.  But in order to buy, if you wanted to buy stock in the passing company you also had to buy stock in the other corporation.  If you wanted to buy stock in the Skiing Corporation, you also had to buy it in the Aspen Company.

 

Do you know how long that lasted, that rule?

It lasted about the first ten years.

 

So there was a very strong financial connection between the…?

It was really, it was…(SIDE ONE OF TAPE ENDS) and the town could not survive very well on one or the other, it took both.  It had to be a year round operation with the exception of a few terrible months.  The mud season and the delightful fall season in which the weather was good and the colors were good, it was quiet.

 

So when you made films for Aspen did you also talk about the Music (MAA) and the culture in order to promote the area?

Oh sure, it’s always been the two together.  That’s Aspen, a combination of skiing in the winter and…and I think it was the first resort to do that.

 

That would make it…that’s one of the reasons why it’s distinct.

It made it unique from other ski areas, that’s why it was so attractive to young people and older people too.  That’s why it was worth while to be here year round, you could make a living at it, because the people came.

 

How would you compare the skiing in Aspen to places in the East and places in Europe that you’ve skied?

Well I’ve not skied much in the East, there was no reason too, I lived in the West, why ski in the East?

 

Well yeah.

I hope I didn’t make a solicitous remark?

 

No, lots of people agree, I grew up the East.  I asked how you would compare the skiing in Aspen to the East and the places that you’ve skied in Europe and maybe other places you’ve skied in the West like Alta?

What the devil did you come up with?  I said if you lived here there was no reason to go East to ski.  That’s true, you live here you’ve got skiing better than just about anywhere.  We did go to Europe and we lived there for many years and we skied all over Europe too.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t just as good in Europe.  It was a lot more crowded.

 

Much more crowded in Europe?

Oh yeah.

 

And this was in the Forties or Fifties is that right?

Fifties and Sixties.

 

How else would you compare the skiing in Europe to the skiing in Aspen, is the snow similar?

Well I think…no. For quite some time Aspen developed a reputation for taking good care of the slopes.  First before we had mechanical grooming we had a trail crew that with a shovel and skis would pack up the slopes and keep the runs in good shape.  Year after year we cut more and more runs and we were more concerned with the skier as a athlete, as a guy who really wanted to ski rather than partake of the social life.  In other words skiing was paramount here, in the European resorts it’s sort of a combination of people who like to sit in the sun and who like to hike and who are not necessarily good skiers.  I mean there was that mix, we didn’t have that mix here in Aspen.  In the winter you skied or you didn’t come.

 

Would you say that that is still true today?

Not necessarily no, I think a lot of people come today because they want to be seen here and then their friends come and they couldn’t care less about the skiing.  So there’s a lot to do besides skiing now.

 

What is this, how many broken legs have you had?

I broke the same leg four times.

 

In the same place?

No.

 

Wow, skiing always.  You broke it when you were skiing?

A lot of times it was done in the hospital because they didn’t set it right.

 

Oh, ok.

So a year later they had to re-break it.  So I was out for two years.

 

One of the things that interests me is how skiers’ attitudes about adventure and danger and whatever have changed over the years and it seemed like in the early years people just went and have fun and if they broke a leg, well that was just what happened you know.  Would you say that’s…?

It depends on how badly you do it.  There are broken legs and then there are broken legs.

 

That’s true.

Well I think that it varies with who it is, some people take it as part of life if you want to be a skier you may take a fall and other people aren’t really of that mind and so it’s the individual really.  It’s not a trend at all, in other words it wasn’t everybody at that time was gung-ho and oh, break a leg to hell with it and today they cry their eyes out if they break a leg.  I think that it’s just…you can’t generalize on the attitude of the people that come.  It’s a more varied group that do come now, rather than the young energetic adventurous types that were here in the early days.  Now we get a mix of old people who couldn’t care less if they ever ski and wouldn’t think of risking anything and there’s…you get the young people who risk twice as a much as we did in the old days.  There are also a lot of older people who come to ski here and have been skiing for a long time and they keep coming.  That’s one thing about skiing is that you can do it until you croak.

 

And families on vacation too.

Families on vacation, it’s a great family sport, it’s a great thing for the family to take them out and nowadays you can separate the kids so that they’re playing with other kids and have their own thing to do and then the parents can do their thing.

 

When you were working as General Manager in Aspen what kinds of concerns did you have?  I know one of them was promoting the area in which got you involved with the 1950 FIS, what other kinds of issues were you coping with?

My issue was to make money, making it easier too.  To make money you had to get more people, to get more people you had to make it easier.

 

Make what easier, the skiing?

The skiing and so in order to make it easier you had to have money.  There you go, it’s a vicious circle that you have to go through and that’s why I got the idea of having the World Championships here because they had never been held in this country and I had raced in Europe and I was aware that this compared to the European ski courses and championships courses and we definitely were qualified to put on a World Championship.  All we had to do was to get the powers to be which were in Europe to agree that it would be worth trying.  So we promoted that idea in order to get more people to come, to bring more money into town and to also build the…improve the skiing here.  So one went hand in hand with the other.

 

So you wanted to use the extra income in order to develop the ski area and then attract more people again after that?

All that worked together, in other words to have the World Championships you had to have good skiing, good courses.  That meant that you had to raise money to build those new courses and that’s what we did.  We got contributions from people who were interested in seeing this part of Colorado become good.  It was mostly Colorado money that put on the World Cup.

 

Oh really?

Yeah and it was not ski money, they weren’t skiers, these were the Coors Company, (the brewing company), the power companies and so on and banks and people like that and rich people who had money.  They thought that this was an excellent way to improve the image of Colorado as far as a tourist economy and they wanted the tourist economy to grow in Colorado.  It had the potential and all they had to do was start spending some money and developing the areas so that they would be attractive to outsiders.  Dick designed these beautiful trails like Ruthies Run and Dipsy Doodle and all those runs.  The ones that he designed and cut out because he knew what would make a good ski run.

 

What does make a good ski run?

What does make a good ski run? Number one, space, room, you don’t like to ski through trees so you got to have open space so you can make turns and not bump into something.  Alright that’s number one and then it has to be interesting, it can’t just be flat.  It has to follow the terrain, it has to utilize the terrain whatever gullies and bumps and…the variety of terrain that you’ve got on the mountain, but you mostly have to allow space because in the early days the trails in the East were maybe 10-20 feet wide, well you hardly had room to snowplow, much less do big turns.  Certainly you didn’t do any traversing and so we wanted to give them room to traverse if people wanted to come to a stop and so on and so we built runs like Ruthies Run which could be used for the World Championships, but also would enhance the skiing for the average skier, the beginning skier.  We had to have runs that appealed to people who were taking up the sport, who weren’t particularly good at it, but their dollars were just as good as anyone else’s.

 

Did you have any general philosophy about development or building trails or was it just every year you tried to build a few more trails or…?

Well the philosophy was simply to make more.

 

So bigger is better always?

Well not bigger is better, but more space.  The mountain (Aspen Mtn.) was big enough to accommodate more ski runs.  It also scattered people better so they wouldn’t all come down the same little trail.  You had to have a variety and a number of different runs to accommodate more people.

 

And the Ski Company (Aspen Skiing Co.) did they have any land ownership problems or anything like that with cutting new trails, do you remember?

Well we weren’t so serious about getting Forest Service (USFS) approval or anybody else’s approval about cutting trails in those days, nobody cared.  Nobody gave it a second thought and so we didn’t ask and we figured that the only way to do that is don’t ask, just do it.

 

And it worked out fine.

That’s how it worked out and it was many years before all of a sudden you had people who said, “My God they’re cutting trees down!” and “they shouldn’t dare do that, the elk or the deer might not like it.”  But that’s only the last couple of years.  That’s a group of people who have come in after the skiers.  In the beginning the only thing that we were all interested in was making the mountains good to ski on and anything else was secondary, such as ownership, such as wildlife, such as…I don’t know.  A lot of Aspen Mtn. was mining claims that Darcy (DRC Brown Jr.) and his family owned a lot of.  A lot of people owned them and had a lawyer in Denver who did nothing but trace in the courthouse who owned the rights, the surface rights to the mining claims.  There is surface rights and mining rights, in other words underground and overground.  So either they bought the surface rights from people who maintained and kept the mining rights.  There weren’t many because mining had gone “plewhy” when they went off of the standard.  So you did try to find that, but the upper third of the mountain (Aspen Mtn.) roughly is Forest Service (USFS) and the lower two-thirds were owned by other private individuals who had mining claims.

 

The Ski Company (Aspen Skiing Co.) ended up buying them out?

They bought them, at least bought surface rights if not total rights.  Many of them it was hard to tell who owned them.  The records were not good and so the question of quit claiming a lot of the land, in other words going to court and saying nobody owns this so I hereby announce that I own it and so they could pay whatever the back taxes were.  So much of the property that people built on in town and all around was quit claimed, had gone through the courts and nobody laid claim to that land so it was yours.  So there was that process plus we were trying to find living owners and offer them money for it.

 

So the Ski Company (Aspen Skiing Co.,) had a lawyer in Denver working on this?

Yeah.

 

They had you running the show pretty much…

In the very beginning yeah.  They had a Board of Directors, it was a Corporation run by a Board of Directors, most of them were in Denver and they were sort of voluntary, it didn’t pay anything and they were interested skiers essentially and businessmen.  So they knew what had to be done, they were aware of the fact that we needed money to run it and many of them bought up some of the old houses for a place to come to and they’d come up here.  For anyone who had money in those days it was a feast, you could come and if you had the money you could buy a lot of property for very little money.  But 99% of the people that came here didn’t have even that little bit of money and so it was the people with money that eventually ended up owning the property.

 

Now I understand that you all were involved in A-Basin is that right?

Well I was part of the group that started it yeah.

 

Could you tell me a little bit about that?

A-Basin?

 

Yeah.

Well Larry Jump had the idea and Thorne Rosenwall and Jarvis Shoffler and Sandy Shoffler, they were two brothers who went to one of the Ivy League schools, Williams? No I think it was Amherst and there were about five or six of us who decided that we would apply, that was Forest Service (USFS) land.  We would apply to the Forest Service (USFS) for a permit to build a ski area, one that was reasonably close to Denver and high enough so that it had good snow.  It was right at, it was above and below timberline, so it was a good ski area.  There was a problem that it was on the other side of Loveland Pass so you had to cross the pass to get to it.  But it was good snow and it was possible to do it.  It was really Larry Jumps idea and he and the Shoffler brothers.

 

And you helped them to get the permit?  What was your role?

Thorne first of all he and I were in business together, I was working for Thorne at the Ski Company making skis.  [perhaps Dick is referring to the Groswald Ski Company in Denver]

 

This was about when, I forget?

Must have been ’46, after the War, right after the War.

 

And then so you and Thorne had…

Well we all got together and Larry and the Shoffler brothers actually went up there and ran it and they got Max Durkham who had worked with the Forest Service (USFS) back in Pennsylvania and he came over and he joined up with the group too.  But he bought a homestead down at Keystone and made a fortune by selling that to Keystone and Arapahoe and so he did well.  I never made a nickel, I got $1.00 worth of stock.  I guess I still have it somewhere.  So we did it just because we were friends and were interested in seeing more ski areas.  We had no grandiose ideas that anybody was going to get rich.  We were just trying to get enough money to try and build some lifts.

 

So folks from Denver could come and have something to ski on?

Yeah for people from Denver, it was a weekend resort.

 

So it had a different character as compared to Aspen would you say?

No lodging, no housing, you just drove up during the day and skied.

 

Well I’m trying to think did I ask you about skiing in Europe and if the skiing in Aspen is better than that or…I can’t remember if we finished that question?

You did ask us and we did say that with European skiing there was more of a mix and they weren’t as concerned with the skier per se such as improving the snow conditions like grooming and fixing up the ski areas.  It may be different now we haven’t been there for…

 

No I’m only speaking of those days…

No I’m only talking about those early days we were there, we can’t say a word about what’s going on now.

 

Well you can.

All we know is what people say after they went there.

 

Well I can’t think of anything else, thank you so much.

If you think of anything, give us a holler and we’ll try to answer it.

 

Great.