Henrietta Hay's Column

On a sunny day in June in 1949 I attended a press conference with Dr. Albert Schweitzer. It was held on the lawn in front of the home of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke in Aspen.

On a sunny day in July 1994, I sat in the Music Tent in Aspen and heard beautiful music and words of love and respect for Elizabeth Paepcke, who died on June 15.

I witnessed the beginning and the end of an era. Between those two events, a great cultural experiment took place in western Colorado, which changed Aspen from a decaying silver mining town into a world famous center of ideas and music and intellectual stimulation. The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies was created, and to a great extent it was the vision and leadership of the Paepckes, which brought it about.

The Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival brought scholars and musicians to Aspen from all over the world in 1949. I was so overawed to be breathing the same air as Dr. Schweitzer that I have absolutely no idea what he said. He was a little startled to be breathing that air, too, since it was much too thin for him. All the correspondence about this trip had come to him from Chicago, and he thought the convocation would be held there. He decided that, "Aspen was built too close to Heaven and was not good for his health."

Walter Paepcke died in 1960. It is his widow Elizabeth who has kept the dream alive: the dream of the body and soul and mind coming together in nature. The Aspen Institute was one of her passions. She defined its purpose and gave it its character. Some 1300 people from all over America cared enough about her and that dream to fill the big Music Tent last Thursday to remember and honor her.

Loren Jenkins, publisher of the Aspen Times, wrote, "Her passing from our midst creates a vacuum and, alas, closes that rich, creative Paepcke Era that shaped our community ...Elizabeth Paepcke was a giant of our age."

One writer commented that, "few of us are ever strikingly beautiful, terribly charming or fabulously rich. Elizabeth Paepcke is all three." She knew her own mind and spoke it without hesitation, and we learned at her memorial service that she was also delightfully funny.

Two of her three daughters and six of her grown grandchildren spoke with tears and laughter about the fun and the challenge that they had growing up with this unique woman.

Her daughter said that the only time she ever heard her mother use the word God was when she was telling Mortimer (Adler) how to think about Him.

One of her grandsons remembered best her sense of fun and her unwillingness to accept mediocrity in her life.

Her friend Fabienne Benedict said that being with Elizabeth was like being in a fairy tale. Aspen has lost its fairy godmother.

Concern for the physical environment was an integral part of her dream and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies became one of her major projects. Tom Cardamone, the Director, said, "...our most endearing memories include her thistle-pulling crusades, goose-dropping holy wars, dirty-hands-and-knees tree plantings and (most fondly) our shared stories of wild adventures from Antarctica, New Zealand, the Alps and her beloved Colorado mountains."

She deplored the "new" Aspen with the monster houses, the ostentation, the glitz, the wealth, the people who care only for image. She said once, "They haven't an inkling of what Colorado is, and they don't give anything to the town, they only take."

Her daughter spoke emotionally of the need to keep her mother's dream alive. She said that she cannot fill her mother's shoes, nor would her mother want her to. But is terribly important that the dream not be lost in the trendiness of today's Aspen. It is up to the community, to all of us, to remember. Elizabeth was a unique woman, a woman with a dream of blending body, mind and soul in nature. She believed, in her own words, in "leaping into life."

The Aspen Idea even more important in today's world than it was in 1949. We can only hope that her death does not represent the end of an era, but that we can keep her dream alive.