Willoughby: The advantages of being a famous town

Reading the latest best seller by Elin Hilderbrand, “Swan Song,” I noticed she mentioned Aspen several times. If you have read her Nantucket books, you know they explore the ups and downs of life in a tourist town. In this book, two of the main characters, recently paying $22,000,000 for a Nantucket house, claimed their previous residencies were, “holidays in Palm Beach, then we skied most of our winter away in Aspen.”

While it is fiction, the book setting could easily have been transferred to Aspen. Many other fiction books in the last decade have also made references to residency or tourism in Aspen. Some may wish authors wouldn’t glorify our town; others love the free advertising. Being the “in” place is good for real-estate sales as well as restaurants, hotels, and other tourist amenities.

The Hilderbrand series focuses also on resort employees, including the seasonal workers. Waiters, waitresses, bartenders and others are woven into her plots. A waitress in Las Vegas, tired of the noise and heat there, after reading one of her books might think of moving there, or with the mention of our town, to Aspen. Another biproduct of fiction based on a real and exciting setting.

Aspen did not make the pages of best sellers in the 1930s, but the town’s efforts to attract skiers took advantage of connecting celebrities to its tourism. In its early years, it was a sport with affluent followers. In those Depression years, the federal government was, through the U.S. Forest Service, trying to entice the development of skiing as a business with growth potential. Aspen was not the only town attempting to get off the ground floor of a new business.

The major competitor, with a head start of a couple years, was Sun Valley. Its developer, Averral Harriman, wanted to build a larger passenger trade for his railroad holdings and chose Sun Valley, on the line, to create a resort. To initiate a buzz about skiing and traveling to a resort, he coaxed movie stars to Sun Valley, including Norma Shearer, Gary Cooper, and Claudine Colbert.

It worked.

The Highland Bavarian partners copied Harriman’s approach, working on attracting celebrities and wealthy cliental to Aspen to spread the word and to form that identity as being the chic place to go.

Partners Tom Flynn and two-time Olympic medal winner Billy Fiske were in Los Angeles, and they enticed movie star and comedian Jack Oakie and his wife, both skiers, to visit and ski in Aspen. Oakie, when asked for a statement from a reporter about his impressions, said, “better not get started on that, as it would take a whole newspaper to tell how much he liked it.”

Partner Ted Ryan, the grandson of the 10^th wealthiest American in 1928, recruited the East Coast skiing crowd and wealthy travelers who usually went to the Alps to come to Aspen. The war interrupted their efforts, but Aspen was already beginning to be known.

After the war, the Aspen Skiing Company and Walter Paepcke used a similar method for creating the buzz. Their first success was getting film star Gary Cooper and his wife, who had three names — Veronica, Rocky, and for movies, Sanda Shaw — to shift from Sun Valley to Aspen. They visited in 1948, fell ln love with the town, bought property on Red Mountain, and built a house. Life magazine published pictures of Cooper in Aspen in 1949, and Warner Brothers produced a short film, “Snow Carnival,” with Cooper as narrator with scenes in Aspen and promoting the California Zephyr to get there.

It is a cliché, but the rest is history.

Tim Willoughby’s family story parallels Aspen’s. He began sharing folklore while teaching at Aspen Country Day School and Colorado Mountain College. Now a tourist in his native town, he views it with historical perspective. Reach him at redmtn2@comcast.net.