Video Interview: Fritz & Fabi Benedict

1993.023.0006 Video History Fritz & Fabi Benedict

Interview with Judith Gertler

August 18, 1993

Judith Gertler [00:00:20] This is a video history interview with Fabi and Fritz Benedict on August 18th, 1993, in Aspen, Colorado. This interview is part of the Aspen Historical Society’s Video History Project, and the interviewer is Judith Gertler. Fabi and Fritz, we’re very glad that you’re able to participate in this project with us, and it will give us the opportunity to learn more about Aspen’s history and also the role that each of you played in it. So thank you for participating.

Fabi Benedict [00:00:52] Our pleasure.

Fritz Benedict [00:00:54] Thank you.

Judith Gertler [00:00:55] Fabi, let’s begin with some of your background, before you got to Aspen. Can you give us your full name and where and when you were born?

Fabi Benedict [00:01:07] Yes, my full name is Fabienne Benedict. I was born in Limpsfield in England in 1919, and I went to France when I was a month old, then to Italy and then back to France, where I was brought up. My sister Joella Bayer married an American when I was eight, came to this country, and then when I was 19, my mother and I came over to the States, settled in New York, where I lived for quite a long time, about ten, 11 years before I came to Aspen.

Judith Gertler [00:01:39] Can you tell us about your parents? Briefly.

Fabi Benedict [00:01:43] Well, both my parents were writers. Um, my mother was a modern poet named Mina Loy, who’s, um, become a little bit well-known, particularly since she died. She was one of the first people to write in free verse. {cough} Excuse me. And my father was also a poet, writer and critic who was French and Irish, wrote in French and is credited with being the founder of the Dada movement. Although I don’t concur with that, I think other people founded it too. But he was a sort of precursor of surrealism.

Judith Gertler [00:02:25] And you grew up in a, in a home and in a culture where art was very important. All kinds of arts.

Fabi Benedict [00:02:31] Yes right, in Paris. And my mother’s friends were mostly artists and writers.

Judith Gertler [00:02:36] Did you practice any kind of art? Did you create yourself?

Fabi Benedict [00:02:40] Yes. As a little girl, I painted quite a lot, and I was one of these people who had more talent when they were young than later, shall we say, because I, my drawings were pretty good for my age, let’s put it that way. And my mother was sort of a Svengali. She’d push you. And so I did have some stuff exhibited when I was very young. Queen Mary bought two of my paintings when I was about 15, and I got a check from Buckingham Palace and a lovely letter, which I still have. But the check we cashed, which I think is unfortunate because it had the lion and the unicorn. It was quite wonderful, and we should have kept it and framed it, but we needed the money. It was probably $100 or something.

Judith Gertler [00:03:21] And you came to the United States, and what did you do in New York when you…?

Fabi Benedict [00:03:28] I first went to art school, to Parsons, and to the New York School of Fine and Applied Art and the Art Students League a little bit at night. And then I worked as a designer for many years until I met Fritz. Free lance, and also jobs in firms.

Judith Gertler [00:03:47] I heard that you had a marriage prior to your marriage to Fritz?

Fabi Benedict [00:03:49] Yes. Right.

Judith Gertler [00:03:51] Uh, can you just mention that in terms of how that led you to Aspen?

Fabi Benedict [00:03:56] Well, my, the reason I came to Aspen was because my sister Joella and Herbert lived here, and they’d invited me to come out to visit and had told me about Fritz, actually, that, even though I was married then and I didn’t know why my sister realized it wasn’t a perfect marriage. But she said, “I have a wonderful husband for you in Aspen,” so I thought I’d come and look. It was Fritz.

Judith Gertler [00:04:21] What else had you heard about Aspen?

Fabi Benedict [00:04:24] Well, really not too much. You know, nobody was talking about Aspen in those days. This is back in 1947, ’48. Uh, my sister and brother-in-law loved it and, of course, kept telling me how beautiful it was, and I must come out. And I’d never seen mountains like this. So as we drove in from Denver, my mouth was just sort of open the whole way because it’s so beautiful.

Judith Gertler [00:04:46] Can you paint a picture for us in words about what the town looked like when you came, and your first impressions of the town and the people of Aspen?

Fabi Benedict [00:04:58] Well, the town was pretty charming, and I still think, all told, it still is. I just think, this is the west, west side, still looks wonderful with all the beautiful trees. And I was struck by the people here because they weren’t like people in the average small town. They were very imaginative and had a sense of humor and came from different countries. And, uh, well, they were a very, very exceptional group, the old timers living here in the late ’40s.

Judith Gertler [00:05:28] Anything else about those very early days in Aspen before you met Fritz?

Fabi Benedict [00:05:34] Well, I met Fritz right away. I arrived on a Saturday, and I met him on a Tuesday at a square dance at the Jerome Hotel. They had a square dance every Tuesday, right?

Fritz Benedict Right.

Judith Gertler [00:05:48] Let’s meet Fritz on this tape and get a little bit of his background. And then we’ll talk about how the two of you met and subsequently married and lived here together. So, Fritz, can you, um, first of all, tell us your, your full name and where and when you were born.

Fritz Benedict [00:06:11] I’m Frederick Benedict. I was born in Medford, Wisconsin, little town in northern Wisconsin, in 1914. We, my father died when I was 16, and my mother decided to take my sister and me down to Madison, where my brother was a professor at the university. And we both went to school there then.

Judith Gertler [00:06:35] And what is your first memory of skiing?

Fritz Benedict [00:06:40] Well, my, we had a little hill behind our house. We lived on the edge of the, this little town, and we used to go up there, climb that hill and put on our skis and ski down a packed slope. Take our skis off at the bottom, you know, just toe straps and walk up the hill and slide down again. We thought we were having a great time. My father made my first skis when I was four.

Judith Gertler [00:07:08] Do you know what he made them out of?

Fritz Benedict [00:07:10] Ash.

Judith Gertler [00:07:12] Could you tell us in a in a complete sentence?

Fritz Benedict [00:07:15] Oh, they were made out of ash.

Judith Gertler [00:07:19] I understand that you had an interest in the outdoors as a young man. What? How did that manifest itself?

Fritz Benedict [00:07:28] Well, we had a little cottage on a lake eight miles from Medford, and we spent a lot of time out there. And my father was quite an outdoorsman, fished and hunted a lot, and I sort of fell into that same way of life. Uh, I used to, starting at the age of seven, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to work on a dairy farm to help make hay. I did that for five years. That helped, uh, helped me learn about farm life, which, and how to work. That really did me in good stead, I think, those early experiences.

Judith Gertler [00:08:21] Can you talk a little bit about the development of your interest in architecture and your study with Frank Lloyd Wright?

Fritz Benedict [00:08:28] Well, when I was ready to go to, to college, I was sort of stuck in Madison because it was during the Depression. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be an architect or a forest ranger. Neither one was taught at the university, and I floundered around for quite a while in the art school, engineering, you know, preparing for architecture, and ended up studying landscape architecture and getting a couple of degrees in that. But my professor, my landscape professor was a good friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, so he took me out there. It was only 40 miles from Madison, but I didn’t know much about it, and I just fell in love with that place. And as soon as I got my master’s degree, I became an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938.

Judith Gertler [00:09:26] And where was his school located?

Fritz Benedict [00:09:30] That was, the school was in Spring Green. It’s only 40 miles from Madison.

Judith Gertler [00:09:37] And what did you learn there in terms of philosophy and design that helped to determine how you would work in Aspen?

Fritz Benedict [00:09:46] Well, he, Frank Lloyd Wright was, of course, a very organic architect and had a great feeling for how buildings should fit into the landscape, and using native materials as much as possible, and natural materials, and not use fake materials. And that all very much appealed to me because of my landscape experience and interest, I guess. And, and I liked the idea of building. I like the way he taught architecture. It was an apprenticeship, and he didn’t particularly like getting apprentices who had been to college. He liked to start them out on his terms and felt that a lot of college experience was, had to be, you had to start over and forget about much of that. Uh, and it was a great, a great idea to learn by, by working on, on projects and, uh, rather than just some academic experience. And we did a lot of construction work, too, which gave us a good, uh, good background in, in actually, how things are put together. Um, during the three years I was there, we built most of the Camp in Arizona. It was a place where we all moved to in the winter. And, uh, we got experience in carpentry and stonework, and I did landscaping there, too. Moved, moved plants in from the desert. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful time. We did a lot of construction work in the summer. I did a lot of gardening, too. And, but you learned architecture sort of by osmosis because you were in an area or, you know, a place, an enclave where it was almost like a monastery. It was, the whole life was architecture and how to learn how to live.

Judith Gertler [00:12:17] How did you happen to come to Aspen the very first time?

Fritz Benedict [00:12:22] Um, there was a painter named Frank Mechau who lived in Redstone, and he came down to visit Mr. Wright, he was a great admirer of Mr. Wright, in Arizona, and he invited the whole fellowship to come up through this valley on our way back to Wisconsin. We migrated back and forth from Arizona to Wisconsin, and the, Mr. Wright didn’t take him up on that, but he told me a lot about this country, and I had learned about it from the, reading ski, the ski annual, too, about how great the skiing potential was here. Not much had been done on development, but that spring of 19–, uh, let’s see, ’41, I had to go back to Taliesin in Wisconsin early to put in the garden, the vegetable garden. We tried to live off the land, and we had this huge garden. So I decided that I’d come up through here because of learning about it. And it took me three days to get here. I came on a train, hitchhiked and got another train, Ridgway to Grand Junction. Slept under the bridge in Glenwood Springs and then came up on the train the next day in March of 1941.

Judith Gertler [00:14:01] What did you see when you arrived? What did you see when you arrived here?

Fritz Benedict [00:14:05] Well, the town was, uh, it was sort of drab because none of the buildings had been painted for 50 years. And they were sort of gray, and it was a very sleepy little town and a little depressing in a way, because so many of the downtown buildings were, the windows were boarded up, and there were only about 600 people living here. And you could shoot a gun down Main Street and not hit anything, but practically no vehicles. And in the winter, they only plowed a few of the streets. The main, the highway through town and about six blocks downtown were plowed, where the snow was plowed, and everybody else just walked. They left their cars jacked up in their garages. And, uh, it was, you know, the town was just about broke. It was very, in a way, depressing because of that. But as Fabi said, there was a unique group of people still hanging, hanging on here, waiting for mining to come back. They weren’t that interested in it becoming a ski resort. They wanted mining to come back.

Judith Gertler [00:15:28] You then came back a few years later. Can you talk about that? Back to this area?

Fritz Benedict [00:15:34] Well, I was drafted in the Army as soon as I got back to Wisconsin, and I ended up in the infantry, but then when the ski troops were started, I was transferred up to Mount Rainier, Washington. And from there I went to an engineer school in the army with the idea that there was… the ski troops were going to expand into a division. And about the time I was going to get out of officer school, there was going to be a division, and they were building, starting to build the camp at Camp Hale, north of Leadville. So I had it all figured out that I would get back there in the engineers as an officer, but they kept me there at the school to teach camouflage for a year. And finally, I did get back to the division the last winter that they were at Camp Hale. And when I was at Camp Hale, I came back to Aspen every opportunity because I’d fallen in love with it when I was here on that trip in the, the spring of ’41. And then Friedl Pfeifer told me about his plans to try to develop skiing here, and he and I came over together a couple of times, and I then discovered this little ranch up on Red Mountain. You know, from town, you can’t really tell there’s a ranch there. But climbing up on Aspen Mountain to ski down the Roch Run, you look down on it, and you can see there’s a bench up there. So I drove up that little narrow, winding road and talked to the rancher up there and…about possibility of buying that place because I, it was just so unique, you know, and with an incredible view and all the natural beauty in the place. And he was, uh, he was interested in selling. He had been trying to make a living with 250 head of sheep, and that was a pretty hard struggle, and he was getting up in years. So we agreed on a price, and, but then I went off to war to Italy and worried all the time about while I was gone that he might sell to somebody else. But when I got back, when I got out of the Army, I went directly up there and made the deal to buy the place for $12,000.

Fabi Benedict [00:18:18] Seven.

Fritz Benedict [00:18:20] No, I think it was 12.

Fabi Benedict [00:18:21] Excuse me for interrupting.

Fritz Benedict [00:18:24] It was 600 acres, though.

Fabi Benedict [00:18:26] Well, tell her how you bought it. He had to sell his car.

Fritz Benedict [00:18:29] Well, yeah.

Fabi Benedict [00:18:30] So then you had to walk up and down.

Judith Gertler [00:18:34] So again, the price was somewhere between…?

Fritz Benedict [00:18:37] It was, I only think it was $20 an acre.

Fabi Benedict [00:18:39] 12, you’re right. 12,000. We still owed seven when we…

Fritz Benedict [00:18:42] Well, I had to pay, I had to pay half of it in cash. And that was difficult. So I sold my car, and I’d saved a little money during the war. My mother loaned me a couple of thousand dollars, but I think he figured he’d get it back because he figured I was a greenhorn rancher, and he knew how tough it was to scratch a living out there.

Judith Gertler [00:19:06] Were there any buildings on the ranch?

Fritz Benedict [00:19:08] Oh, yeah. There was a nice house, nice brick house built with local brick that was made right down the bottom of the hill during the mining days. It was during the mining days. It had been a dairy farm and quite a successful farm. But then after the miners left, it was hard to make a living, a little ranch like that.

Judith Gertler [00:19:36] Was there a lot of land…? Can you describe whether or not there was a lot of land in Aspen to buy for those kinds of prices at that time?

Fritz Benedict [00:19:49] Well, it’s almost a joke because land had no value. There were several hundred vacant lots and lots in town that were tax delinquent, and the county commissioners were anxious to get those lots on the tax rolls. So anyone that would bid $5 or $10 for a lot could get it and start paying taxes on it. Um, I didn’t buy any lots. I just bought that place up on Red Mountain, and there were ranches around town too, that were very reasonable. People wanted to cash in and move downvalley or something. Move away.

Judith Gertler [00:20:48] Let’s talk about how the two of you met and how you subsequently married and the early, your early married life on the ranch.

Fritz Benedict [00:20:59] You can tell about that. I’m tired.

Fabi Benedict [00:21:04] You’ve done a good job. So anyhow, we met at the square dance at the Jerome. And then Fritz must have liked me, I thought. I suddenly thought he was adorable. So he came to my… I was staying with my sister and brother-in-law in town, the house that later belonged to Robert and Barbara Anderson. An old house on Francis and Second. And so my brother-in-law had some baby owls. Gary Cooper, who then lived in Aspen part-time, had shot the mother owl and given the babies to Herbert and Joella, and they needed to eat live mice if possible. So Joella and Herbert had advertised in the Aspen Times for live mice, and Fritz brought down mice that he found around the place, right?

Fritz Benedict [00:21:51] Well, I happened to raise up a board that was in the meadow, and there were field mice living under there.

Fabi Benedict [00:21:57] So every morning around 7:00, he’d come with his little jeep that went “tat, tat, tat, tat,” little old army jeep made a lot of racket, to bring these mice. He came three mornings in a row, and I’d look at him through the window from upstairs. And then the fourth morning, I decided I’d be out in the garden at seven, sewing, in the sweet peas. I was making my sister a suit. I wanted him to see how domestic I was so he’d think I’d be nice wife material. Well, I was out there. I was so cold sewing in the sweet peas at 7 a.m. and he didn’t come.

Fritz Benedict [00:22:29] I ran out of mice.

Fabi Benedict [00:22:31] Ha! Ha! Oh, dear.

Fritz Benedict [00:22:37] But then the courtship got started anyway.

Fabi Benedict [00:22:41] We, the town was so small, you’d always be invited to the same little, small parties. Everybody would be there. Old timers and, uh, ranchers and the few, the newcomers. Very nice. So I’d always see Fritz there.

Judith Gertler [00:22:54] What were the parties like in those days? What would they consist of?

Fritz Benedict [00:22:59] Well, I remember, uh, Meg Brown, who used to be married to Darcy Brown. They had some parties, uh, down in the meadow where, uh, Hallam Lake is, you know, ACES. And they called it a “Wow” party, and they put the liquor in a bucket, and you’d swing it around like that and say, “Wow!” and then drink it out of the bucket.

Fabi Benedict [00:23:21] I never went to one of those. That sounds like fun.

Fritz Benedict [00:23:26] It was pretty hard going. But that wasn’t typical. These parties, they were just, go to somebody’s house and… Well, it’s funny about, you know, now we have liquor and wine in the house, but when we moved up on Red Mountain, we… typical fashion, you might buy a pint of whiskey on a Saturday night, you know, and have that, but then you’d never have it in the house during the week.

Fabi Benedict [00:23:56] No, we didn’t have liquor in the house. I used to be shocked because we had a tenant who hadn’t paid his rent, who lived in one of our old cabins, and the rent was 30 a month. Didn’t pay his rent, but we went up there one day, and he had wine and liquor in the house. And I thought, “Well, we don’t have wine and liquor in the house, and he doesn’t pay us his rent and he has wine and liquor.” I was annoyed. And we’d been married a year, the first time I ever bought any hamburger because we lived on deer meat, a little bit of elk, and also, we had chickens. We had a very nice vegetable garden. We froze enough for the whole year. We used to give some to the hospital. We had so much stuff.

Fritz Benedict [00:24:32] In the fall of the year, we’d go down to Paonia and pick peaches and bring those home and freeze them for the winter. It was, so that’s the way people lived. It was a very simple life and…

Fabi Benedict [00:24:42] It was very nice.

Fritz Benedict [00:24:43] People didn’t have any money, but they, they enjoyed life.

Fabi Benedict [00:24:49] Oh yeah.

Fritz Benedict [00:24:50] It was simple pleasures.

Fabi Benedict [00:24:53] We, Fritz rented his pastures to a sheep man from, Basque sheep man, and his sheepherders were Basque. And that made, uh, that was awfully pleasant. They’d drop by and bring us lamb, or we’d go up there for lunch up Hunter Creek.

Fritz Benedict [00:25:09] We’d ride horseback up, and, where they were up Hunter Creek, they had that whole ranch.

Fabi Benedict [00:25:13] Sing Basque songs. It was fantastic.

Fritz Benedict [00:25:16] And they’d bring out this, circles of bread and cheese and red wine. And it was a wonderful…

Fabi Benedict [00:25:25] I hadn’t liked it…

Fritz Benedict [00:25:25] They lived just the way they’d always lived.

Fabi Benedict [00:25:28] After they left, Hunter Creek seemed like a cemetery. Just lost all its charm.

Judith Gertler [00:25:37] Any stories about any particular people during this, or your early years of marriage and living on the ranch? People that you knew?

Fritz Benedict [00:25:47] Mhm. What do you think?

Fabi Benedict [00:25:53] I should have rehearsed.

Voice off Camera [00:25:56] What about the Whispering Swede?

Greg Poschman (camera) [00:25:57] Whispering Swede.

Fabi Benedict [00:25:59] Oh, the Whispering Swede, yes. The Whispering Swede was a… had he been a miner, Fritz?

Fritz Benedict [00:26:07] Well, I think so.

Fabi Benedict [00:26:07] I think he’d been a miner, and when we were first here, he repaired watches, and he spoke in a sort of little whisper. He’d say {whispering}, “Oh, that’s…” He talked about his caraway farm and chicken farm on the east side. He had a little bit of land, was very beautiful, and grew caraway seeds. I think they just grew there wild, really. We always loved that little piece of land and would have been interested in buying it. The Whispering Swede wanted to sell it, and one year, maybe I’d been here two years by then, Fritz had bid on some land that belonged to the railroad, which included quite a bit of land on the east side of town. And we were the high bidders for some strange reason. And then Fritz was just astounded, because walking over what the description seemed to include after getting the deed, it included the Whispering Swede’s acreage, about 4 or 5 acres east of town. And Fritz was really kind of upset almost. He said, “Oh my God, what do we do? We now have the deed to this land.” And really, the Whispering Swede had squatter’s rights, so we felt it was really his. So we never mentioned it to him that we had that deed, we didn’t want to upset him, but we asked him what his price was for the place. And then I think it came out somehow that we had the deed, but we were recognizing his ownership and he wanted $7,000, I think. Well, to make a long story short, my sister lent us the money so we could pay him. But even though we recognized his ownership and we were paying him what he wanted, he was a little resentful about it. And I remember he used to bring us fish, I remember his bringing us fish and saying that people had been killed over that place, and we weren’t sure if the fish was poisoned! But anyway, we wanted to get him his money, that was my sister’s money, and get a deed from him. And he said he had no way of doing this without getting to a lawyer. Well, we had no lawyer in town, so I offered to take him, to drive him to Glenwood so he could see his lawyer and get everything in order. And he, no, he wouldn’t go with me. And then he told some mutual friends, I think it was Angie Klusmire’s husband, that he wouldn’t drive with me because he wasn’t sure I wouldn’t kill him before we got to the lawyer. But so anyhow, unfortunately, this man after that was not a great fan of Fritz’s, but the ludicrous and strange twist of fate is that one day Fritz was at the courthouse, and he noticed some smoke coming out from a house 2 or 3 houses down, it was the Whispering Swede’s? And so Fritz ran towards that, wondering if he was in and needed help. And “Dirty” Herwick, who was then our sheriff, was ambling over there kind of slowly, and Fritz ran over, broke in the door as…. Before he broke the door in, he talked to Mary…Just, Margaret Just, and said, “Do you know if the Swede’s in there?” And she said, “No, no, he’s not home, because I haven’t seen him today.” Now, what kind of answer is that? So Fritz broke the door, got in there, and the man was upstairs. He’d been overcome by fumes. He’d passed out, and Fritz carried him out. We have a photograph of that from the paper, carried him out on his shoulders, brought him out to the fresh air. So, I can’t say Fritz saved his life because he died. But, I mean, that would have been a strange twist, since he was, felt that we were trying to kill him, if Fritz had been able to save him, but unfortunately, he didn’t save him. But he tried, right?

Fritz Benedict [00:29:32] There’s a tract of land adjoining that land that the Swede owned, just south of it, that’s now a very fancy development. It was called 1010 Ute, but I think it has another name now. And that was tax delinquent land. And I talked to the county commissioners about the possibility of buying that. And so the commissioners and I walked out there, and Bob Delaney was the county attorney. We walked over that little hill and we got over this hill, and Orest Gerbaz, who was a commissioner, he said, “Looks like a great place to shoot a deer out of season.” {laughter} It didn’t look like much to him. I think I offered them about $2,000 for like 7 or 8 acres. And Bob Delaney, the county attorney, turned to me and he said, “Now, Fritz, if you were in the shoes of these county commissioners, would you sell it for $2,000?” And I had to admit I wouldn’t, but they were, you know, they were so anxious to get land on the tax rolls.

Greg Poschman (camera) [00:30:43] Now, didn’t the Whispering Swede blow his house up once because he was trying to kill ants?

Fabi Benedict [00:30:47] No, that was Hoofy Sandstrom.

Fritz Benedict Oh no, that was Hoofy Sandstrom.

Greg Poschman (camera) [00:30:51] Tell us a story.

{break – tape runs out}

Greg Poschman (camera) [00:30:59] Um, okay. Pick it up from the last.

Judith Gertler [00:31:02] Fritz, you were talking about how anxious the county commissioners were to sell land. Would you tell us a little more about that?

Fritz Benedict [00:31:09] Well, you know, looking back, it’s just too bad that the county and city didn’t keep more land in town. You know, so much of it was vacant. Houses had been torn down or burned down. But now we have this shortage of land for parking and civic needs. And it was just given away 50 years ago, 45 years ago. It’s just…

Fabi Benedict [00:31:40] Ludicrous.

Fritz Benedict [00:31:40] It’s hard to imagine that happened. But what… it’s funny about the parking. The Ski Corp took the position that they weren’t responsible for providing parking at the base of the ski slopes. You know, the typical ski area, they have a big parking lot, but the Ski Corp took the position that it was up to the town to do that. And by then, of course, the county had sold off the lots, but there were still some good bargains at the base of the mountain, like where the Aspen Square is. The Ski Corp rented part of that. A woman from Texas owned the whole block and rented it for skiing, or for parking. And then when she sold it, they lost their parking, and they made no attempt to buy it.

Fabi Benedict [00:32:32] And we used to keep our sheep out there. We had two pet sheep.

Fritz Benedict [00:32:36] Oh yea, we lived right across the street, in the Bowman Building.

Judith Gertler [00:32:40] Let’s… I’d like to go there in just a moment, but I wanted to ask you just a couple of questions about the ranch and about the property that you bought that the Swede lived on, the Whispering Swede. Can you give us the, the boundary of, of the ranch? In other words, how would you describe the ranch on Red Mountain?

Fritz Benedict [00:33:01] Well, it, uh. part of it was a meadow on that bench, and the old farmhouse was up there. Uh, and then it, uh, went up the hillside above it, to some extent, and brushland. And it came down toward town on the south slope, almost to the valley floor. Uh, and then it ran on up Hunter Creek too, where the McCloskey house is now.

Judith Gertler [00:33:32] What were the east and west boundaries? Can you describe that?

Fritz Benedict [00:33:35] Well, the west boundary is about even with the western edge of the town. And then it ran on up Hunter Creek to where the National Forest starts now. It was stretched out for a mile or more, I guess. It was actually two ranches. There’d been a, uh, an upper ranch and a lower ranch, but they were all connected.

Judith Gertler [00:34:07] And what were the boundaries of the property that you bought that included the property of the Whispering Swede?

Fritz Benedict [00:34:16] Well, that’s where the Calderwood subdivision is now, on the east end of town, right along the river.

Fabi Benedict [00:34:22] But it included a lot of lots in the city too, Fritz. City Market area and all that. Well, where the Danielis lived, the Glory Hole Park and…

Fritz Benedict [00:34:31] That wasn’t part of it, though. Those were…

Fabi Benedict [00:34:33] Well, Danieli’s lots, all those lots, were just a block over from City Market, right?

Judith Gertler [00:34:40] So didn’t go quite as far as Spring Street, but…?

Fritz Benedict [00:34:50] Uh, yeah. You don’t know Spring Street. {laughter}

Fabi Benedict [00:34:51] Too dumb.

Judith Gertler [00:34:53] Well. you began to say how you moved into town. Why, why did you leave the ranch? Or why did, why did you move into town after living on the ranch?

Fabi Benedict [00:35:07] Well, I don’t know. I loved that little brick house. It’s still up there. Belongs to Jane Mayer. Very cute little brick house. And Fritz was anxious to sell it and build something that he would design. So every so often he’d come home and say, “You haven’t put a sign out for sale.” Well, I never put the sign up for sale because I didn’t want to sell it. But one day, unfortunately, a cousin of Pussy Paepcke’s son-in-law had heard, probably from Fritz, that it would be for sale, and they, he and his wife came to look at it, and I put a very high price on it. I think I asked, my sister had just sold her house, which was a very comfortable house downtown with a studio and several bathrooms. Really comfortable, ours was a shack, right? She’d sold hers to the Andersons, Robert, Bob Anderson for 13,000, including some very nice early American furniture. So I asked 15,300 for ours, which is a quarter of the size of my sister’s, had one bathroom, two bedrooms in the attic, and the next day those daft people called. The woman said, “Oh, Mrs. Benedict, I’m so excited. We…” She was kind of wacky. “Are we fine? We can afford your house.” Uh, and I said, “Well, that doesn’t include the stove.” The Franklin stove. I thought, well, if I don’t include that adorable Franklin stove, she won’t want it. But she bought it anyhow, so that was that.

Judith Gertler [00:36:34] Did you sell land around the house also?

Fabi Benedict [00:36:36] No, not much with the house. Maybe an acre or two, right, Fritz?

Fritz Benedict [00:36:39] Yeah.

Fabi Benedict [00:36:42] So we moved downtown in some old building that Fritz had traded. He traded this old, old building called the Bowman, where the Chefs of Aspen is, for a little cabin that he had built on Red Mountain to a man who still owns it, who makes vanilla extract. And the building we got had something like 32 rooms in it. It had been a bordello once in the mining days, most of it. Had 32 rooms, and the inner rooms in the central section, it was three buildings, had no light, but Fritz was pretty smart. He went up on the roof, and he found a difference in the heights of the roof, so he was able to put clerestory windows in there. And Fritz and I worked pretty hard on that place. We moved in. We had no heat…

Fritz Benedict [00:37:22] It was all, uh, a shell, you know.

Fabi Benedict [00:37:24] It was awful.

Fritz Benedict [00:37:24] Stripped of windows and doors.

Fabi Benedict [00:37:28] And Steve Knowlton had taken the doors, and a man had hung himself in the doorway, but the body wasn’t there anymore. {laughter} And, um, we would get in the Jeep and go to my sister’s several blocks away to wash because there was no, you know, no plumbing and no heat. And it was pretty awful. So at Christmas, it was so cold that I asked Herwick… No, who was it who had the jail? Elma? Alma? Alma. She let us sleep in the jail for a few nights so we’d be cozy. Remember that? Up on the hill? Anyway, we got it fixed up slowly to where it was pretty comfortable.

Judith Gertler [00:38:02] Can you tell us when you moved to town?

Fabi Benedict [00:38:06] Well, we moved into that building in the fall of ’52, maybe? Would you say, dear?

Fritz Benedict [00:38:12] I imagine about that, yeah.

Fabi Benedict [00:38:14] I think the fall of ’52, and we started working on it maybe in November or something like that.

Fritz Benedict [00:38:20] But then we were living there, we considered going back up on Red Mountain.

Fabi Benedict [00:38:25] Well, the idea was this was something for the time being, and then we could design a house, and we’d move on Red Mountain. We did live there. We lived there seven years. What, dear?

Fritz Benedict [00:38:37] We looked at different sites up on Hunter Creek and…

Fabi Benedict [00:38:39] For some years, yeah.

Fritz Benedict [00:38:40] …on Red Mountain for about ten years.

Judith Gertler [00:38:42] Did you eventually move back into town, uh, back on the mountain?

Fritz Benedict [00:38:45] No, we moved upvalley, on the river.

Judith Gertler [00:38:48] Now, was this the time that you adopted some children? When you were living in town, or does this come later?

Fabi Benedict [00:38:55] No, it was after we built and moved east of town, and that’s what really decided… We had an application in to adopt children, and we decided it was going to be much, much more convenient being near town than up on Red Mountain. And… which it really was. I think it worked out wonderfully.

Judith Gertler [00:39:13] Can you tell us about your children? Their names and…?

Fabi Benedict [00:39:16] Well, they’re all awful, especially Jessica. {laughter} Jessica, who’s sitting right here. Jessica Gordon is our best friend in the world, and we were very fortunate to adopt her when she was three years and 11 months. It was really a twist of fate because we’d applied to adopt two children, and our application had been circulating for a long time. We weren’t having too much luck because we were pretty old, and so we didn’t have much priority, you know? But, in the meantime, we had met three little girls in the Basalt area and were hoping to adopt them. Three little girls whose mother had abandoned them, who ranged then between the ages of nine and five, one was nine, seven, five. And so since we’d applied for two little girls, that would have been five little girls. So I talked to the Welfare about changing that to an application for two little boys. So we’d have three girls and two boys. And so the Welfare Department shelved our application for two little girls. But one day we got a call, and the man, Mr. Speckman, said, “I know you’ve shelved your application for two little girls and want two little boys, but there’s one, a wonderful little girl we’ve been told about in the Denver area, and she’s just what… Well, they’d asked me what I wanted, and I said, “Well, you know, anything.” They ask what I was. And I said, “Well, I’m French and Irish.” So I just threw this out, you know, and they’d put that down. They’d try to match your ethnic background a little bit. And this little girl was French and Irish. So, what the Welfare said was that she was really adorable. In fact, the judge was trying to swipe her for a friend, for a family. And that annoyed them because they felt that this little girl should go to somebody who was going through the regular channels. So we went to Denver and that little girl was our little Jessica, who was the first we adopted. And then later on, we were able to adopt two of that family of three, Charlotte and Emily. That took that took a long time, the legal process and everything, but they’d spent quite a lot of time with us in the meantime. So by the time we adopted Charlotte, she was 12, and Emily was ten and a half. And Patty, we didn’t adopt. She wanted to stay with her grandmother. And then, we’d applied for two little boys, but we got one. It was our son. Nicholas, who’s 31 now. We were very fortunate.

Judith Gertler [00:41:50] And so were the children.

Fabi Benedict [00:41:52] We’ve got wonderful children, yeah.

Judith Gertler [00:41:56] And to put this in a time frame, when was Jessica adopted? When, when did you first meet…

Fabi Benedict [00:42:03] Well, we met her on May 27th.

Judith Gertler [00:42:05] Of what year?

Fabi Benedict [00:42:06] Of 1960. You were born in ’56, sweetheart? 1960, and we were able to adopt her shortly after, I would imagine by the end of summer, it was sort of early fall. I remember we had lots of friends over for the adoption party. I remember the day we met, but I don’t, off the top of my head, have the day of the adoption.

Judith Gertler [00:42:26] And you were living still…?

Fabi Benedict [00:42:28] We were living in that house east of town, where we had a very nice place to bring up kids, I feel, because we had horses there, chickens, and it was right close to everything. They could walk to school, but still it was a country atmosphere.

Judith Gertler [00:42:42] Fritz, what would you say about Aspen and, and raising children in the early ’60s?

Fritz Benedict [00:42:51] Well, it was a wonderful town, small town to raise children. Uh, there weren’t any problems like have developed with drugs and so forth. I guess? At least when Jesse was, and the older girls were growing up. That came later, but, um, you know, it was so close to nature and you could go swimming in the river, and we’d go on hikes, and we went over to Ruedi Reservoir to sail quite a bit on weekends, and take trips up, jeep trips up in the mountains. It was a paradise.

Judith Gertler [00:43:43] When you think back to the town in those days, in the ’50s, late ’50s, ’60s, early ’60s, how had the town changed physically from the time of your marriage? How had it grown?

Fritz Benedict [00:44:00] Well, the growth was very slow in the beginning. You know, the resort wasn’t well known and it was very isolated, hard to get to. But then some things happened, like, to make skiing more popular. You know, the Head skis, which were much easier to turn and instruction got better, and boots were better, and the whole sport sort of took off and became fashionable with the Bogner clothing. And the ladies looked much better in Bogner pants than Levi’s, and, um, and then the condominium law came in. Before that, there were some people that had second homes, but they were generally houses, and there wasn’t much income from renting them. But with the advent of the condominium apartment, people could rent them much of the time when they weren’t here. In fact, when condominiums first came in, some people, I think, were able to pay them off. They’d just make a down payment, and then with the rentals, they were able to end up owning them and have them paid off. And that changed as there were more condominiums built, but it was still quite different from just having a house that wouldn’t be rented very much, so… And of course, it was so convenient too, you know, a lot of them were built near the ski slopes, so people could, didn’t have to have a car. And the town just sort of began to take off.

Judith Gertler [00:45:53] In a moment. I want to ask you some questions about the building of condominiums and the things that you were involved in, but can you tell us when condominiums began being built in Aspen, approximately what year did they begin?

Fritz Benedict [00:46:07] Do you remember?

Fabi Benedict [00:46:08] Now, which were the first, dear? Would you say the Aspen Alps? Or Aspen Square?

Fritz Benedict [00:46:13] Yeah, Aspen Alps was one of the first. Yeah.

Judith Gertler [00:46:19] Approximately what time frame are we talking about?

Fritz Benedict [00:46:21] I think it’s 30 years?

Fabi Benedict [00:46:23] Oh boy, I don’t know.

Judith Gertler [00:46:25] Okay.

Fritz Benedict [00:46:26] Uh, I think it must be early ’60s.

Judith Gertler [00:46:32] Well, Fritz and Fabi, let’s talk about how you began working as an architect, and Fabi, how, how you were involved in the business and consulting and, and what your role was.

Fabi Benedict [00:46:46] My role was to see that we could make the payroll.

Kevin Padden (sound) [00:46:48] Excuse me, you have your hand on the microphone.

Fabi Benedict [00:46:50] Oh, sorry.

Kevin Padden (sound) [00:46:51] That’s okay.

Judith Gertler [00:46:52] Would you like me to ask that again?

Greg Poschman (camera) [00:46:54] No, we got the question. Go ahead, Fabi.

Fabi Benedict [00:46:59] Well, I was the bookkeeper, and I typed the contracts and tried to see that the clients paid us. That was very difficult. And make the payroll and just sort of Fritz’s “Girl Friday,” I suppose you’d say. Right, dear?

Fritz Benedict [00:47:14] I should have used her more for design because she’s a good architect. Quite strong.

Fabi Benedict [00:47:19] Well…

Judith Gertler [00:47:20] Did you use her for…?

Fabi Benedict [00:47:21] A little bit, yeah.

Fritz Benedict [00:47:22] She was too busy doing bookkeeping to do…

Fabi Benedict [00:47:25] No, he was very nice. He’d show me his things, and I’d say, “Well, I think the roof should be a little more this way or that way,” but, um, his designs were excellent anyway.

Fritz Benedict [00:47:34] I started out just designing and building one house at a time. You know, maybe one or 2 or 3 during the summer. And I sort of learned architecture by building that way, because I hadn’t really had enough training in, in school, and I never worked in an office. I should have gone to work in somebody’s office when I got out of the Army before I came here, but I just wanted to live here. And at first up on Red Mountain, I was just a subsistence farmer for a year or two, and I was thinking I was going to do architecture on the side. But then, you know, the work developed, and I sort of got caught up in the rat race, and gee, we had as many as 30 people working with us as time went on because we got into designing ski villages too. Um, I did the plan at Snowmass… or at Vail and planned for the village there, and then tried to build the… designed quite a few of the buildings too. And then when it was ready to start Snowmass, Bill Janss hired me to be the planner of the village up there. So we got very busy and, uh, too busy. I mean, looking back, if we had it to do over again, we’d do more like the kids today, you know, go around the world. And that’s our thing because we were very adventurous, but we were really wrapped up in the work and worked all the time.

Fabi Benedict [00:49:15] It was stupid, frankly. Very stupid.

Fritz Benedict [00:49:17] Yeah, we were workaholics.

Fabi Benedict [00:49:19] However, we’ll know better next time, right? Tell her about the pigs, who were the garbage collectors.

Judith Gertler [00:49:27] Why don’t you tell us, Fabi?

Fabi Benedict [00:49:29] About the pigs? Well, when we were first married, Fritz said the only thing he’d ever made money on the ranch was pigs. The year before I met him, he had bought some little feeders at a sale and fed them garbage, that was allowed in those days. You could pick up the garbage at various restaurants in the town and feed it to pigs. Now that’s not allowed because, you know, sanitary reasons, etc., and the pigs had put on a lot of weight. The market had gone up, and he’d made a sizable amount at the end of the summer. And he decided that if we had pigs the year we got married, that we might make enough to pay for a pickup truck. So we bought the pickup truck on time with the idea that the pigs would pay for it. It didn’t work out that way. We went down to a sale of pigs in Glenwood, and Fritz wanted to buy maybe 20-30 pigs, I forget, but unfortunately, at one point when there was quite a band of pigs to be sold, he scratched his nose, and the auctioneer thought he was bidding. We ended up with 62 pigs, and we really didn’t have enough garbage for them. We had an agreement… Oh, we’d also bought some at the sale, but we’d also bought some from a man in Carbondale. Quite a number of those, maybe 20. He told us that, with the pigs that he was selling it over the market value, because with it went the concession to pick up garbage from the Red Onion, the White Kitchen, um, the Crystal something in, on the highway, the Hotel Jerome and a few other places. And one… So we paid extra for the pigs because that gave us the right to pick up this garbage, you get it? But one morning we got…the first week in business…we got to one of those places, and the garbage was gone. So we asked the owner, and he s–, and I said, “But we bought the right to pick up.” He said, “What right?” There was no agreement with that man, Mr. Mautz. He didn’t have an agreement. But anyhow, we did get garbage.

Fritz Benedict [00:51:27] Well, the um…

Fabi Benedict [00:51:28] But we were short of food for them.

Fritz Benedict [00:51:29] The restaurateurs said, “First come, first served.”

Fabi Benedict [00:51:33] Yeah. But we did have quite a lot of garbage. However, we were short. The pigs were hungry. I was really sort of sorry for them. They broke into our vegetable garden and ate the corn and, well, I was very sorry. I still think of them now because they were hungry. It was sad. So we took them to market in the fall, and they hadn’t put on enough weight, and the price had dropped, and it didn’t pay for the truck. But those pigs were so cute, and they’re kind of defiant. You’d try to chase them out of the garden, and they’d defy you because they wanted that corn. Doesn’t that make you feel bad?

Fritz Benedict [00:52:07] Yeah.

Fabi Benedict [00:52:07] Well, it does me.

Judith Gertler [00:52:10] Can you describe some of the projects that you worked on in town?

Fritz Benedict [00:52:17] Well, we, uh… As I said, I started very small, just designing one house and building it. Uh, some of them were out of town, up Castle Creek. Places all around town. And we did quite a bit of remodeling and fixing up Victorians that were, had been bought that hadn’t been lived in for a long time. And then, uh, we gradually got into some commercial work, um, new, new shops, downtown shop buildings. And especially when we got into building condominiums, that was a big, big thing. The Aspen Alps and the Gant and several others.

Fabi Benedict [00:53:11] Aspen Square. You don’t want to admit that, do you?

Fritz Benedict [00:53:13] Oh, yeah.

Fabi Benedict [00:53:14] That’s my kind of building. But he didn’t do the North of Nell, right?

Fritz Benedict [00:53:19] No.

Fabi Benedict [00:53:20] But you did a very nice, the old library, Fritzie. That model, that was very handsome. And the campus at the Music School, I liked that a lot. What you did there was wonderful.

Fritz Benedict [00:53:31] And I did the Bidwell Building, Mountain Plaza. And uh, you know, people like Bert had bought that property very cheaply. So it was easy to get the owner to leave some open space right on the corner. We did that on several corners. Uh, let’s see, I can’t think of the others now. Mary Ellen could be asked.

Fabi Benedict [00:53:56] But tell about Bert Bidwell…that was sort of fun. Bert Bidwell bought an old building, Tomkins Hardware, a lovely old brick building, and wanted to tear it down and have Fritz design a new building. But Fritz thought that that building should not be torn down. He’d often talk himself out of jobs that way, which was very good of you, actually. He’d said “No, no, Bert, don’t destroy this. It’s really handsome. We’ll just fix it up and paint it.” And then Bert said to Fritz, “Well, do you think it’s sound and structurally sound?” “Oh, yes.” Well, the next morning it fell. It caved in!

Fritz Benedict [00:54:26] Well….

Fabi Benedict [00:54:27] It wasn’t the next morning. But sometime that winter.

Fritz Benedict [00:54:29] There wasn’t any heat in the building, so the snow didn’t melt. So the snow built up on the roof, and the weight of the snow collapsed it.

Fabi Benedict And the bricks all collapsed.

Fritz Benedict [00:54:38] Well, the bricks didn’t collapse. The walls just fell in…

Fabi Benedict [00:54:39] Well, there were bricks all over, rubble all over.

Fritz Benedict [00:54:42] But in building the new building, we saved the bricks and used them. We did the same thing at the Gallun Building, the Woods Building now. The building had been burned out there, and there were a lot of bricks on the top floor that weren’t, it wasn’t occupied. And we took those bricks down.

Fabi Benedict [00:55:05] That was a beautiful building. They’ve added to it now. It doesn’t look so good. But you know where the Aspen Drug Store is? They’ve added a second floor, and that’s not too nice. But when Fritz did it, what there was there, it was the old Aspen Drug Store on the corner, and then there was a pit with a big cottonwood growing up, a hole in the ground where there’d been a fire, I guess, Fritz? There’d been a building once?

Fritz Benedict [00:55:26] The cottonwood was growing in the ashes.

Fabi Benedict [00:55:27] And the facade of the building was still there with the stained glass and the posts, but nothing else but rubble and a hole behind. And Fritz wanted Mr. Gallun, the owner of the property, who wanted to tear everything down, to save the little corner building, which he did, and to do an underground restaurant downstairs on that lower level with trees. Very imaginative, what Fritz did there, it was beautiful at the time, and Gallun didn’t, Mr. Gallun didn’t really want to do that. He wanted to tear it down. So I got on my knees. He was in our office, this cute man. He’s, um, Carol Craig’s, was Carol Craig’s father, very nice. I got on my knees and I said, “Please, Mr. Gallun, don’t tear that down. How about doing it according to, you know, Fritz’s sketch?” And he patted me on the head, he said, “Okay, okay. If it doesn’t cost more.” Isn’t that cute? So he did it that way.

Fritz Benedict [00:56:11] Well, I wanted to save the cottonwood tree, so we made a courtyard in there.

Fabi Benedict [00:56:15] Mr. Parsons thought you were nuts.

Fritz Benedict [00:56:19] He was the druggist.

Judith Gertler [00:56:20] So that was another important job you had, was to help convince clients, Fabi.

Fabi Benedict [00:56:26] Well, that was probably the only time, but that was fun.

Fritz Benedict [00:56:30] She was a good partner. But she worked too hard, as I said.

Judith Gertler [00:56:37] Fabi, where did you work? Where was the office?

Fabi Benedict [00:56:39] In my bedroom. {laughter} Well, let’s see, up in the brick house, we had a formal dining room. I worked in there. And then people, neighbors, bothered me so much. One, in particular, ran the taxi service. I was very busy in those days because we had a big payroll, and we didn’t have computers or adding machines or anything, and she’d come over in the morning the minute Fritz went to work about 7:30 or 8:00. She’d come over and say, “Stop working and let’s have coffee” because the woman had nothing to do in the off season. So I finally had to move my office to the attic so I could lock the doors and nobody could see through the windows. There weren’t a lot of people, a few people living on Red Mountain. They really hadn’t much to do and would visit, and I didn’t have time for that. So I moved the office into an attic bedroom. But then down in the Bowman Building where the Chefs is, our offices were downstairs, the whole corner there, we had all that space downstairs for offices.

Judith Gertler [00:57:35] And when you moved to East, to… where was your office?

Fabi Benedict [00:57:39] Well, then we still kept the office in the Bowman Building for many years.

Judith Gertler [00:57:43] Fritz, what were some of your considerations when you began to design homes and condominiums and commercial buildings in town? What were some of the, the thoughts that went through your mind? How you planned, what you wanted to achieve?

Fritz Benedict [00:58:02] Well, when I design houses, I like to take advantage of the site. Often these sites were quite nice and natural and with good views and unusual shapes sometimes. And I liked to fit the house, you know, to the site and try to use as much indigenous materials as possible. Now you see all kinds of stone used in buildings here. It’s imported from as far as the East Coast. But I thought using, in some cases, we could use stone right from the site, but at least from the neighborhood around here, and we used a lot of native material, wood too, spruce, that did a lot of board and batten, and the rough, rough sawn wood that was cut in the local mills in the valley or up in Lenado. I liked the idea of that indigenous character, you know, doing it, you know, trying to save money. But also it seemed to fit in. And normally I liked the idea of pitched roofs that fit in with the mountains rather than flat roofs. You know, it’s contrary to the Bauhaus tradition, which we did some flat roofs at the Meadows, you know, and I worked with Herbert Bayer out there, but that was more his design than mine. And I liked, I became aware of the great solar quality here when we built the, a cabin up on Red Mountain, that first winter I started to build that one. I moved up there in 1945, and I discovered that by, I just, you know, massed the windows to the south because that’s where the view was. And no one was to the north. And it kind of set it into the ground, and it was a low ceiling in the north. But then I discovered that I was getting so much solar heat from that, those windows. It wasn’t like where I grew up in Wisconsin, where the sun isn’t very strong in the winter because it’s a lot of cloudy weather and it’s a hazy atmosphere. But here, you know, the strong sun just heated up those cabin rooms. And I had a big fireplace mass that I later discovered absorbed that heat and had a red concrete floor, and that was a heat sink as well. So it was, it just sort of happened that that was a great solar building.

{break}

Judith Gertler [01:01:00] Fritz, um, could you continue talking about the, how you learned from your experiment with your first cabin in terms of solar?

Fritz Benedict [01:01:10] Well, whenever I could, I would emphasize, you know, mass the windows on the south, and normally the view was in that direction. Uh, and that was fairly easy to do with houses. Now with, uh, commercial buildings and condominiums, the sites, uh, didn’t always work that way. So it was harder to do, but usually with houses, I was able to emphasize the solar. Just passive solar. I didn’t really get involved that much in more high tech solar, and it’s amazing that this, in this location, solar makes so much sense because of the long heating season, and we have a lot of sun. So it really makes a lot of sense, and it’s unfortunate now that owners and even architects don’t pay much attention to it. Um, there was quite a bit of interest at one time when the price of oil went up, you know, 15 years ago. But then as soon as it dropped, there was a lot of just drop in interest in doing solar buildings.

Judith Gertler [01:02:28] A minute ago, you mentioned your collaboration with your brother-in-law, Herbert Bayer, and I wanted to ask some questions about how the two of you worked together. And perhaps, how you and Joella consulted with each other? What were some of the projects that come to mind that you worked with Herbert on?

Fritz Benedict [01:02:51] Well, Herbert and I were joint architects on most of the buildings out at the Meadows and the Institute. Uh, Herbert didn’t have an architectural staff, but Paepcke had brought him out here to be involved in all phases of design in Aspen, you know, advertising and making brochures. And, of course, Herbert was a painter, spent a lot of time doing that. But he had studied some architecture in the Bauhaus and had a great interest in it. So we, we had a good association. As I said earlier, he, being a Bauhaus man, had a different approach to architecture than I did. But since Paepcke had a lot of confidence in Herbert’s, uh, design, I didn’t, we didn’t get in much conflict on how the how the buildings should look. And so practically all the exterior design on those buildings was Herbert’s. And my office would do the, the working drawings, and we had quite a bit of influence on the floor plans. And I did a lot of the planning out there and the landscape design, but we worked very well together, and he was a unique man, he, uh, a Renaissance man, so I enjoyed working with him. And we were brother-in-laws, so we spent a lot of time together in the mountains and skiing, and it was a great, great association. Um, and it’s interesting as the first, uh, chalet of the so-called “chalets” that we built, the, the tourist accommodations, they were quite boxy and really didn’t look that great because there was just a meadow out there, no trees. And now the trees are all up, and they’re pretty well, uh, married to the ground by the trees. But as we went along, building more buildings, they became more sculptural with sloping roofs. And I liked them better than what we had started with. It was a, somewhat a matter of economy too, when we first started those first chalets. We built those for $10 a square foot. It was… Paepcke had a hard time scraping up the money to build the first one, 12 units. It’s, uh, it was a little easier to get money as time went on.

Judith Gertler [01:05:33] What time period are we talking about? The beginning of The Meadows?

Fritz Benedict [01:05:37] That was about, uh, 1953 or so, I think. Do you have any idea, Fabi? You think that’s right?

Fabi Benedict [01:05:47] Maybe ’54.

Fritz Benedict [01:05:51] It was the mid ’50s, anyway, we started that first chalet building.

Judith Gertler [01:05:57] Fabi, I know that you have a close relationship with your sister Joella.

Fabi Benedict Right.

Judith Gertler [01:06:02] A personal relationship. I’m also wondering how you functioned professionally with her, since both of you were, were assisting and working with your husbands in a similar way?

Fabi Benedict [01:06:15] Well, actually, that never really came into play at all, wouldn’t you say? Really not, no. Because, um, um, Fritz’s office was doing all the business end and the working drawings and all that, and Joella was helping Herbert a great deal, but more maybe with running his art studio, where he had a couple of assistants. And she probably helped, she helped him a lot with correspondence, sending photographs of his work to a gallery, organizing exhibits once in a while, things of that nature. So actually, she wasn’t involved in the architecture and construction at all, and there was very little discussion of that. Right?

Fritz Benedict [01:07:02] Mmm, right.

Judith Gertler [01:07:02] Well, you mentioned a few moments ago that you had a lot of fun together as, as a foursome. I’m interested in knowing a little bit more about life in Aspen in the ’50s and the ’60s, in terms of who you got together with, what kinds of things you did socially, what kinds of projects you worked on in those days. Just give us a flavor of what life was like for you in Aspen other than your work?

Fritz Benedict [01:07:33] Well, it was, life was so simple then, and, you know, close to the earth. As an example, all four of us went on…we all went hunting that fall, didn’t we? For elk? We camped up Hunter Creek, and it was important to get the meat. You know, I think both Herbert and I weren’t interested in trophy hunting. We were meat hunters, and you can look down on that. But it was easy to rationalize it because there were too many elk and too many deer. They’d increased so much during the war when there wasn’t much hunting going on. Unfortunately, you know, there has to be hunting to… or the animals would starve. You know, it’s lucky that there are people that like to hunt, and I haven’t hunted since we got married, except that time.

Judith Gertler [01:08:32] Except what?

Fritz Benedict [01:08:33] I mean, she would wean me away from it. And now I can’t imagine how I could shoot a deer. You know, we had three deer right in front of our house the other day.

Fabi Benedict [01:08:42] We had a, we had a pet deer on Red Mountain. It was adorable.

Fritz Benedict [01:08:46] And I, looking at those deer, I can’t imagine how I could have done that, shot them, because they’re just a marvelous animal. But we went up there and camped, and it was, you know, just very kind of primitive way of life, in a way, living off the land to some extent and, um, not traveling very much. We didn’t have any money. We had to get our pleasure here. And there was just a lot of great camaraderie.

Fabi Benedict [01:09:24] We had a strong link with our friends, don’t you think, Fritz? We’d have dinner with my sister and brother-in-law, or she’d call, oh, I’d say every other day and say, “Come on, I just made some soup.” She lived next door in that old building, so we’d have dinner with them. They weren’t working quite as long hours as we were, so she’d have us for dinner a great deal. And then we had some very, very close friends we saw a lot who were great fun. There was an illustrator living in town at the time called Garth Williams and his wife, Dorothea, and their two children. In fact, our daughter Jessica was named after their second daughter. We saw them all the time. It was like… going to their house was like entering a storybook. It was just a marvelous family, and they’d always invite our children too. We saw them more than anybody, except maybe the Morses. We had some very dear friends called Wendy and Rudy Morse, who had eight children, and we spent a lot of time with them, and we’d go to an occasional party. It wasn’t too much going on, right? The Paepckes would have us for Christmas dinner pretty generally, and that was kind of a highlight. And Pussy was nice enough to invite our kids too. And so they saw a part of the world that they never would have seen, I think. Don’t you think? Maybe Pussy’s?

Fritz Benedict [01:10:38] Yeah.

Fabi Benedict [01:10:38] Almost a different century. In fact. I wrote her a note once and I said, “Thank you for taking my children by the hand and leading them through the looking glass,” because I think the sort of life she led, the trouble she went through, she’d organized these treasure hunts and everything, and the beauty of the house and… was something that is just possibly disappearing.

Fritz Benedict [01:11:00] Those 5 or 6 years that we lived right in town, above, uh, in the Bowman Building…

Fabi Benedict [01:11:06] Above the shop.

Fritz Benedict [01:11:07] …above the shop, yeah. Those were as happy years as we’ve had. Now, part of it is our youth. But the town was such a marvelous, quiet, simple place then, and you’d walk down the street and you would know everybody except, you know, a few tourists.

Fabi Benedict [01:11:24] We had quite a few friends who were old timers, very old. And we’d go and call on them, maybe take some cookies or what have you. So we had… Fritz, I would say, had a great rapport with the old ranchers and miners, which I think a lot of the newcomers did not have. And at Christmas, we’d go around in our little sleigh with the horse pulling it, and go and call on the “winos,” and some people frowned on that, we’d take wine to the “winos,” but I mean, why not? They weren’t going to stop drinking, and that was a wonderful part of our life.

Fritz Benedict [01:11:57] That’s after we moved to, out on the, up on the river east of town.

Fabi Benedict [01:12:02] We used a sleigh and a little carriage quite a bit.

Judith Gertler [01:12:07] I’m curious as to where the “winos” hung out in those days. Where did you…?

Fabi Benedict [01:12:12] One of them hung out right in front of our office building, lying in the grass with his little white and black dog. Remember, dear? Where the bowling alley…what is there now?

Fritz Benedict [01:12:19] As Pussy says, he had his feet in the irrigation ditch.

Fabi Benedict [01:12:25] What’s the building there now, dear?

Fritz Benedict [01:12:30] Oh, the Aspen Square.

Fabi Benedict [01:12:31] No, no, where the, where the bowling alley was.

Fritz Benedict [01:12:34] Oh…

Voice off Camera [01:12:36] Boogie’s?

Fritz Benedict [01:12:37] Boogie’s.

Fabi Benedict [01:12:38] Boogie’s. Well, that was a vacant lot with a wonderful little brown weathered shack. Very beautiful, with hop vines growing on it. And there was a man who regularly would fall asleep — he was very drunk, poor thing — fall asleep in that high grass with his little dog watching over him, remember? And then when that little shack was torn down, friends of mine would say, “Aren’t you glad to see those old shacks go?” And I said, “No.”  And then after that, we had an ugly bowling alley there to look at.

Fritz Benedict [01:13:05] A group of the winos lived above the Herron Park, up on the…

Fabi Benedict [01:13:10] Many of them lived…

Fritz Benedict [01:13:11] There was a little enclave up there.

Fabi Benedict [01:13:12] But then also where the, um, Algot Erickson’s area, and then Mr. Fitzpatrick…

Fritz Benedict [01:13:20] Well, that’s the area I’m talking about…

Fabi Benedict [01:13:20] Mr. Fitzpatrick. Algot Erickson.

Fritz Benedict [01:13:24] There was a kind of an interesting, uh, he called himself a reverend. I don’t know if he was or not, but he…

Fabi Benedict [01:13:32] Reverend Ray.

Fritz Benedict [01:13:33] He had goats, milk goats, and he and his wife would come along right by the Bowman Building in the summer with a little child’s wagon and a sickle. And there was grass growing along the irrigation ditch there, you know, and they’d cut that, put it on the wagon and take it home for the goats. It was… life was different than it is today. It’s so different.

Fabi Benedict [01:14:00] Then we had our two lambs where the Aspen Square is now, and I’d walk over to the east side with them for a little outing to get some clover and so forth towards the Whispering Swede’s.

Fritz Benedict [01:14:10] Oh yeah.

Fabi Benedict [01:14:11] These two lambs. So cute. And at night they slept in our build–. in the building where the Chefs is now, downstairs.

Fritz Benedict [01:14:18] Where the Chef’s is, yeah.

Fabi Benedict [01:14:21] That must have… Fritz had tools there, like table saws and all that. And there’s two sheep that slept in there… must have been a mess, huh?

Fritz Benedict [01:14:29] Oh, yeah.

Judith Gertler [01:14:32] Speaking of changes, the town’s attitude changed toward building and growth sometime, I believe, in the ’70s.

Fabi Benedict [01:14:44] Mmhmm, about 20 years ago.

Judith Gertler [01:14:44] Could you go, start talking a little bit about how the town fathers (I guess in those days, it was the fathers, not the mothers) the, the, the town fathers began thinking and talking about some kind of changes in attitude toward building and growth?

Greg Poschman (camera) [01:15:04] Fritz, can you just move over toward Fabi a bit? That’s better.

Judith Gertler [01:15:07] Tell us about the time frame too, please.

Fritz Benedict [01:15:11] Um, yes, I suppose it was early ’70s when people begin then to, begin, began to question this idea of growth. And it came on quite early when Shellman and Edwards came into office as county commissioners. It was quite a change in attitude. The old-timer county commissioners, uh, felt that you couldn’t tell people too much about what they could do with their land. There was that, that Western attitude, you know, the frontier and… The, Shellman, Edwards and later Kinsley, uh, were elected with the idea of controlling growth and not letting it just…

{break – tape runs out}

Fabi Benedict [01:16:05] Now we won’t go to jail anymore, right Fritz?

Greg Poschman (camera) [01:16:08] Did you help cut all those billboards down?

Fabi Benedict [01:16:10] Yeah, we did.

Fritz Benedict [01:16:11] Not as much as Bugsy, but…

Judith Gertler [01:16:12] Are we rolling?

Greg Poschman (camera) [01:16:13] I’m rolling. Go ahead.

Judith Gertler [01:16:13] Okay, Fritz, would you back up just a moment and talk about the, the new county commissioners and the view toward change?

Fritz Benedict [01:16:25] Well, when Shellman, Edwards and Kinsley were elected to county, county commissioners, a big change in the idea of controlling growth. Uh, actually, we had started zoning quite early, but, uh, it was, uh, just pretty simple zoning. And, uh, it wasn’t really very strong controls. And for a long time there wasn’t any building code. We just, we didn’t realize how lucky we were then, because you could build anything without having to go through all the bureaucracy that you have to now. But there was need for a greater, greater control of how the growth was going to occur. And luckily, that early zoning did preserve the entrance to town. We didn’t get the commercial sprawl and strip development as you come up the highway. Um, that was a very important thing that is contrasted to so many communities, but there was very strong changes then in, in reversing the, or to clamp down on the, on the zoning and change a lot of it to “down-zone” a lot of the land that had been zoned for a lot of tourist growth. There’s a big tourist zone that was, uh, eliminated or reduced.

Fabi Benedict [01:18:06] It was nuts. Nuts. There was a place we have east of town, it used to be a little dairy farm we bought from the Dixons. It was about 150 acres, well, 130 some acres, plus Callahan’s, right? I think there was a right then with the older zoning to build something like 2200 units. Is that correct, dear?

Fritz Benedict [01:18:25] Forty units per acre.

Fabi Benedict [01:18:26] We didn’t even know that when we bought it. We were just astounded.

Fritz Benedict [01:18:29] Yeah.

Fabi Benedict [01:18:30] Yeah, that was really bad. We really needed a change. Should have come earlier actually. The only, the only bad part is that, of course, it had a terrible effect on the prices of land and really drove so many people downvalley.

Fritz Benedict [01:18:46] Yes. I wished… you know, their heart’s in the right place, but I wish they had done something about providing maybe a satellite village for, uh, for control for locals. So that this terrible inflation on real estate hadn’t occurred. But, you know, the controls were so pervasive that I think they could have done more rather than just letting this occur and start this streaming downvalley of the workers, which has just caused so many problems on transportation and the community losing its balance. And that was one of the great things about this place, how there were, there were no class distinctions on income, and it was just such a homogenous community, and it was just unique. And I guess we didn’t realize.

Fabi Benedict [01:19:49] That was nice, yeah. And the rich people who moved in, you never would have known that they had a lot of money. They’d live in a humble old Victorian house. I mean, like Adelaide Marquand, right?

Fritz Benedict [01:19:58] Yeah.

Fabi Benedict [01:19:58] It was marvelous. It wasn’t…

Fritz Benedict [01:20:01] Or Darcy and Ruthie Brown. They had a tiny Victorian.

Fabi Benedict [01:20:02] Yes. Right.

Fritz Benedict [01:20:04] Um, and people wanted to be part of the community, such as it was, the unique thing that it was. And now it just seems that people want to bring their way of life that they have back in the cities when they come here, and it’s really lost that desire to fit in. What else?

Judith Gertler [01:20:32] It’s… one of the things about Aspen is there are no billboards on Highway 82. And can you talk about if you played a role in that?

Fritz Benedict [01:20:42] Actually Fred Glidden. He hasn’t gotten the credit for that, but he, he was the first one to propose that because he had lived in Santa Fe, and vigilantes had done it down there, gone out at night with chainsaws and cutting down billboards. And Bugsy Barnard, who was mayor, got very excited about it, and he did a lot of it. And I went out on some midnight excursions…downvalley…

Fabi Benedict [01:21:06] And Pat Henry was involved, I think. I was jealous because they didn’t ask the ladies to go.

Fritz Benedict [01:21:10] At first, when they were cut down, some people put them back up, but then pretty rapidly they just gave up, the commercial interests just gave up, didn’t put them back up.

Judith Gertler [01:21:22] You, you’ve mentioned the wonderful sense of community, and you’ve both contributed a great deal to this community in terms of your involvements. Um, could you talk a little bit… we don’t have too much more time, but could you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you have given of your time to, to the community?

Fritz Benedict [01:21:46] Well, I was on the board of the Music Festival and School for about 34 years, I think. Uh, now it’s a limited term, so nobody will ever have that length of service. But for seven years I was chairman of the board, and I became chairman at a very critical time when the, most members of the board were wanting to see a change in the presidency. Gordon Hardy had been president quite a while. Well, like 25 years, I think. And Gordon just didn’t want to leave that role, and there was a, it was like a war. And practically the whole board quit because Gordon, they felt Gordon hadn’t followed to what he’d agreed to in stepping down. And I, my memory is so bad I can’t remember. I can’t pin the blame on who or what. But it was one of those things that I’d rather not get into that anyway. But then Gordon asked, I couldn’t see quitting. I, you know, I was afraid that the whole Festival would, would come to an end because practically everybody stepped down.

Fabi Benedict [01:23:32] Well, some trustees wanted it to collapse. It had become a really very antagonistic thing where they wanted to quit and see it collapse.

Fritz Benedict [01:23:41] And then they thought they could start over, which nearly happened. But I just thought it was better to hang in there. And then Gordon asked me to be chairman, and we built the board back up and did quite a few things. We were able to build the Marolt housing for the students, and we played a role in that. I…

Fabi Benedict [01:24:10] You played a major role in it. You got those built.

Fritz Benedict [01:24:11] I was pushing ads and made some early sketches. And, well, I was very active in the Parks Association. I was president of that for six years. And the Parks Association was very much against that housing project because it, the land had been bought for open space. But I thought that, you know, this four acres at the very end of the property that it wouldn’t violate the open space. It was right up next to where there’s some community housing right across the road. So I thought it would kind of blend in with that. And as you drove down the highway, you’d see all this open space, and that was way back away from the highway. Well, the, the, or the…

Fabi Benedict [01:25:00] Well, we had it put up to a vote. You were the one who caused this to happen. It was put up to a vote of the Aspen voters, remember? And then the voters voted yes, that there should be housing there, housing for about, what, 350 students and employees? And after the, even though the voters of Aspen had voted for it, the Parks, which was sort of Fritz’s baby in a way, threatened to sue the MAA or sue the city, I don’t know. Who would they sue?

Fritz Benedict [01:25:30] The city, for giving up that open space. So Fabi came up with this great idea.

Fabi Benedict [01:25:36] Okay.

Fritz Benedict [01:25:38] Tell her about it.

Fabi Benedict [01:25:39] Oh no, it just… Fritz had mentioned that we could give some land, give more land than that was taking, that was taking about four acres. If we gave about three times that much, that perhaps…

Fritz Benedict [01:25:47] For open space. For a park.

Fabi Benedict [01:25:48] …for open space, that would appease the Parks. So I came up with the idea of giving a park up Hunter Creek, and they liked that. And so then the Marolt place got built, which I think has been a very worthwhile project. Right?

Fritz Benedict [01:26:02] Well, it’s worked well because it takes care of a lot of transient workers in the winter, who are going to be coming in another month.

Fabi Benedict [01:26:10] And it looks quite nice. Harry Teague designed it, and I think it’s very, very suitable there.

Fritz Benedict [01:26:15] I think people realize that it’s not that bad.

Judith Gertler [01:26:21] One more involvement I wanted to ask about, and perhaps you both could answer. You talk about the development of the 10th Mountain Hut System, and how that started, and why is it important to you?

Fritz Benedict [01:26:34] Well, when I was doing planning work at Vail for the Vail Village, I, I got to thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there could be a trail from Aspen with huts all the way to Vail?” To connect these two resorts, very much like Chamonix in France and Zermatt in Switzerland are connected by a system of huts. And there’s so many huts all over the Alps, and we really didn’t have very many in this country. The Fred Braun huts existed back around Ashcroft, but those didn’t really form a system where you could go from hut to hut one night after the other. So I, you know, I thought quite a bit about that at the time, but I just never did anything about it until about 15 years ago. And then I got to thinking, “Gee, I really ought to try to push that idea.” And so I talked to a group of people that were interested in that kind of activity, and we formed something called the Western Slope Trails Association. We approached the Forest Service about being able to get sites on the forest, but, you know, a day trip apart, 7 or 8 miles. And they were kind of hesitant because they’d had problems with cabins on the forest in the past, where they became a kind of a white elephant and a problem to them, rather than something, a valuable thing. And, you know, our organization didn’t have any history to it or stature. But then Robert McNamara wanted to build a hut in memory of his wife, and he told the Forest Service that if these huts weren’t used enough, that he would tear, tear it down after a few years. So that helped us a lot in getting, getting the huts started, and from there on, it, we built one hut a year and we have about ten now, and want to build 2 or 3 more. And we’ve incorporated some, some ranches, dude ranches that were along the way and have a little more amenities like food served there and, and a hot tub at the Diamond J. And it’s worked out very well, and it’s really snowballed in the use. It’s, it’s really worked out better than I ever thought it would.

Judith Gertler [01:29:29] I’ve had the experience of, of using the McNamara Hut, among others. It’s, it’s a wonderful, I mean, the whole thing is such a terrific experience.

Fritz Benedict [01:29:40] I’d like to say a little about use of the forest. You know, there are quite a few environmental groups here, who, I’m afraid, are kind of selfish. And, uh, initially we got to use these huts for the winter. But then I always thought that they should be used for the summer, too, because more people take their vacations in the summer than in the winter. So we applied to the Forest Service 3 or 4 years ago to use the huts in the summer, but we were opposed by the Wilderness Workshop and the Sierra Club. And one of those people even said that they were up at the hut and there were children up there, and that turned them off. And their argument was that they were near the wilderness and that that would draw more people in the wilderness. And my, my position was that since the huts were already there, it’s less disturbing to the natural environment if people would stay in these existing huts rather than camping and beating down the grass and messing up the, the, the terrain. And not having an outhouse or, or controlled water supply, and… They were worried that people would come up there by jeep and have parties, and it hasn’t worked out that way. So now they’ve kind of accepted it. But I think there is a tendency on some of the local people to be very protective, you know, from a natural standpoint, but also from a selfish standpoint, and that they don’t think that somebody from New York, I guess, has as much right to these forests as they do. And I think we’d like to see the huts used more in an educational way, too, and get people here to learn about how to live in the wilderness. And we’d like to get more kids out and, you know, programs and get inner city kids. They have a good reaction to staying in the huts and cutting, doing work on the trails. And I just think that that is a, something that can grow. I’d just like to mention that.

Judith Gertler [01:32:27] Just a couple of more questions. I wonder if the two of you would discuss or describe your personal philosophy about giving to the community. You’ve been both, been very generous in terms of your time, in terms of, of land and trail easements and one thing and another. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you’ve done that.

Fritz Benedict [01:32:57] Go ahead. You go.

Fabi Benedict [01:33:05] I don’t know what to say, but I just feel that we’ve been very fortunate, and we have to give back. Um, that would be basically it, don’t you think, Fritz? I also feel, and this may sound silly since we were developers in a way, people shouldn’t really own land. I don’t see how any person, just because they have a piece of paper, can say, “We own this and you stay out.” True? I mean, the land belongs to itself. The land belongs to nature. It doesn’t really belong to us.

Fritz Benedict [01:33:34] It belongs to future generations.

Fabi Benedict [01:33:35] It belongs to future generations. So one has to give some of it for open space. Well, really, it’s a matter of duty.

Fritz Benedict [01:33:46] Well, it’s, uh, it’s true that it’s, uh, it’s really very enjoyable to give when you have the ability to give. Uh, Fabi does so much, you know, besides giving, she, uh, well, she’s become a great expert in medical things.

Fabi Benedict [01:34:11] Come on.

Fritz Benedict [01:34:12] She, she knows where the best doctor is for whatever you have ails you. For instance, she found where the best glaucoma expert was, in Boston. I’ve been going there every year for about ten years. He’s the best in the world. And I used to think that all doctors were the same. But she is so into that, that she just digs out these people and she’s found the best, an awfully good cardiologist for me in Los Angeles. You know, it’s costly to go there, and luckily, we are able to travel that way. But it’s just… I should have died about 20 years ago.

Fabi Benedict [01:34:56] That’s an exaggeration, but it is fun. What I mean is that occasionally, like this week, I think you can steer somebody who’s very sick or has a really severe problem to the right doctors. And occasionally it really is almost a miracle. And that is very thrilling to me. Uh, just by my making a couple of phone calls and some conversations, to be able to do that is very rewarding.

Fritz Benedict [01:35:18] Well, we’ve gotten very interested in something that’s fairly new now. It’s a, uh, the foundation started by somebody called Andrea Jaeger, uh, for bringing children that have terminal cancer out here. And we’re going to try to give them land so they can have a permanent camp.

Fabi Benedict [01:35:45] But that again is selfish reasons on my part. She was thanking me and crying and I said, “No, it’s really selfish because I would love to have the kids around.” And when I went to the first barbecue for them, I thought, “Well, this is going to be horrible. You know, all these little kids who, every one of them was terminal, but not at all. I left very exhilarated. They were all so happy, and their week here was such a miracle for them. It’s just wonderful. It was just a great bunch of kids.

Judith Gertler [01:36:18] I think this is a wonderful place to end. And before we do, I just want to give each of you a chance to add anything that you haven’t said, or perhaps answer some questions that I haven’t asked. Is there anything either of you would like to say before we end?

Fritz Benedict [01:36:38] I don’t have anything.

Fabi Benedict [01:36:41] Well, we’ve had a lovely life here and met wonderful people which we never would have, it never would have happened anywhere else. And it’s been a magical place to live, right dear?

Fritz Benedict [01:36:53] Mmhmm.

Fabi Benedict [01:36:54] That’s about it. Sums it up.

Judith Gertler [01:36:57] Thank you both very much.

Fritz Benedict [01:37:00] Thank you.

Fabi Benedict [01:37:03] This one’s a sentimental fellow. You’re gonna make me cry.

Judith Gertler [01:37:08] You’re such a wonderful couple together too.