By Don
Many people, including my mother and father, when they first looked at Breckenridge, saw old mining tailings, disheveled buildings, and a quaint but poor town that was waiting for a blood transfusion. Summit County as a whole was even much less attractive with the exception of the gorgeous topography. At the time of our arrival, I read that the three counties in the US with the highest level of per capita education were Los Alamos county NM, Pitkin County CO and Summit County CO. I later read that people in Summit County had the highest longevity in the US. Must be something good going on here. Just prior to our discovery of the town, with the advent of Ralston Purina Dog food money and oil money, Keystone and Copper Mountain ski areas joined Breckenridge, now owned by Aspen Ski Corp to make a major destination for winter sports. I had hopes but little did I know that we had bet on a winner. So let’s see what was really there. Let’s meet these people.
We found the people to be a very diverse group. There were the old timers like Frank and Theta Brown that lived on Main Street. Doris asked Theta what it was like to live on Main Street in the good old days. It was understood that in the 1930s, huge gold boats or dredges navigated up the Blue River and through the town, working shifts all day and night. Theta said that “It was noisy…the trucks, the snow plows, the dredge.” She was born in that house on Main Street. Apparently, the dredge on the river passed by her house within 50 feet and every time a shift changed, the noise quit for a few moments and everyone in town woke up. There were late arrivals that opened up restaurants for the skiers. Ski shops appeared, condominiums were built, and people came to fill the new jobs. Some middle-aged old timers still ran the town council, including the mayor. Change was afoot but at the time we were too busy with the business to see it all coming.
Young people came, some as ski bums or to become lift attendants, living six or more to an apartment. There were dropouts from city rat race jobs that became bartenders or realtors, or found other more peaceful jobs away from city pressures. There were even “hippies" that lived on National Forest land in tents and abandoned cabins who managed to stay both summer and winter. It was common to know a lift attendant who had a Master’s degree and loved his life in Breck. Or a college graduate who now ran a business cleaning condominiums. Or a former NY stock broker that came west for a change of life.
We met them all and were assimilated into their ever-changing environment and its many coexisting cultures. To each his own, seemed to be the way. As a retired Navy pilot, I was slowly accepted into this diversity, along with Doris and the kids. There was humor everywhere. The wife of a well to do family complained to me about her feeling self conscious driving her Mercedes into town among the pick-up trucks with golden retrievers in the back, each with a red bandana around its neck. She laughed when I suggested she put a plow on the Mercedes. We went to an ecumenical Christmas service at the Protestant Father Dyer church with Catholic friends. We heard our Catholic friends behind us mimicking us Protestants saying to each other…”What do we do now, read or sing? When do they do bells?” That's ecumenical humor for you.
We got to know an ex-Marine who was the minister of the Father Dyer Church. He was making a cellar in a church building and needed help. I showed up to rake concrete as it came through a cellar window in a chute. Next to me was an old Norwegian and former underground patriot during the Nazi occupation. He was much older than I, very fit, and worked twice as fast. He passed me once and I said, "Olaf, I hate you.” Olaf laughed and asked me how old I was. Besides Olaf who represented the allies, we had a cook in the Ore Bucket restaurant that had been a wartime Messerschmidt gunner in the Luftwaffe. Now that’s ecumenical and geopolitical camaraderie. When we needed a vacation, a couple running a t-shirt shop told us to use their condo in Phoenix. They were repaid with a case of toilet paper and other items from J-J Supply.
A year later I got the Red White and Blue volunteer fire department to bring their multi-story bucket fire truck to the church. Wearing an old flight suit, I repainted the steeple. When asked why I would go up that high and do that, I told everyone “I was just trying to get closer to God.” I really did it for the minister who was my friend.
I first met that minister one cold day on the ski slopes. The businessmen, including a toilet paper delivery boy, would get a free half day pass from the ski area every Thursday and young and old would “boom” the hill for two hours and retire to the bar in the Bergenhof for whatever. A stranger joined me on the ski lift chair. It was a near 20 below chill factor. I smiled and said “Jesus Christ, it’s cold.” It was Al Brown, the minister. I did not attend church but Al and his wife also became friends.
Don throwing toilet paper
Breckenridge parades, summer and winter, started whenever they were ready. We decorated our Chevy panel truck with a huge chicken wire snowman that was wrapped in toilet paper and made a very large arch made of toilet paper at the back of the truck with a sign mimicking McDonalds that said "Over a Million Served.” Double clutch Doris drove the Chevy. I was on top with New Orleans style throws that I tossed to the masses, some unwashed. Our throws were toilet paper rolls. We always followed our realtor friend whose Jeep was towing an outhouse with him standing in the outhouse wearing a rubber mask of the current president. There were three or four of these parades a year and the snowman was kept in our warehouse between parades. The parade featured other “floats.” A yellow backhoe with funny people in the bucket, a flat bed truck where known characters were using an axe and a chopping block to cut off the heads of rubber chickens, a dignitary on a horse, namely the only black man in Breck and the Democratic whip in the state legislature…to whom I loaned my sword for affect and best of all…the famous Breckenridge marching folding chair drill team that sometimes included Kent. The winter parade was called Ullr Fest and yes, some Schnaps were consumed.
Doris reinforced her mantra of never turning down a lunch and we ate many a lunch in town. In the summer, a phone would ring around 11 am and someone would ask if we were up for golf, with which we had recently become vaguely familiar. On went the answering machine and off we went, usually to a nine hole course at Leadville or Buena Vista which had trout streams running throughout. We once met a fisherman with a nice fish and naturally asked him, “What club did you use?” We backpacked with the kids, camping at a pond hours away. We vacationed on road trips using the bus and went to Lake Powell each May to spend a week on a 50 foot houseboat with ten other people. I could never understand why my bathroom number was 28. It was home alone time for Jennifer and Kent. That was unwinding time for the hectic winter business season of occasional seven day work weeks. We said, “What happens at Lake Powell stays at Lake Powell." Was there drinking? Well, the toughest job of unloading supplies from the cars to the boat was finding enough native bearers to move the booze cartons.
After two years in the duplex, we bought a house being built a half a block away and put the duplex on the market. It sold fast and we made a winter move, as we called it, by flexible flyer sleds through a path made by our big snow thrower. We also used the VW bus. Locals helped move the piano. Winters were usually fun. After a big dump I would snow throw the driveway and front walk, then drive the snow thrower up a ramp into the bus, go to work and clear the snow from the J-J supply loading dock. Sometimes the snowfall required that I chain up just to get to work and keep the VW bus chained up until noon when the plows were done. We sometimes accomplished more just getting to work than we did during the day. JJ Supply sent Jennifer to Colorado College and Drake University and Kent to RPI. Both kids found local jobs, the last of Kent’s was being a lift attendant. He left his lift attendant job to join the Navy and departed for Pensacola. Then we sold the business and I worked as dispatcher and driver for a Denver airport to Breckenridge transportation company for the last three years while Doris was a receptionist and secretary at our good friends’ real estate office.