Snowmass history: Meet the Snowmass sandwich-slinger

In a “We’d like you to meet” article on March 7, 1968, the Snowmass Villager introduced readers to Jim Metcalf, owner of the Village Delicatessen. Having grown up in Sun Valley, Idaho, he was no stranger to resort living.

“Jim was on the junior racing team and competed in all three events of the Junior Nationals in 1958,” the Villager reported. Though he broke both knees in college, ending his racing scholarship, he persevered and even with pins in both legs became a paratrooper in the army. After the army, he first tried living in California but couldn’t handle the eight-hour drive to ski in Mammoth, so he packed up and moved to Steamboat, Colorado.

After visiting back home and seeing “‘how Sun Valley had been built up by Janss I knew the Snowmass development would be a success and I wanted to be a part of it.’ The Metcalfs visited the Snowmass Pavilion in Aspen on the Memorial Day weekend last year, ‘And the next thing I knew I was in the delicatessen business,’ Jim said. … Opening was hectic at his Village Delicatessen, Jim says, ‘I got the building on Dec. 14 at midnight and opened on the 17th. There was no hot water for several days, the help was untrained and I probably knew as much about it as they did. But the next thing we knew there were lines of people out the front and back. Business has been great.'”