Texan Go Home!

people in Aspen would rather keep the town for themselves than have it overrun with tourists. Which is pretty ironic, since Aspen’s major industry is tourism and a lot of people in Aspen came there as tour-isi.s in the first place. In fact, the most adamant are the recent converts to Aspen consciousness: “You call yourself a local here after six months,” says one New York transplant. The level of self-satisfaction runs high in the Rockies, and unusually so among Aspenites, many of whom seem to have the idea that one is a better person for having moved to a better place.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the “locals” direct their barbs at Texans, especially the members of the Dallas Ski Club, nearly 300 of whom make an annual five-day trip to Aspen that culminates in a highly competitive club racing championship.

“The town is pretty hard on them,” an employee of the Aspen Ski Corporation says. “They’re so typically Texan – loud, run around in big groups, try to take over the bars. You don’t even know when the other clubs are here, but with Dallas, word is out immediately: ’Dallas is coming next week.’ ’Oh, God.’ They’re so overwhelming!”

So Aspenites get their own back, she says. Ski Corporation employees, who organize races for the ski club during its trip, award a case of beer to the one among them who arranges to have sexual intercourse with a Dallas Ski Club member under the most unlikely conditions. Worse yet, she claims that one employee deliberately falsified times in one of last year’s events to keep a particularly disliked DSC member from winning. So much for mountaintop hospitality.

With 300 members hitting the mountains in a single day, most wearing pins or scarves or cowbells that clearly identify them, the Dallas Ski Club is an easy mark. It’s not the only one, however. In Aspen’s well-defined hierarchy of tourists, Texans do not stack up well, and everyone from restaurateurs to busboys will go to some lengths telling you why.

Consider, for example, the opinions of Klaus Christ, owner of Aspen’s Golden Horn, generally ranked among the city’s five best restaurants. Christ is a tiny Swiss tyrant, as proud of having refused service to John Denver on a busy night as he is of his veal and sweetbreads; off-hours, Christ is stunningly miscast as a director of the Aspen Chamber of Commerce. In his own estimate, Texans provide about 30 percent of his business.

“I love them,” he says, “but they put us into shock because they’re loud, obnoxious, and use vulgar language. I say, ’This is my ballpark, you play by my rules.’ You have to be blunt. Texas is blunt.

“They’re unhappy, dissatisfied in Texas. Down there they have a responsibility to society, and here they don’t. This is the place for them to wear boots and jeans, to get laid by the bartender, the busboy, to do coke, whatever. But still, they want to be important, as they are in Dallas. They can’t get away from the Dallas trip.

“They are peasants when it comes to eating and drinking. They find something they like and eat it for the next five years. They know nothing about wine. You could give them Ripple or Thunderbird.”

Christ is not unaware of the financial contribution Dallas has made to his plan of retiring at 40, however, and he has asked his employees, please, please not to call the Texans turkeys.

Why Dallas should come in for so much flak is not obvious. According to available figures, Texans account for only about six and a half percent of Aspen’s winter tourists – well behind California, Illinois, and New York.

And while plenty of Dallasites are investors, their clout is relatively weak compared to that of 20th Century Fox, which recently paid $48 million for the Aspen Ski Corporation, giving it a near-monopoly on the town’s mountain resources.

Some Dallasites so resent the sort of treatment they’ve received in Aspen that they’ve decided to take their business where it will be appreciated. One of them is Harry Bass, co-founder of the Dallas Ski Club and former owner of a large chunk of Aspen Corporation stock. Bass says, “All of a sudden this new vernacular came along and Aspen started calling everybody turkeys-suckers. It made me so mad I couldn’t stand it. I mean, I ran the Aspen trips for nine years and there was never any trouble. But Texans get branded in a hurry. Once it gets started, you can’t stamp it out.” Bass is now majority stockholder in Vail Associates.

Another former Aspenite is Henry Stuart, chairman of the board of Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport. He and his family had been homeowners and part-time citizens of Aspen for about 20 years when they finally decided the terrain was no longer friendly. “If you were a tourist, you were a second-class citizen,” Stuart says. “You were allowed to spend your money and keep the locals in groceries, but you weren’t allowed to enjoy the place like they were. The attitude was, ’I am the last one in, pull the ladder up. This is my Aspen.’ Well 1 just don’t like to spend my money in a store where people don’t want me.” Stuart is now spending his money in Crested Butte, a smaller ski resort to the south.

The Dallas Ski Club will be heading up, undaunted, to Aspen this month. And they’ll no doubt encounter the usual snubs from recently divorced would-be photo-journalists from New York who’ve spent a season cleaning condominiums and think that qualifies them as natives.

But seriously, if you wanted to divide Us from Them, wouldn’t you call Them something more clever than “turkeys”?