Whenever someone cracks on Vail not being a “real” community, I think of Rod Slifer.
Slifer came to what would be a town in 1962, shortly after the very first pioneers, and by pioneers I mean people who gave up all in their former lives to do everything from digging the first trenches to setting up a town government separate from the ski resort they were building at the same time.
He died Monday, at the age of 89.
Today, the village Aspen people sneer at as they drive by enjoys — though that’s a relative term — routinely packed Town Hall meetings and memorial services that would outnumber the crowd for Bruce Springsteen, if not Taylor Swift these days.
Another will gather for Rod Slifer, first Realtor, mayor for parts of three decades including the early 2000s, co-founder of the largest real estate company in the region, who skied a Back Bowl at age 88 and would again if pneumonia hadn’t felled him.
I know, all the ski towns have remarkable people, Park City maybe most of all. Funny, this community reminds me most of Vail. I don’t mean Vail Resorts the company or the ski mountain, or what the forgivably ignorant think they see as they drive past the town on I-70.
I mean the community I lived in and covered for 17 years, which Rod did so much to help shape with his calm stewardship and gentle humor. In crisis, even when irked, maybe especially when irked at me, there always was that twinkle in his eye.
If you met him, you invariably loved the guy even if you wore your resentment of rich people like a bruise, as some do.
He showed up in Vail far from rich at 26, having grown up in some tiny farming town on Colorado’s eastern plains. No one had much more in mind than survival then. I think there’s an authenticity, to use an overused word, that springs from that.
And maybe that’s what spoke to me as editor and later publisher of the Vail Daily during his last term as mayor and community elder.
I learned a lot from him when maybe we’d disagree and he’d buy me a beer, that twinkle in the eye, a couple of times. There’s a funny breed of journalist, to me anyway, who would refuse. Rod no doubt had encountered the type, so this was test as much as natural instinct. I bought him beers, too.
You see, some journalists believe themselves apart from community, holding their noses and reeking of a “democracy dies in darkness” fervor rivaling Batman. Too often their reports also rival Batman in twisting events into nearly pure fiction. They tend not to last in ski towns, which are more community minded and less tolerant of BS like that than most. Besides, investigative thoroughness has nothing to do with buying the mayor a beer or accepting one from him or her.
In any case, it never stopped Slifer from offering thoughtful criticism or trying to help me understand where he thought, often enough correctly, we were wrong. And I wrote and edited, as always, what I understood to be true, ultimately thankful for that more to the story, some evidence I’d overlooked before, that would make a story or column more honest as well as accurate.
He and the founder of Vail Mountain, Pete Seibert, had a failure decades ago at Snowbasin, and had to sell the resort after a few years in 1984. That’s as much as I know about his connections to Utah, though I’d guess some folks here knew him well. There are too many ties between here and Vail to think otherwise.
I’m writing now in honor of how much I learned from him about dealing with crisis, political disagreement, disappointment, and fellow humans. He might express anger from time to time, but that wasn’t his general approach. He was more likely to make a wry, funny observation that got a room or tense parties around a conference table to laugh despite themselves. And then he kind of had you, regardless of the outcome of some discussion point. That had a way of making the matter at hand, while critical, seem almost secondary in this life.
When I talked with him, he was one of those people who made you understand you were important to him simply as a human being. Not that this is rare in ski towns, mind you, but it always was very present in his company.
So, here’s to Rod then, I’ll declare, pint in hand.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.