To Aspen and Back
Author: Peggy Clifford
Publisher:
Published: 2022-07-04
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9780996454513
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Aspen, Colorado: elevation 7900 feet, resident population 6000; America's largest ski resort; site of the prestigious Aspen Music Festival and School and the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. Home of leading pop singer John Denver, leading outlaw- journalist Hunter S. Thompson, leading best-selling novelist Leon Uris, leading comedian Steve Martin, leading man Jack Nicholson. Described by national media as "the place of the seventies."Like New York and Hollywood, Aspen describes a state of mind and a way of life. In its 100-year history, the town has staged the birth, death, and resurrection of the "American Dream." It is the legend of that attainable dream that Peggy Clifford illuminates in her story of the growth of this American town.We see the dream take root and flower silver when Aspen is founded by a group of prospectors on a mother vein forty miles wide; we see it wither and die some ten years later. We see it manifest again as a Chicago industrialist comes to town in the 1940s with a host of co-big daddies including Albert Schweitzer and Mortimer Adler, and goes about making a place where America can turn from things to ideas, aiming for a "total synthesis of human life."But the directions of dreams are not always consistent. The town-out-of-time attracted innocents, dreamers and fugitives from the Land of Plenty, but the town of art and sport they created attracted others smart enough to know a good and profitable thing. Ski facilities were expanded, boutiques appeared, a wall of condominiums separated town from mountain. Once out of step, Aspen is in vogue, and a more modern version of the dream motivates the place: pleasure is business, and business is a pleasure.