Video Interview: Dick & Margaret Durrance

1993.023.0009 Video History Dick & Margaret Durrance

Interview with Jeanette Darnauer

August 18, 1993

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:00:15] This is the Aspen Historical Society’s video history project. The guests are Dick and Miggs Durrance, and I’m Jeanette Darnauer. Dick, let’s start with you. Tell us, uh, start back from your childhood.

 

Dick Durrance [00:00:31] Good Lord.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:00:32] Born in Florida. Go all the way back and then up to, uh, kind of, when you went to, moved to Germany, why your family moved to Germany.

 

Dick Durrance [00:00:41] Well, I guess, I guess I should start by saying I was born in Florida, the ski capital of the world. And, uh, where we have all kinds of snow. No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t know about snow until somebody from the North, when I was living in West Palm Beach, a friend of mine, a buddy who was also about eight years old, said that there was such a thing as snow. And I, from that point on, I was very curious and fascinated and wanted to know what snow was like. My parents decided that that was such a big item with me that they sent me to school up north to New York Military Academy in New York State, and I guess I was about 10 or 12 years old. And by golly, I did see snow for the first time up there. The first time I thought I saw snow, it was just ashes coming out of the incinerator. But then later I found out that snowflakes were real, and they did melt if they hit on your hand or anything like that. And from then on, I was hooked on snow.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:01:47] Why did your family decide to move to Germany?

 

Dick Durrance [00:01:50] Well, there were five of us. Uh, we were three boys and two girls, and my mother had decided that she would like to take us over to Europe and give us an education, just for variety’s sake in, somewhere in Europe. We weren’t quite sure where to go, but she had been told by a professor she had in college that we should try Germany, that they had a very good educational system. And so without further ado, she simply hopped on, got us all together. She gathered the clan. There were five of us, and we got on a little boat and, there were no airplanes then. That was 1927, and we all headed for Germany. Uh, and we wiggled our way down from northern Germany, from Cuxhaven, which is the port to Hamburg, always holding in front of us a photograph that we’d seen on a boat of a mountain with snow on it. And that’s where we headed. We had no other place in mind. We had no plans at all except to go to Germany. So this mountain, with the snow on it, happened to be Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which has since become quite a place to ski.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:03:12] Did your mother have any knowledge of Garmisch at that time?

 

Dick Durrance [00:03:16] None of us had any knowledge of anything to do with Germany. We couldn’t speak a word of German, and we had no relatives or friends, didn’t know a soul there. We just took off and headed for Germany and we ended up, uh, without too much trouble…maybe we did have some trouble. We couldn’t speak the language. Not many people spoke English, but we did end up in Garmisch, and we hit it on a day when it had just snowed about a foot and a half. The sun was out, and we were fascinated. We thought, this is heaven, we’ll stay here. So we walked the streets until we found a house to rent. We went back to Munich, got our luggage and never left there for five years.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:03:58] And you were how old when you moved there?

 

Dick Durrance [00:04:00] Uh. Let’s see, I must have been about, uh…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:04:03] 11.

 

Dick Durrance [00:04:04] 11, I guess I forget it’s been a while ago. {laughter}.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:04:07] Yeah. What, uh, tell me the first time that you skied, when you, how you were introduced to skiing?

 

Dick Durrance [00:04:13] Well, actually, we were so fascinated with snow and possible skiing that we even bought skis in Hamburg the day we arrived in Germany. They happened to be cross country skis, but we didn’t know the difference. And so we took them with us to Garmisch. And I guess the first day we got there, we tried them on, uh, knowing nothing about it. And we were skiers from then on.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:04:39] Your mother also?

 

Dick Durrance [00:04:40] No, no, no, no, she, uh, she took care of us, and she didn’t ski. But my, essentially, it was my brother, my older brother, Jack, uh, and he was two years older, so it would make him 13. The two of us would take off and go into the back hills where there was no one else. And in our riding breeches and riding boots, we put on those cross-country skis and tried to jump.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:05:11] How’d you do?

 

Dick Durrance [00:05:12] Oh, we did, we thought very well, we must have gone two feet. {laughter}

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:05:16] So you were there for five years.

 

Dick Durrance [00:05:18] We lived there five years. We went to school there, eventually learning the language and becoming very familiar with all the mountains around there, because that’s what we did. We played in the mountains.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:05:31] At that time did you, um, think that the, that the ski industry in some aspect was something you wanted to spend your life in?

 

Dick Durrance [00:05:38] No. Never crossed my mind.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:05:40] You’re answering…

 

Dick Durrance [00:05:42] Oh, it never crossed my mind that we would end up being, uh, living with skiing for the rest of our lives at that time. We just thought it was great to be in snow and in mountains. And of course, the ones there are gorgeous.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:06:00] Do you remember the first race that you saw?

 

Dick Durrance [00:06:02] Uh, the first race… I didn’t see one, I was in one in school. Uh, it was, uh, I guess you’d call it grade school. And we all ran cross-country. That’s what we did. There was no downhill racing at that time.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:06:18] Well, what was the, um, 1932, when you watched the German downhill race at age 18?

 

Dick Durrance [00:06:27] Oh, no, I was in it.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:06:28] Oh, that was one you were in.

 

Dick Durrance [00:06:29] Oh, yeah. No.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:06:31] Okay. Tell me about that race.

 

Dick Durrance [00:06:32] Well, that was the first slalom race that they’d ever held in Germany. And in fact, it’s when slalom racing was just barely beginning in 1932. And I raced as… by then they called it “Jungmannen,” which was “Junior,” and I happened to win it because there weren’t that many people who had been skiing. And we’d taken it up as soon as it became known that you could do that, and there were little flags that you could, they were about two feet high. And so it was very easy to get through them. And there were just little sticks with paper flags.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:07:14] And what were you doing all this time, Miggs? Tell me about your, where you grew up and, and started getting your love of skiing.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:07:22] Well, I wasn’t as fortunate as Dick, starting as a young child. I started really, uh, my first year in college, and, um, I went up to Yosemite, and I was extremely fortunate because, um, it was December, early December when we went up, my mother and I, and the road washed out in a terrible storm, the road from Merced to Yosemite. And it was six weeks before it was repaired enough for anyone to get in there. So I was the only one who wanted to ski. I’d go up to Badger Pass. They had two Austrian instructors at the time, um, Hannes Schroll and Sigi Engl, and they would take turns teaching me all day, every day. So I stayed on for five months and began to learn.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:08:22] And how old were you at that time?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:08:24] I was about, um, 18.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:08:27] Oh, freshman year, you said, first year of college.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:08:27] Yeah.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:08:29] Were you born and raised in California?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:08:30] In San Francisco. I was born in San Francisco and lived there and in Berkeley. I was going to school in Berkeley when all this started.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:08:45] When you went up to ski for the first time?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:08:47] Yes.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:08:48] Were you, um, automatically, did you automatically fall in love with it?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:08:52] Yes, I was fanatic. Absolutely loved it. And the next year, um, I thought I had to go back to school again, so I started back. And then, uh, I got a letter from Yosemite Winter Club, Ski Club, asking me if I’d like to go to Sun Valley to race in a, one of the first races they had there called the Jeffers Cup race, which is the nine Western states. That was a team race. And they asked me to be on the California team, along with Bill Janss, who started Snowmass and then Sun Valley and then bought Sun Valley. He was one of them. Marty Aragé (sp?) was another one, and there were only about 30 girls in the race, so I couldn’t have gotten less than 30th. I was somewhere up in the first three. I didn’t win it, but I think I was third. And um, at that time it was 1938, I believe. And the girls who had been on the 1936 Olympic team were all in Sun Valley, along with Alice Kiaer, who sort of organized the girls in Europe and then over here. And they asked me to stay for the rest of the winter and try out and train for the Olympics of 1940. So I guess it was ’39. Yeah. And in the spring of ’39, we went, all went to Mount Hood and tried out. And I just got on there by the skin of my teeth. But the Olympics were called off because they were to have been in Finland, and Russia marched into Finland. So there were no Olympics for 12 years.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:11:04] How much time did you have before you knew? I mean, you had been training for a long time. When were they canceled, you know, how much prior to the race?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:11:14] I believe they were canceled in September. Isn’t that right?

 

Dick Durrance [00:11:19] Oh, sometime in the fall, yeah.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:11:19] And we were to have left in the fall. We were to have left the end of October.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:11:26] Hm. So that was, that must have been quite a disappointment.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:11:29] Yes. I mean, it was extremely disappointing, but Averell Harriman, being a very kindly soul, invited all the girls to come back to Sun Valley the next year. And by that time, Dick…

 

Jeanette Darnauer To race?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:11:46] Well, to… we were invited back to keep on training in case the war was over and something might happen. And besides, he was just a very kindly soul.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:11:59] Yeah.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:11:59] And at that time, Dick had graduated from Dartmouth, and Averell had given him a job as publicity photographer at Sun Valley. So, uh, we became quite well acquainted.

 

Dick Durrance [00:12:17] In the darkroom.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:12:18] And he would take me in the darkroom. And I learned a great deal in the darkroom. But it wasn’t always about photography. {laughter}

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:12:28] Well, we’ll go into that in a little bit. Um, going back to, uh, to the tryouts of the California team, was that, did you have a lot of competition at that time?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:12:41] Uh, the California team, um, when I first tried out was the first year I started skiing. There were five ladies in the team, in the whole race, so I couldn’t have gotten less than fifth in that one, but I think I got second or third in that. It was very early in the days of skiing in California.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:13:04] And the Yosemite Ski Club. Was that what you called it?

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:13:06] Yes.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:13:07] The Yosemite Ski Club, uh, consisted then, I assume, of almost every California skier.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:13:12] The Yosemite Ski Club was, I think, probably the biggest ski club, and there must have been 15 or 20 people in it.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:13:21] Okay. When you started skiing, were you, did you ever think about, dream about trying out for the Olympic team and being on the Olympic team?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:13:32] No. When I first started skiing, um, it didn’t occur to me, but I had heard a lot about Sun Valley, and I thought Sun Valley would be absolute heaven. And by the end of that winter, I really wanted to go to Sun Valley sometime. And I’d heard an awful lot about a young man who kept winning all the races, this fellow Durrance, and I kind of thought I’d like to meet him, too. So when I did go to Sun Valley, I not only met Dick, but Averell Harriman, too.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:14:06] Well, so let’s go back to you now, Dick, a little bit. You, we left you in Germany at age 18. You came back to the, to the United States…?

 

Dick Durrance [00:14:13] Yeah, I came back. I came back home, and, uh, of course, the family at that time had to go back to Florida. Uh, it was right at the point at which Hitler had taken over. And Americans weren’t particularly welcomed. It was a very nationalistic…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:14:31] In Germany?

 

Dick Durrance [00:14:32] In Germany. And Hitler was a big boy then. And so we decided it was time to come home. And home at that time was still Florida. And I spent, I guess, the first three weeks there. And during those three weeks, I kept trying to find out how I could get north to where there was snow. And I found out that the best place to go to get snow and still continue the, my education was to go to Dartmouth. I’d heard about it, so I hopped on a bus and headed up to New Hampshire.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:15:06] What were you studying at Dartmouth?

 

Dick Durrance [00:15:09] Uh, well, what was I studying? Well, I went there and tried to get in. I had to get in first before I could study. And when I had my interview with the dean of admissions, he listened carefully, and he finally said, “Dick,” he says, “I think your science courses are great, but God, your English is terrible.” It had suffered during the five years that I lived in Germany, and I had discovered that the way to speak was to put your verb at the end of the sentence, the way you do in German, and my English needed a little polishing. He suggested I go to high school and take all five years, I mean four years, of high school English and four years of American history. And then he would like…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:15:57] In one year.

 

Dick Durrance [00:15:57] …in one year, and he would, then he would talk to me again and see if it would be all right to go to Dartmouth.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:16:05] So you did?

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:16:06] So I got… Yes, I got a job washing dishes in Newport, New Hampshire, which is 30 miles south of Hanover, New Hampshire. And I did just what he said. And finally I got in.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:16:19] And then what did you decide to study?

 

Dick Durrance [00:16:20] Oh, then, then I decided I’d major in art. Uh, and so… I had become interested in art when I lived in Germany, in painting and things like that. So I didn’t know it was going to be photography at the end, but it was a good preparation for it. So I went to school and… as an art major.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:16:43] His English, when I first knew him, was rather strange. He had a southern accent in English and a southern accent in German, because he lived in Bavaria, where it’s as different as it is in this country.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:17:01] Mhm. How funny. How did you get on the ski team?

 

Dick Durrance [00:17:06] Ski team? Well, I managed to win a few races. Uh, in fact, I won almost all of them because there weren’t many skiers in 1933 when I came back. And so I think I won, oh I don’t know, a whole flock mostly. In those days, you ran four events, uh, in college. College competition involved both downhill, slalom, jumping and cross-country. And so as a result, you had to do all of them, which is not a bad idea anyhow. And so I raced in all those events. And finally in 19–, I guess it was thirty, yeah, the tryouts were in ’39, and by that time I had raced quite a bit.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:17:51] Tryouts for the Olympics?

 

Dick Durrance [00:17:52] Tryouts for the Olympics, and that’s how I got on the team.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:17:56] Well, who else…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:17:57] But you were on the ’36 team too.

 

Dick Durrance [00:17:59] Oh that’s right. Oh my God, I forgot about that. That’s right.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:18:02] Tell me about that one.

 

Dick Durrance [00:18:03] Yeah, I was on the ’36 team. Sure.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:18:06] In ’35 it was…

 

Dick Durrance [00:18:09] ’36, I was, I was a sophomore at Dartmouth at that time, and I’d gone out in ’35, I beg your pardon, into Mount Rainier and we had the tryouts there, and I won them. I got on the team, and I decided, that was my sophomore year, that I would go to Germany and further my art studies. And I went to Munich, studied art, but also studied the downhill course in Garmisch, my old hunting grounds, I mean, where I’d grown up. And so I studied very carefully all summer long, exactly every bump and every rock and everything else on the downhill course, so that I would have maybe an advantage over some of the others. And so I spent the whole year in Europe, and we did race in the Olympics. And that was in February. After the Olympics, a number of the, my friends who were on the team and I traveled around to various countries in Europe. Went to the Arlberg-Kandahar, to the FIS in Innsbruck, and to the six-day downhill races in Sestriere. And we traveled all over. And in those days, we were amateurs, but we were always invited and got board and room at these different places where they held the races.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:19:26] How did you get a place on the German national team?

 

Dick Durrance [00:19:29] Oh, I was just automatically, uh, one of the top skiers, and I raced for the Garmisch Ski Club. Uh, that was the only one there.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:19:40] But that was while you were still living there.

 

Dick Durrance [00:19:42] That’s while I was still living there. That was not after I’d come home.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:19:46] All right.

 

Dick Durrance [00:19:47] At that point, I was American again.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:19:49] Okay, that’s where I was confused in the, reading about it. What was the Arlberg like to race? And that’s supposed to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest, downhill courses in the world.

 

Dick Durrance [00:19:59] Well, it’s still the same one. Uh, and…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:20:03] You’re answering.

 

Dick Durrance [00:20:04] Well, the downhill course for the Arlberg-Kandahar, which was in Sankt Anton, was called the Galzig. And it was a rather difficult course, and I think it’s the same one that they use now. Uh, but in those days we all had bear trap bindings, long thongs, long skis, and didn’t know any better. So we tried to go as straight as we could.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:20:32] How did you do in it?

 

Dick Durrance [00:20:34] Oh, I think I placed in the first ten, thereabouts. In all the races that we did in 1936, while we were racing over there, I was generally placing in the, anywhere from the, in the first ten, sometimes in the first five. And at some points I was leading.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:20:53] Who else was on the 1936 American team?

 

Dick Durrance [00:20:57] American team was a fellow from Dartmouth called Ted Hunter, who was very good then, and Don Fraser was a jumper, but then he tried downhill and slalom and so he joined us. Darroch Crookes from Seattle was another one. Uh, Bob Livermore from Harvard was another, and Alec Bright, also from Harvard. So it was mostly, uh, kids from college because they were the racers at that time, not altogether.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:21:31] Then you went back to Dartmouth and tried out again for the 1940 Olympics?

 

Dick Durrance [00:21:36] Yeah, I got them mixed up. I got the, I got the Olympics mixed up. I went in two, I made the ’36, there was no problem there, and in ’40, there was really no problem either. But that’s when Miggs and I met, and we looked forward to going to the ’40 Olympics. Instead of that, we got married.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:21:56] That’s pretty good. Um, how did you meet, uh, or have the occasion to get to work for Averell Harriman?

 

Dick Durrance [00:22:05] Oh, I simply won the races. I beat all the Europeans when he first, his first, uh, Harriman Cup race. He thought that was so great that I should work there.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:22:15] Oh, so you were… Okay, you had come out to Sun Valley. You were racing…

 

Dick Durrance [00:22:17] I’d come out to Sun Valley from Dartmouth. I’d raced, and I beat the top Europeans that he had invited over. And so with that, he and I became great friends. He offered me a job, and I didn’t hesitate to take it.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:22:34] Now Miggs, you had been anticipating meeting this Durrance skier that you’d been hearing about.

 

Dick Durrance [00:22:40] Nice kid. {laughter}.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:22:41] Tell me, do you remember the first time you got to meet him?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:22:46] I’ll never forget the first time I met him. The first time I saw him, he was up in a tree. There was a very steep slope on the Warm Springs course called the Steilhang. And he was in, on an opposite slope with a camera that was as big as his head, shooting the other racers coming down, instead of training. He was already into photography at that time.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:23:15] And that’s how you saw him?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:23:17] Yeah.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:23:17] How about the first time you met him?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:23:20] Um, I really…

 

Dick Durrance [00:23:22] About that same time.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:23:23] Yeah, I met him about the same time. We were all a group together, you know, racing and…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:23:30] Did you start dating right away?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:23:31] No, as a matter of fact, we didn’t.

 

Dick Durrance [00:23:34] She had a very good boyfriend.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:23:37] I had several.

 

Dick Durrance [00:23:40] Several, but the one that was number one then was another racer. Another ski racer.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:23:45] So you thought you were out of the picture?

 

Dick Durrance [00:23:46] No, no, no, I gave that no thought. I decided HE would be out of the picture.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:23:52] Okay. How long did you date before you got married?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:23:55] About six weeks, I think, was our whole dating period before we got married.

 

Dick Durrance [00:24:02] Life was short. You had to do things in a hurry.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:24:04] Yeah.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:24:05] Well, one of the reasons we got to know each other quite well. We went to Friedl Pfeifer’s wedding in Salt Lake City, and there was a whole car full of us. It was Dick’s car, and we went to Friedl’s wedding and then to Alta to a race that they had “called” an FIS, although I don’t think it was a sanctioned FIS race. And it was snowing so hard during that race. Of course we had to climb up. There were no lifts in those days, but we climbed up in the huge snowstorm. I remember sitting in a tent for hours, and the men ran first. And some of them were so blinded by the snow and the snow was blowing so hard… I think it was Alf Engen or someone that ran into a snowdrift, and then the next person that came down found his goggles and brought them down. Oh, but they never did find out really who won it.

 

Dick Durrance [00:25:10] Timing in those days wasn’t the best. It was, what you did, you had timers who’d synchronize their watches before the race. They climbed all the way up by foot and started their watches. And when they got down, they recalibrated the difference that they’d gained or lost. And then they sort of figured out, more or less, who won. And it happened in this race that I think they had, before they got through figuring, they had at least four winners.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:25:45] Tell me also, for those people who don’t know about Friedl’s involvement with Sun Valley, how you, what his role was there, how you got to know Friedl.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:25:55] We got to know Friedl very well because he came over as coach of the ladies’ team. He was brought over by Alice Kiaer, who had organized the girls in Europe to race in ’36. And he had met Alice, and she brought him over really just to coach the ladies’ team, which he did the first year. The next year, I believe, Averell put him in charge of the ski school, but we still saw a great deal of him there.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:26:31] What was he like as a coach?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:26:33] He scared the hell out of me. {laughter}

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:26:36] He’s tough, huh?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:26:38] Well, I wasn’t used to being treated that way, but he… I remember, the first week I was there, we went to the top of Dollar Mountain, and there is a place where, you know, people came around, so it was heavily ridged and it was very steep. And we got to the top and he said, “Now vee vill schuss.” And I looked down there, and I thought, “Never will I live through that.” So I waited until I was the last one and finally, I couldn’t… nobody else had killed themselves, so I had to go. I remember I got to the bottom, and it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I was in hysterics by the time I got to the bottom.

 

Dick Durrance [00:27:30] But when I was there in ’36, Dartmouth at that time knew they were… Otto Schniebs was the coach originally, I mean, when I first went there, and they asked me to stay over. There was a Dartmouth professor over there at the time, and he and I went around, and we were supposed to interview all the potential coaches for Dartmouth. And among those that I interviewed was Friedl.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:27:56] Oh, is that right?

 

Dick Durrance [00:27:57] And when I first went to see Friedl, and I spoke German, I spoke it as a native German. And he couldn’t believe that I was an American. He thought I was a Bavarian.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:28:10] Is that right?

 

Dick Durrance [00:28:10] Oh, yeah.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:28:11] Well, you were young enough to be able to pick up the language.

 

Dick Durrance [00:28:13] And young enough. And so we interviewed a whole bunch of people, and we finally selected, or the college finally selected, Walter Prager from the results of our interviews. And that’s how Walter Prager got in. But that was the first time I met Friedl.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:28:29] Miggs, then when you got to the bottom of the hill of that run, what did Friedl say?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:28:38] He laughed his head off.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:28:41] So you were okay, huh?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:28:43] Yes, yes. So then, so then I sort of trusted him a little more.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:28:48] You learned a lot then?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:28:49] Ah, yes, I did, and he was very, he was an excellent coach. He really was. And he was very kindly. I had a bad, um, spill at one point. It was very icy, and I went down a ravine. And, um, my skis were very stiff and they stayed in the bottom, and I went ahead and hit my head on the ice and got a concussion. And they took me to the little wing of the lodge that was the hospital. And he came in that afternoon with a new pair of skis that, Friedl Pfeifer skis. Of course, I had broken the skis too, but he came in and said, “I think, I think the fault was with the skis, not with you.”.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:29:36] Oh how nice.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:29:37] Yeah, he was very nice about that.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:29:39] We always have heard that he was quite a ladies’ man. Uh, did you notice that as a young skier?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:29:49] No. Actually, uh, I didn’t. He was very serious. Yeah.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:30:00] Did you, going back to your, beginning of your photography career, Dick, did you, how did you get interested in photography? You said you were interested in art.

 

Dick Durrance [00:30:10] Well, no, I got interested in photography simply through the fact that, uh, Averell Harriman said, “What would you like to do, when I was still in school and after I’d won two races, and he wanted me to work out there.” And I said, “Well, I would like to make, do photography and maybe make some films.” And, I hadn’t the vaguest notion of how to do either. And so he, he arranged for the man in New York City, who was the publicity man, to send me a Speed Graphic up to Dartmouth. And I was supposed to shoot so many pictures, uh, every week and send them back to him for critique. And that’s the way I got it. That’s when I first started shooting pictures. And then when I first went out to Sun Valley and worked full time, uh, he said, well, I forget how it happened, but they wanted to have a ski movie. So we made a film called “Sun Valley Ski Chase,” and I got my roommate from college, Steve Bradley, who later became my brother-in-law, uh, to join me. And the two of us made a film called “Sun Valley Ski Chase.” And Steve was the hare who caught the, the… No, he was the fellow on snowshoes who finally caught me, the hare. And we had all the ski teachers from Sun Valley working after the, Sun Valley closed, the ski season was over. And we, I think, we broke 2 or 3 legs, a couple backs and so on because we did crazy things on icy spring snow. But we had great fun doing it, and it was so much fun that I decided filmmaking wasn’t such a bad deal after all, and so…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:32:02] You were in the film as well shooting it?

 

Dick Durrance [00:32:05] Oh yeah, we were, everybody did everything in those days. And uh, so after that, I did, that started my film career as well as my photographic career, working at Sun Valley through Averell Harriman.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:32:19] Learned on the job, huh? Taught yourself?

 

Dick Durrance [00:32:21] Well, yes. Everybody did that. That’s how you learned to ski.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:32:25] How did your photography career start, Miggs?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:32:29] Well, when Dick decided he wanted to take up, uh, filmmaking rather than still, uh, photography, he sort of gave me the Speed Graphic. And I had been doing a lot of his darkroom work at this time, processing film, but I didn’t… And then I, um, started shooting it and processing my own. And those are some of the pictures that are still selling and are on the walls here at the Historical Society.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:33:02] That’s great. What had you studied in college?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:33:05] I also was an art major.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:33:09] Interesting. How many years, then, did you live together in Sun Valley? And tell me the next step in your careers.

 

Dick Durrance [00:33:15] Oh, well. Well, we got married in 1940, and, uh, we left Sun Valley, I think, same year, wasn’t it?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:33:23] In November.

 

Dick Durrance [00:33:24] Yeah, November, in the fall of that year. We got married in spring. And we moved, went to Alta. I met a friend from, uh, Jay Laughlin from Harvard, and we’d, uh, formed a team and gone to New Zealand and Australia while I was still in school…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:33:42] The ski team?

 

Dick Durrance [00:33:43] As a ski team. And I had seen Alta just before that. And during the time that we were on this trip, I persuaded Jay Laughlin to join me and try to develop Alta. We knew that it was, we’d gone there for the races and knew it was fantastic. And they were just beginning to build a lodge, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had donated $25,000 to build a lodge. But that wasn’t enough money, so they only got halfway up the building. And so when we, I did talk Jay Laughlin to put in the money and Miggs and I would do the work. And we’d just gotten married, and so we left Sun Valley and went to Alta and ran that. And we had a ski school, and it ended up that we actually did a lot of the cooking, because every time we’d hire, hire a chef from somewhere, they couldn’t stand living in Alta, where you got snowed in almost every winter, all the time. And so we ended up being dishwasher and cook.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:34:47] From time to time…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:34:48] From time to time…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:34:49] …unwillingly.

 

Dick Durrance [00:34:50] …as well as teach skiing, running a ski shop and coaching and God knows what all. But we loved Alta, and those are our first years. And the highlight of that was when we were having lunch one day, we lived in a little miner’s cabin only 100 feet away from the lodge, someone came in and said, “Your house is on fire.” And sure enough it was. And we got burned out to what we… down to what we were wearing, including all our cash. And so that was one of the problems we had when we got, first got married, the first year.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:35:23] Did that then make you say, we’ve got to go do something else or did you stay in Alta for a while?

 

Dick Durrance [00:35:28] No, no, no, no, no. We decided that’s the way life is.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:35:32] How many years were you there?

 

Dick Durrance [00:35:34] We were there until the war broke out.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:35:36] Well, then you trained, um, some paratroopers.

 

Dick Durrance [00:35:38] Well, during the time we were there, we trained… before they had a mountain troop, uh, had decided to have mountain troops, they thought they’d try to teach paratroopers how to ski, and use them and drop them in the mountains, rather than trying to get, uh, soldiers up into the mountains, particularly in Europe. And so they asked me to organize a ski school for, uh, paratroopers. And they brought them up from Fort Benning, Georgia. And most of them were Southerners, had never seen snow. And, uh, they were amazed at snow. And it ended up that, oh, maybe a third of them got to like it and were pretty good. A third of them were so-so, and a third of them were just wrecks. Uh, they were trying to roll like they were taught to do when they landed from the parachute and so on. So it all ended up after a year of full winter, of teaching the paratroopers, uh, just a year before the war started, we got in it, uh, that, uh, it was much smarter to have skiers perhaps learn how to jump and use parachutes, but they really didn’t. So they developed the mountain troops, and that’s how they got started.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:36:51] And that would have been, what, from 1940 to 19, maybe ’45?

 

Dick Durrance [00:36:55] ’42.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:36:56] Oh. ’42 when you were there at Alta?

 

Dick Durrance [00:36:58] Yeah. So we weren’t there that long.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:37:00] Yeah. Why didn’t you want to stay there and develop that area more?

 

Dick Durrance [00:37:03] Because the war broke out, and you either had to go in the army… And at that time we were having babies, our two boys. And so someone offered me a job in the engineering department, flight test department at Boeing. And I took that. And I worked during the war in the flight test department at Boeing, designing photographic recording equipment for the B-17 and the B-29.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:37:32] For use in reconnaissance?

 

Dick Durrance [00:37:34] Well, we were testing, we were testing the B-17 and the B-29. The B-29 hadn’t been built yet, and they only had two experimental models which we worked on and, and finally did enough tests so that they could go into production with them.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:37:50] Hmm. And where was that?

 

Dick Durrance [00:37:52] That was in Seattle. And that’s where both our boys were born. And that’s where we lived during the war.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:37:59] And then what?

 

Dick Durrance [00:38:00] And then all of a sudden, we decided we’d really like to get out of the moist northwest. And it rained most of the time, and we wanted to head back to Colorado. And so I came and joined up with Thor Groswald, who ran a ski factory in Denver, and I got a job with him, designing skis and selling them mostly. And we brought out a Dick Durrance model. And that was the first time that skis became flexible. And I brought out a model that was very flexible, like some I had used earlier on in racing and which were particularly good in Alta, in powder snow. And so we got into making skis and selling them. We were selling ski lifts and so on. And before long, the Aspen Skiing Corporation asked if I would come over and run the ski company.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:38:59] And they knew about you just because of your…

 

Dick Durrance [00:39:01] Of racing.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:39:02] Oh, racing. Mhm.

 

Dick Durrance [00:39:03] And so that was the… actually it was the second winter that the Skiing Corporation had been formed. They’d built Lifts Number One and Two. And so I came in in October of ’47.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:39:19] Now before you go into that, though, I want to talk a little bit more about the ski. Um, was, can you describe the ski that you designed a little bit more?

 

Dick Durrance [00:39:29] Well, in those days, skis were made of hickory. They were also made of ash and maple and so on. But hickory was the strongest piece of wood. And that’s, skis had been made of, of wood all up until that time. You didn’t go into the other things until later. And so you had a problem making wooden skis so that they’d hold their shape. They would very easily warp. And the way they shaped the ski in those days was putting them in a steam box and bending up the tip and putting in the camber. And during the time that we, I wanted a very flexible ski, which meant it was very, it was even more difficult to make them hold their shape if you steam-bent them. And so we developed a new system after the war of high frequency heat, which is like radar. In other words, it penetrates and goes right through the whole ski instead of that. And we found that that would then allow you to make the ski more flexible, thinner, and bend easily and still hold its shape. And so that was revolutionary at the time, a flexible ski that didn’t get all warped.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:40:39] Was it a popular ski?

 

Dick Durrance [00:40:41] Very. It was a top…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:40:42] Dick was, wanted it to be the most expensive ski on the market, which it was… at how much?

 

Dick Durrance [00:40:50] $42. We knocked them over dead. Not many people would put out that much money for a pair of skis.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:40:59] But they were popular?

 

Dick Durrance [00:41:00] Oh, yeah. Well, then, then Head came along, and he decided that… he was an aeronautical engineer, and he experimented with what they called “sandwich construction” of two layers of metal and a foam core, or a piece of wood in the middle, and that, that would not torque and would not warp, metal wouldn’t. And so there was, he started the Head ski, but it copied the ski that I brought out, which was very flexible. And, but he made it out of metal and soon there was plastic and combinations… fiberglass and you know, all those things.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:41:39] What was the brand, then, of the ski that you made? What was it called?

 

Dick Durrance [00:41:44] Dick Durrance.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:41:44] The Dick Durrance ski?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:41:44] It was a Groswald.

 

Dick Durrance [00:41:46] Groswald was a factory, and it was a Dick Durrance model.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:41:50] And how many years was that out? From when to when?

 

Dick Durrance [00:41:55] ’42 to ’45, I guess? About three years.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:42:00] Do you have one of them yet?

 

Dick Durrance [00:42:01] One. {laughter}

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:42:05] Do you ever ski on it?

 

Dick Durrance [00:42:06] The one that I raced on. And of course, it had, uh, it was pretty much worse for the wear, but, uh, I still have it. Well, in those days, if you broke your tips when you were racing, you took a tin can, slit it open and wrapped it around it, and took a bunch of nails and nailed it together. {laughter}

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:42:26] That’s great. Did you ever want to go back after the war? Did you ever want to go back to Alta, uh, as you were, you know, in Denver then and…

 

Dick Durrance [00:42:35] Not really. We’d come to Aspen, and we’d fallen in love with Aspen then.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:42:39] What was the first time? When was the first time you came to Aspen?

 

Dick Durrance [00:42:41] 1941. This was before the war. Oh, we came to, the first time we came to Aspen was in 1941, and they were holding the National Championships on Roch Run, and that’s the only run they had. And there were no lifts at all. And we came over from Alta. We were living in Alta at the time, and we saw Aspen in its pre-skiing days. And that’s when the Jerome had just bare bulbs, and there wasn’t much else. It was just the Roch Run and Magnifico Cutoff that had been cut on Aspen Mountain. And, of course, you had to walk up. There were no lifts. So you sidestepped your own, uh, trail down, and you didn’t ski at most two times in a day.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:43:29] Do you remember in… you were in Alta at that time? Do you remember what, describe what you were hearing about Aspen then, what made you even want to come over? And, you know, for the National Championships?

 

Dick Durrance [00:43:39] I heard it had good skiing. We didn’t hear much about it. We heard that Aspen, at that time, was, uh, had some great skiing, but there wasn’t a great deal of information out on it. So we were… curiosity got the better of us. And we also liked the race.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:43:56] And after you got here, what was your impression then?

 

Dick Durrance [00:43:58] We thought it was pretty great.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:44:00] Yeah.

 

Dick Durrance [00:44:00] Oh yeah. It didn’t take much imagination, after you walked up Aspen Mountain, to realize that was a big mountain.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:44:09] And better than Alta?

 

Dick Durrance [00:44:12] Well, Alta had fabulous snow. You can’t negate Alta. Alta was much smaller. It’s only about half the size of Aspen Mountain. And it was very nice too. But we thought Aspen had great potential. And then after the war, we were offered the job. And so we were very happy to come because we had seen Aspen in ’41 and were pleased with what we saw.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:44:42] Did it seem like, Miggs, a good place to raise a family?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:44:45] Uh, it was a wonderful place to raise a family. I didn’t get to ski here in 1941 because I was, I had just gotten a cast off, and, I’d broken my leg in January, and this was in March, but I’d been in the cast all the time, so I didn’t go skiing then. But when we came back, we came over to a number of occasions. The first one was when they first opened the two lifts, the Number One and Number Two lifts. And it was a town of partying wildly. And I remember saying to Dick when he was offered the job, I said, “Dick, this is not a good idea.” A marriage could never survive in a situation like that, like Aspen.

 

Dick Durrance [00:45:36] Pretty wild town.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:45:37] That was some 50 years ago. I think I must have been wrong.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:45:43] I guess so, but you had your little…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:45:49] My boys were, our boys were, uh, Dick had just turned five, and we… I even waited for his birthday because all of his friends were, uh, where we were before. And Dave was two and a half, but, uh, it was an absolutely wonderful place for them as they got a little bit older and started to school and so on. Um, the whole school, first grade through 12th, was in part of what is now the Red Brick Schoolhouse. They didn’t have the gym at that time, or that wing of it. It was just the little one. I think there were probably 5 or 6 first graders there, and they could walk to school and walk back. There was no traffic, the streets weren’t paved, and nobody went very fast.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:46:45] And you had lots of snow in the in the wintertime. They sledded on the streets too, right?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:46:49] Oh yes. They didn’t clear the streets. But we, uh, we loved it, and they loved it.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:46:59] So you didn’t fight him too much then, when he said, “Let’s move to Aspen”?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:47:04] No, after we moved here, I changed my mind completely.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:47:09] So you started with Ski Company a year after they had opened the lifts.

 

Dick Durrance [00:47:13] Right.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:47:14] And were there as general manager then. Tell me about your time at the Ski Company.

 

Dick Durrance [00:47:18] Well, at that time, the Ski Company consisted of… the officers of the Ski Company consisted mostly of people from Denver; bankers and lawyers and people like that. And between Walter Paepcke and Paul Nitze, investors were looked for all over the country so that you’d get a great variety of people who would then help bring people to Aspen. It was, it was not popular or well-known at that time. And so when I first came here, the big job was to make the mountain more skiable. In other words, take a few of the trees out. And all it was was a 15-foot wide Roch Run and Magnifico, which is one open slope. And so it occurred to me at that time, the best way to do that would be to cut Ruthie’s Run, which was a wide, very big… no one had ever heard of cutting that many trees on the mountain. And at that time you had no EIS, no Forest Service regulations. So all we did was simply go up to the top of the mountain and mark a very wide stretch and chop the trees down. We didn’t ask who owned the property. We didn’t ask if we had permission. We simply got rid of the trees and had a big wide-open trail. And that started bringing skiers here. And that’s, and one of the reasons we did that was so that we could have the World Championships here. And so I made it my project to see if we couldn’t talk the Europeans into letting us run the World Championships, the, what were called then the FIS, in this country. It had never been done. And we prepared a very extensive proposal. Uh, I got Steve Bradley to come over and Frank Willoughby to help and various people, and we put together a brochure and sold it to the Europeans on the idea that we had a big enough mountain, we had good stuff, and we guaranteed them that we would cut trails and make it suitable for a World Championships. They bought it, and so we held them in 1952.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:49:41] ’50.

 

Dick Durrance [00:49:41] ’50.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:49:42] 1950. Did the board of directors of the Aspen Skiing Company think you were crazy or did it take a long time?

 

Dick Durrance [00:49:48] No. Nobody thought anybody was crazy in those days. They all were.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:49:53] So when you came to the board of directors said, “I want…”.

 

Dick Durrance [00:49:56] Oh, yeah. No, when I said that, I said, “Well, after all, our gross income the first year I started was $32,000.” That was the gross receipts on the lift. And so everybody was very willing to try anything. In fact, that’s why they hired me. He says, “Come over and see if you can’t get skiers to come. See if we can’t make this a popular thing.” Well, there were two things. There weren’t many skiers in the country, and none of them had heard of Aspen. And so this was a gimmick to try to get world attention on Aspen as a ski resort, and at the same time, make it a first-class resort by preparing for the World Championships and cutting trails.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:50:38] How did you promote the Championships?

 

Dick Durrance [00:50:42] How did we promote it? We promoted the championships, I think mostly by, uh, making it a, a first class, uh, competition, downhill and slalom. And on top of that, we invited the world press to come here and see it. So it was a question of publicity and providing the facilities, and organizing it so that, you know, the racers, uh, were satisfied that we knew how to run a race.

 

[00:51:13] How long did it take you to do all the preparation? How long were you working on it?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:51:18] It seems to me that it didn’t cost as much as it usually does.

 

Dick Durrance [00:51:21] No, no, no. Our total budget for the World Championships was $72,000.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:51:28] That was bringing the people over…

 

Dick Durrance [00:51:30] That was cutting trails, putting in telephone lines, all the timing equipment, taking care of the racers when they were here…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:51:39] Housing them. Feeding them.

 

Dick Durrance [00:51:41] Yeah, well, housing and feeding was done in private homes. We didn’t pay for it. That was volunteered. And so every everything was volunteer except for the things that you had to do, like telephone.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:51:52] No, we didn’t pay their transportation.

 

Dick Durrance [00:51:54] No. Nobody paid their transportation.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:51:56] And how many people came, uh, observers? How many visitors did you attract?

 

Dick Durrance [00:52:00] Oh, how many visitors did we attract? I would say maybe a thousand? Something like that.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:52:09] Were you pleased with that?

 

Dick Durrance [00:52:11] Well, sure. That’s more people than had ever been in Aspen one time.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:52:16] What happened after that? What, what role do you think that that played in Aspen’s…?

 

Dick Durrance [00:52:21] I think that sparked, that sparked the growth of Aspen and the acknowledgment by actually all the ski world, plus others, that this was a place in the Colorado Rockies where they had great skiing. And so I think it sparked investors to come here and other people who like to ski to come here. And in those early days, of course, there was a nucleus of mountaineers from the 10th Mountain Division who had been at Camp Hale nearby and had skied here. But not just them. There were all kinds of people who had heard about Aspen by then. And so Aspen started to grow, and so did the business.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:53:02] What year, you were there until, well, say, the years that you were general manager of the Ski Company.

 

Dick Durrance [00:53:08] How many years? How many years was I general manager? Five years.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:53:12] From when to when though?

 

Dick Durrance [00:53:13] It was from ’47 to ’52.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:53:16] And why did you leave?

 

Dick Durrance [00:53:18] Because I wanted to make films again. And so I started making films in Europe, and I decided that that was really what I really wanted to do.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:53:28] So you picked up. Miggs, what’d you think about that? Going, taking your family and moving to Europe?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:53:34] Well, moving to Europe at that time was a great idea to me. I had never been there. In fact, I’d never even been to New York. So it was pretty exciting. And we decided to take the boys along. They were five and eight at that time, and we were, um, Dick was given a job in Norway from the State Department as a part of the, um, Marshall Plan, which was to rehabilitate the European countries who had lost a great deal at that time…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:54:17] In doing what? The job was doing what?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:54:17] …in the war.

 

Dick Durrance [00:54:18] Well, the first film I did for Norway was for the, what they call the National Home Guard, which is like our National Guard. And they lost the war. The Germans, you know, invaded Norway right off the bat. And that was mostly because they weren’t prepared to stop them. And so the Norwegian government wanted me to make a film of the Home Guard, the National Guard of Norway, in which every person in that country had a gun and was trained at a signal to mobilize and protect every part of Norway all at once. And so I traveled all over Norway, all the way to the tip, the North Cape, down the coast, and all through the inside to these little towns, and photographed all these people who were members of the National Guard. And they would go through their maneuvers. And so there was no way that the Germans or anybody else was going to invade Norway and find it unprepared.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:55:18] Again.

 

Dick Durrance [00:55:19] It was called “Never Again.”

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:55:21] And then what? What was your next…? Did you stay in Norway for a while?

 

Dick Durrance [00:55:25] Oh, yeah. We stayed in Norway for a year, and I did the 1952 Olympics. That was the official film for the ’52 Olympics. And I just got a letter today from Norway asking me if they could use that on television, the film that I made then, because they’re going to have the Olympics in Norway again this year.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:55:42] Well that’s great.

 

Dick Durrance [00:55:43] And so I’ll do that.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:55:46] How did you get from there then to, back down to Garmisch? “Oh, we took, it was sort of a leave of absence, wasn’t it? That we went up to Norway… or no, I know how it was. We met a fellow from, uh, who was being, who was a soldier in Garmisch at the time, and they had made Garmisch the recreational area for all the armed forces in Europe. And he said, “Why don’t you come down to Garmisch? They need to have someone to make films to promote their recreational area,” which was the, for the whole European theater, was in Garmisch by, being done by the Army. And so I went down there and interviewed the commanding officer and he said, “Sure.” So they provided us with a house and with PX privileges, gasoline…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:56:41] A maid, a houseman…

 

Dick Durrance [00:56:43] A maid and a houseman and a house and all these things. And so we said, “Why, yeah, that’s a great idea.” And so we went down and made films for, what? Three, 4 or 5 years for them. In the meantime, in between films, we would do, uh, pictures, motion pictures for, uh, Pan Am. I did “Wings to Austria,” “Wings to Germany,” uh…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:57:09] Promotional?

 

Dick Durrance [00:57:10] All promotional films, uh, for… and some for the State Department. And so we were busy making films, living in Garmisch, and living high off the hog.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:57:23] Were you shooting a lot of pictures at this time, Miggs?

 

Miggs Durrance [00:57:25] Yes. Well, when we were living there, I had not the responsibility of running a household much, because I had a lot of help and the boys were busy with school and so on. So, um, I had a chance to learn from the same lab that the Army had provided for the soldiers, and they had a very fine teacher on how to, you know, process film and print and so on. And I learned a great deal about that. And about that time, I think you had given me a Rolleiflex.

 

Dick Durrance [00:58:05] Yep.

 

Miggs Durrance [00:58:06] And I went everywhere with my Rolleiflex, and it just was never out of my hands practically. So I had a great, um, I still have all the negatives and a lot of the prints from that time.

 

Dick Durrance [00:58:21] This was about the same time that, uh, Anheuser-Busch approached me on doing a bunch of films, promotional films for the beer company, uh, a new beer they were bringing out called Busch Bavarian, and Miggs was given the job to do all the billboards for this new promotional beer, this new beer they were bringing out. {Break to change tapes} Okay, we were at the point where Miggs was shooting pictures and learning how to, uh, process film and do all that. At that same time, uh, Anheuser-Busch from Saint Louis had decided they wanted to start a beer called Busch Bavarian beer, and they wanted to shoot authentic scenes in Bavaria. And we just happened to be there. And so a bunch from Saint Louis, advertising department, the Gardner Advertising Company, came over and wanted me to shoot TV commercials, uh, for the promotion on this new beer, Busch Bavarian beer. And they asked Miggs at that time if she would shoot four by five color pictures for billboards of the same thing. And so she was real busy with that. And she had an art director who worked with her, I had one that worked with me, and so we did a whole campaign for the Anheuser-Busch beer, and that was then used over here, and they came…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:59:42] In fact, we did it two years.

 

Dick Durrance [00:59:43] I think we did it two years. They came back again, and we…

 

Miggs Durrance [00:59:46] We came back to this country and then went, uh, they wanted more the next year.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [00:59:51] You must have not been very popular, though, with your Bavarian friends.

 

Dick Durrance [00:59:56] Well, we did get a few of our honest to God Bavarian friends to act as models. Although the art directors from Saint Louis were convinced that these weren’t very authentic-looking Bavarians.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:00:11] They expected them to be blond and blue-eyed and have pigtails. Actually, the Bavarians are rather dark.

 

Dick Durrance [01:00:18] Anyhow, the, uh, they wanted to work to a storyboard that had been done in Saint Louis rather than what was actually there.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:00:26] And how long, when did you come back to the States then? From that point?

 

Miggs Durrance [01:00:33] We came back to the States, um, in about 1955, ’56, I think it was, ’56 or ’57. Then we left almost immediately. Pan Am, uh, wanted us to go to Chile and do another, um, promotional film there. At that time, I started working with Sports Illustrated, and I had done a few of the series that they had at that time called “The Spectacle of Sport,” and I did one of those there. And I did some other ones, one on the Arkansas River race, um, one in the winter…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:01:26] When did you move back to Aspen?

 

Miggs Durrance [01:01:29] Well, we never really left Aspen. We kept the house here, and we still had the house to come back to. But we were doing a great deal of traveling.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:01:41] Yeah. Great experience for your kids.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:01:45] Yes, it was. A great experience for the children. Um, they still think that it was one of the big things in their lives that influenced their lives more than anything else.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:02:00] When you, uh, when did you come back, though, to live in Aspen on a more permanent basis?

 

Miggs Durrance [01:02:08] Not really, until 1980.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:02:10] All that, all through that time, you kept, you know, traveling.

 

Dick Durrance [01:02:13] We were traveling doing films, and Miggs was doing photography. And so we were living part of that time in New York City for about 6 or 7 years, and then…

 

Miggs Durrance [01:02:23] Dick did a series of films for Lowell Thomas, which took us around the world with Lowell. I can’t imagine anyone more fun to travel with than he was because everyone, everywhere we went, knew him.

 

Dick Durrance [01:02:39] Well, we did one on the, in Nepal. We spent three months in Nepal doing the Crown Prince’s wedding there. And, of course, Lowell had been…

 

Miggs Durrance [01:02:49] He’s now the king.

 

Dick Durrance [01:02:50] …had been to Tibet and had met the Dalai Lama earlier on and… quite early on. And so, he was happy to go back. And we had permission to shoot the wedding, and we were the only ones given permission to do it. So we went a little early and got ourselves all set up in the palace and got, uh, bribed all the army with booze and stuff. And we were given all sorts of privileges because Lowell was well known by the crown prince at that time.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:03:22] And by the king.

 

Dick Durrance [01:03:22] And by the king. And so we spent, uh, what was it? Three, four months?

 

Miggs Durrance [01:03:27] Three and a half months.

 

Dick Durrance [01:03:27] And we were doing the film. We went down to the jungle part of Nepal and shot a capturing of a rhino. And that was very exciting.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:03:38] And we did… we were all on elephants every day.

 

Dick Durrance [01:03:42] Yeah, for a couple of weeks.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:03:43] That’s the only way you could travel there.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:03:45] Your children were too?

 

Dick Durrance [01:03:47] No, no, we were…

 

Miggs Durrance [01:03:48] No, they were in college by that time.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:03:50] Oh, okay.

 

Dick Durrance [01:03:51] Yeah. And then we went up to the base of Mount Everest as part of the film. And so we got to spend a long time in Nepal and did this film. And it, it won first prize in the New York TV Film Festival. And then Lowell asked us to do another one in Siberia. And so we went from Alaska. That’s when Alaska Airlines first flew into Moscow. And so we did a whole thing on Siberia from east, uh, yeah, from east to west. And then we did one on the Harlem Dance Group for Lowell in New York City, in Harlem, and…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:04:33] And he was familiar with Aspen a little bit, too, wasn’t he?

 

Dick Durrance [01:04:35] Yes, he was a…

 

Miggs Durrance [01:04:35] Lowell had been…

 

Dick Durrance [01:04:37] He was born in Cripple Creek, went to DU, and loved Colorado. He felt like that was his home state. And so he came here as often as he could and would put on his broadcasts from the Hotel Jerome and introduce all the skiers at that time.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:04:57] When did… speaking of, just all the films that you’ve made, I have neglected to have you talk about the films, the early films you did for Aspen.

 

Dick Durrance [01:05:06] Oh, well, that was fun. That was, I had a privileged position running the Aspen Skiing Corporation to do the first film, and so I asked the board if they needed a film, and they said, “Sure.” So I made my first film of Aspen in 1948. And the train was still coming in, and, uh, we called it “Aspen in Winter.” And we had a great time shooting it, and it was just a couple of years after Aspen had lifts and started. And Friedl Pfeifer and Fred Iselin were the directors of the ski school then.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:05:41] Were they in it?

 

Dick Durrance [01:05:42] Oh, yeah, sure.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:05:43] And Gary Cooper.

 

Dick Durrance [01:05:45] Gary Cooper. Then we did one with Gary Cooper for Warner Brothers, and he was featured in it because he had built a house here.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:05:52] What was it called?

 

Dick Durrance [01:05:54] The film? “Snow Carnival.” It’s, these are, these films are all in the archives at the Historical Society here.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:06:03] Um, what, what did you do as a, with that first film, “Aspen in Winter”? How did you, how did you use it?

 

Dick Durrance [01:06:10] How was it distributed? Mostly then to ski clubs. In those days, ski clubs loved to run ski films in the winter. And there was John Jay, and, uh, I don’t think Warren Miller had started up then, but there were… And Doc Howard and a few others who lectured with films. They didn’t make, put sound on them. It was, they went with the film and lectured about it so that, it was a popular thing to have ski films in the winter at all the ski clubs. And so those were the potential clients to come to Aspen, and so that’s where we sent them.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:06:48] Now, those weren’t the only two films on Aspen that you did?

 

Dick Durrance [01:06:51] No, no, I think I did one with you!

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:06:52] Yeah, you did.

 

Dick Durrance [01:06:55] “Return to Aspen,” because we wanted to do more, but I did about, I think about 6 or 7 films over the years, and, uh, yours was the last.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:07:06] And what, uh, when you decided to come back to Aspen permanently in around 1980, what was it? Tell me what your thoughts were at that time. What, why did you want to come back and make this a more permanent place and stop traveling so much?

 

Dick Durrance [01:07:22] Well, it was home from way back when, and so we were just coming back home. And we decided we’d done enough traveling and we wanted to settle down, and we couldn’t think of a better place.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:07:33] Now, the nicest thing that’s happened is that both of our boys have decided to move here too. So we all live in Snowmass.

 

Dick Durrance [01:07:41] Almost 50 years from the time we came here.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:07:44] Talk to me about your, um, feelings of the… first, about the company and then about the community. Um, the changes since you were involved in the, in the real beginnings and were responsible for the evolution of the, early evolution of the Ski Company and in getting it, bringing visitors here. How do you feel as you look at the whole, you know, 40 years…?

 

Dick Durrance [01:08:08] No, I’m not going to answer. I’m going to tell you a story. Uh, one of the fascinating things about coming to Aspen in the beginning was the fact that it was a town primarily of old timers who put up with skiers, and then the, I guess, the most active people were the skiers who had come here because they’d learned that it was a good ski place. And so the town was certainly all for skiing and everything that we did. Like I told you, we cut trees. Nobody cared, and everybody was all enthusiastic about it. So there was hardly any controversy in the early years when we first came here. Everybody thought that, “Let’s grow, let’s develop into a great ski community.” And we got the bug, we got the World Championships here, and everybody helped, all volunteers and so on. And it was not until, oh, quite some time… Oh, I guess when skiing started to get popular, Aspen started to grow more, that the community…  there developed a slight rift in the community. I was no longer involved in the Ski Company then, but some people took exception to the dominating role that the Ski Company was playing in the lives of the people here. And so a sort of resentment started to build, and it seems, seems to have continued to build. And so now all of a sudden, 40, 50 years later, you have a lot of people who are arguing about how Aspen should develop and how it should grow. And it’s a shame, because in the beginning, everybody was here and were having fun, and they weren’t arguing. And now it seems that a great deal of controversy develops over no matter what you do.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:10:15] Do you have anything to add to that, Miggs?

 

Miggs Durrance [01:10:18] Well, I think the whole, the population has changed character. Uh, the people who, um, started it and who were enthusiastic in the beginning and so on have mostly sold their homes and moved down valley or have had to move down valley. The new ones have come in, and it’s become a community of, uh, well, you might say outsiders. A community of people who are here only a month out of the year, or two weeks, in the whole West End and, uh, and so on. It’s almost like a ghost town in the off-season. I’m rather sorry to see that, but I suppose it’s to be expected.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:11:09] Weren’t there always those second home owners from even from the early days, in the, in the ’40s and ’50s?

 

Miggs Durrance [01:11:16] Not right in the town.

 

Dick Durrance [01:11:17] Not actually, no, not in the right, in the beginning. It was a slow development, and it really didn’t come until about 15 or 20 years after we had started. So no, it was slow developing, the absentee owners, residents, and…

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:11:34] You helped create something that was just, that everybody wanted to come to. That was your goal.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:11:40] That’s right.

 

Dick Durrance [01:11:41] We all had fun. We were happy to be here and so was everybody else. And so we had no reason to be unhappy and argue. We partied instead.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:11:53] Doesn’t it seem like, uh, a little bit of that is inevitable, though, whenever you get to a certain point in, in a town’s evolution and in growth, you have, um, you know, there’s a point where you have to say, how are we going to, we’re not just going to continue to grow at the same, at the same pace because we’re reaching critical points. Transportation, for example. You didn’t have to worry about that in the ’40s.

 

Dick Durrance [01:12:20] No way. No, we didn’t sand the streets.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:12:23] Yeah. Well, what do you think now should be the advice you’d give the Ski Company, the advice you give the mothers and fathers, so to speak?

 

Dick Durrance [01:12:34] I’m in no position to give advice to anybody.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:12:38] Well sure you are. You’ve been here.

 

Dick Durrance [01:12:38] I’ve gotten old enough so that I know it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:12:42] Well, then you can say it freely.

 

Dick Durrance [01:12:44] I can say it freely. Sure I can, I can shoot my mouth off as well as the next guy.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:12:49] Yeah. Well, so I’m asking you for your advice.

 

Dick Durrance [01:12:51] Well… That’s kind of tough because it’s almost gone too far. It’s awfully hard to get people not to argue. It’s so much… they seem to enjoy it. And so, I suppose, well, I haven’t really given it too much thought, because, for the reason that…

 

Miggs Durrance [01:13:14] Well, for one thing, if they used chemicals on the streets instead of sand, there wouldn’t be the particulates. As I as I understand it, there has been no problem with particulates for four years. Uh, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It is hard to park, but parking garages would take care of that.

 

Dick Durrance [01:13:39] Well, I guess one of the beefs I have is that all of a sudden, there are people against developing Snowmass to its full potential. In other words, we were given by God or somebody, all these mountains surrounding Snowmass and Aspen, and they are such a very, very small part of Colorado. If you look at a map of Colorado, it’s a tiny, tiny little thing. But it’s very important that Aspen, the community, remain a ski resort. It is that, first and foremost, it’s fine that we have summer activities, that we have the Institute and the music and all the other cultural activities that go with it. It makes it a full town and a great place to live. But at the same time, we shouldn’t forget that we are, first and foremost, a ski community. At least that’s my opinion. And I think it’s very unwise and very silly to say that we can’t, for instance, develop Burnt Mountain, which happens to be the big argument at this point. In other words, we can’t fully develop the mountains that we have, and not many other people have areas like that, and they claim that we may be disturbing the wildlife. Uh, well, the wildlife have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of acres to wander…

 

Miggs Durrance And they’ve increased.

 

Dick Durrance [01:15:07] …wander and be by themselves and have a grand old time. And they don’t need to be on one little speck of a mountain called Burnt Mountain. There’s no reason in the world why that can’t be fully developed, so that the economy, which is still basically a ski resort, can’t flourish and grow by putting lifts on it and facilities and grooming the snow, making snow and making it a full-time resort in competition with others. Otherwise, the economy of the town will always suffer until you do that. And it’s ridiculous that we don’t do it.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:15:47] You know, it’s interesting… the people who have been here the longest and who were part of the rebirth of Aspen in the ’40s, ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, are the ones who are the most supportive to make sure that Aspen continues to grow as a ski economy. You know, you would almost think that people like yourselves would say, um, “Oh, I want it the way it used to be.” You know, I want to stop, and you don’t. You aren’t.

 

Dick Durrance [01:16:16] No way. No, we want it to develop to its full potential. I mean, that’s our livelihood. Those of us who live here and work here.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:16:27] Having lived in Europe, you might have a perspective that you can share with us on this next question. Um, is it possible, do you think, as we deal with these transportation/congestion issues, that Aspen could do something really radical and be like a Zermatt, for example?

 

Dick Durrance [01:16:46] No, I don’t think, I think that’s wrong. I’ll explain why. Zermatt is at the top of a very tall mountain in a valley, a little valley, contained. We, the people of Aspen, the working people, have to live down valley. You can’t close the road to them. They’ve got to come in their cars. They’ve got to have their tools. People who come in and have to buy groceries don’t live close enough so that they can lug the stuff home, uh, they can’t go shopping. So they need their cars. There’s no reason why it has to be a car-free city. You can take care of cars, number one, by not putting sand, which is one of the big problems. You don’t need wooden fireplaces; gas fireplaces are good. So you can fight the pollution problem, uh, other ways than trying to eliminate automobiles in the town. And you can take care of all the automobiles that will ever come here in good big garages.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:17:47] There’s another thing, too. Switzerland has a marvelous electric train system that was built many years ago, and it’s very easy to get around by train there. It isn’t easy here, and it would be very expensive in these days to try to put one in, you know, to try to have a whole system from the cities. The cities in and the resorts in Switzerland are very close together, and there aren’t the great distances that there are in the West.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:18:23] I want to go back to something you said a while back and have you compare early days with more recent days. One of the… you’ve both referred at different times to the parties, the big party town, that Aspen used to be, you know.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:18:37] It was.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:18:37] And don’t you think it still is? I want you to talk about the social scene, then and now.

 

Dick Durrance [01:18:45] Well, number one, the parties were much simpler.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:18:50] They were not catered.

 

Dick Durrance [01:18:51] They were not. Nobody catered. You didn’t dress up. It was a, sort of a, it was a daily routine. It wasn’t a special event. You weren’t, and you weren’t trying to outdo the next guy. And nowadays, it seems like one party is there to be outdone by the next guy and so on. So they get bigger and bigger and more elaborate and to the point where they’re ridiculous. And so that’s not necessary for people to have fun, to have a very elaborate party, which the people with money, that’s the only way they know how to impress their friends. And so they do it. And that wasn’t the original idea of partying. It was just to laugh and make fun of each other. And things that were going on.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:19:37] And be spontaneous?

 

Dick Durrance [01:19:38] It was spontaneous. Absolutely. Yeah. So the partying that goes on now is entirely different.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:19:47] If you can think of, the most, the greatest disappointment for each of you and the greatest highlight of your life. It could be as a part of your career, or it could be just as So for you, it may be as part of, you know, maybe your days with the Ski Company or just your days, in essence, something that really stands out that you’re so proud of in your life. And I’m sure there’s many more things than just one, so you don’t have to just choose one.

 

Dick Durrance [01:20:16] You go first.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:20:18] And something that you were most disappointed by or frustrated by over the years. Probably tie it to Aspen, I suppose, if you can.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:20:27] Um, I can’t remember being terribly frustrated by anything. Um, one of the highlights of my whole life, I think, was the trip to Nepal and the beauty of the things that we were doing there, and the scenes we were doing, and the pictures that I was able to take at that time are still my favorites. And I’ve enjoyed learning photography. It’s been a big part of my life. Probably always will be.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:21:12] Yeah. Dick?

 

Dick Durrance [01:21:14] I think the most exciting thing that I remember from all the way at the beginning on was when I saw my first snowflake after I came up from Florida. I, honest to God, didn’t believe that there could be anything so wonderful. Don’t ask me why I have no answer for that. But that was obviously the most exciting thing for me. It was exciting growing up all the way and competing. Uh, and other than that, after the excitement of racing, which was certainly a big part of my life, I think making films was probably one of the other highlights of items that I remember. In other words, I spent a great deal of time making films. I enjoyed each one of them because every time you made one, you learned a little something. You saw new people, other people, and what they did and what they wanted to do. So you got to know the people of the world, and you communicated and tried to interpret what you saw. And to me, that was a real thrill. And I regret that I’m too damned old to keep doing it.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:22:29] So that’s your only disappointment, huh?

 

Dick Durrance [01:22:30] Yeah. That’s my only real disappointment, that you get old. That’s not really true either, because I don’t mind being old.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:22:40] This is great. Um, anything else that we’ve left out?

 

Dick Durrance [01:22:45] Oh, sure. I can’t remember what. I forget too much.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:22:51] There’s one cute story, though, about Dick that I think he’s forgotten to tell you. Was that when he was in New York Military Academy, he put a glass of water on the windowsill…

 

Dick Durrance [01:23:05] Before it snowed.

 

Miggs Durrance [01:23:05] …before it snowed, and before it froze. And that night, it did freeze. And there it was: ice that he’d made.

 

Dick Durrance [01:23:15] Of course I ruined the cup because it broke. It was a tin cup. Ruined the cup, but I was very excited.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:23:23] Great.

 

Dick Durrance [01:23:23] So that’s the story of a Florida cracker. We ended up living in the mountains and hating to go back to Florida.

 

Jeanette Darnauer [01:23:33] And California. I guess to wrap up, this is the end of the Aspen Historical Society’s video history project with Miggs and Dick Durrance. And I’m Jeanette Darnauer.

 

Dick Durrance [01:23:49] Thank you.