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Andy mill aspen house12/26/2023 ![]() “So Burl Ives came down off the stage and sat among us and sang.” “There wasn’t a very big audience,” recalled Celia Marolt, a matriarch of the longtime local ranching and ski-racing family, in The Quiet Years. Star recording artist Burl Ives, who came to town frequently in the 1940s, sang ballads at the Paepcke-restored Wheeler Opera House that Lowell Thomas admired. the first writer or artist to become a Public Celebrity.” Auden once observed that Goethe was, “So far as I know. Ironically, as Ted Conover notes in his book Whiteout in Aspen, W. In 1949, they sponsored a Goethe Bicentennial celebration in Aspen that included Albert Schweitzer (on his only visit ever to America), Thornton Wilder, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Artur Rubinstein, and Gregor Piatigorsky among the famous attendees, some of whom returned for years afterward. Wheeler before them, the Paepckes became celebrities themselves.īy greatly assisting in turning Aspen into a world-class resort, they began to attract more celebrities to visit and live here. They also introduced numerous of their fellow wealthy industrialists to town, along with prominent artists, and helped start the Aspen Skiing Corporation. ![]() The Paepckes originated the Aspen Idea (of celebrating mind, body, and spirit) and created the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival to further those ideals. It became famous as a set for movies such as Devil’s Doorway and The Searchers, as well as for print ads and television commercials for Marlboro and others still being shot there today. When hollywood came looking for film locations, some of the producers knew Lou, and they would base out of the ranch. “Each afternoon,” he wrote in the intro to Frankie and Johnny O'Rear's The Aspen Story, "I broadcast from the redecorated auditorium of the old Wheeler Opera House, which with its new red plush and gold decor surely must be as handsome as it ever was in the days when Joe Jefferson did his Uncle Tom's Cabin or later when John Drew and Lillian Russell [one of the most famous American actresses and singers of the late nineteenth for the silver miners and their ladies."Ĭontinuing that line of stage performers and ushering in a new era of film stars, Broadway actress Lou Deane and her husband, Had, bought the T-Lazy-7 ranch on Maroon Creek in 1938. He went on to make “annual pilgrimages” to Aspen in the late 1940s. The globetrotting Thomas was a devoted skier and first ventured to town before World War II. Internationally famous writer, radio broadcaster (four decades on air), filmmaker (his movie about Lawrence of Arabia was shown around the world), and television host Lowell Thomas was told about Aspen by his friend Damon Runyon. ![]() Image: Courtesy: Aspen Historical Society Other of Aspen’s most famous residents would be similarly maligned over the years. Of course, the Native Americans themselves were considered undesirables back then by the white settlers who built the town. The enlarged image has hung in various businesses around town and is a local favorite. When you see their images today, you have no doubt that the coolest, most glamorous people in Aspen when it first began were the Ute Indians, specifically the four of them visiting Aspen in the 1880s who had their pictures taken by well-known local photographer Horsethief Kelly. Interestingly, the boldface names that forged a real relationship with the community, by either living here or visiting frequently, often ended up reflecting something true about the Aspen of their respective eras. And after the post-WWII cultural and recreational renaissance, it quickly became a salt lick for celebrities and a virtual petting zoo for the rich and famous. Even during a long, early-1900s lull in its own fame and fortune as a community, public figures and luminaries continued to spend time and live here. As one of the West’s richest silver-mining towns, Aspen attracted celebrities almost from the moment it was established. ![]()
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