Kent:
Rick, I met you about eight years ago in the graduate
program classes you were running for the town at CMC.
Basically you were instructing most of the classes. I was
really impressed with the way you handled yourself and the
classes. Were you a professional teacher?
Rick:
My main occupation in terms of making money was a
consultant. I was doing one or two consulting jobs a year,
mostly outside the county for fairly large businesses. I was
making enough in in a six to eight-week period of
time to live off of for the rest of the year. Work as an
instructor came primarily because I felt a little
intellectually bored living up here. I had been real
active before I moved here in business and graduate school
and felt that just living here, skiing and hiking and
climbing was a wonderful way of life, but intellectually boring. I needed something a little more
stimulating and so I got involved with Colorado Mountain
College. I started teaching courses that I felt qualified
to teach.
Kent: I've read that you came from big business
in New York. Would you share with me what your previous life was like?
Rick:
I grew up near New York City and always loved the New York
area. I went to undergraduate school in Pennsylvania. I
decided to go back to New York and take a job with a major
corporation and to go to NYU Graduate School of Business.
I was fortunate to get a job with First National City Bank
in New York and worked for them for seven years. I went to
NYU undergraduate School of Business and got my MBA and
took a lot of interesting courses. City Corp. grew rather
rapidly during the seven years I was there. It went from
being First National City Bank to City Bank to City Corp.,
which started to acquire a number of unrelated
subsidiaries. For about four years I worked for First
National Bank as a manager at various positions within the
banking hierarchy of that one bank. Then they started to
diversify and because I had been involved in some major
changes in the operations of the banking business for City
Bank, especially new innovations in computer applications
in the back office in managing that change. I got involved
with the acquisition of a number of their independent
subsidiaries and looking at how those could be folded in
to the corporate structure and where they fit into the
type of business that City Corp was growing to become.
Kent:
What brought you here?
Rick:
I took a two-week vacation, which was the first time in
about three years I had taken a vacation and came out to
Colorado. I spent two weeks skiing and traveling around
the Colorado area. I spent some time here in Summit County, Vail and Aspen. It was really a
wonderful awakening for me to see this part of the
country. I spent some time without the pressures of business
to really enjoy myself. The magic of those two weeks were
very strong. I decided after I went back to New York after
the two-week vacation that enough was enough. Seven years
of working hard for City Corp. and doing what I had done
was a great lifetime experience that I never regret, but
at the same time there are much better things in life than
riding a subway to Wall Street every day and working hard.
So I finished up the project I was on and moved back out
here in time for the next ski season, which was November 1972. Basically I've been here ever since on and off, back
and forth.
Kent:
You do go back from time to time?
Rick:
I've done two other major consulting jobs for City Corp
since then. I had a wonderful opportunity to work for Chase.
A friend of mine twas in a similar position as mine
for City Corp. We were both vice-presidents of different
divisions, and had gone to Chase as senor vice-president
of European operations. He called me up and said `I 've
got an incredible position that's just perfect for you.
You'll have to be in Europe a few weeks, but then once you
go to Brussels, Rome, Paris, London, we have about
two-hundred fifty-million dollars worth of differences in
our foreign exchange accounts and we can't figure it out.
What we need is somebody who can figure out why it is
happening, we don't care about the money so much as we
need to find out why its happening. Stop it and then
develop a computer system that will replace the manual
system that we've used for years.' Sounded wonderful, it
was spring and skiing season was over. So I went back to
New York. I was there three days and I left. I couldn't
stand it. I rode the subway down to Wall Street where his
office was and spent three days with him. I was just
totally assaulted by the noise, the smells, the people,
just no peace at all. I had been living here for about
four years at that point and had become so sensitive to my
surroundings and other things that were going on that I
could not stand the abuse that my senses were taking in
New York.`I'm getting on a plane this afternoon and
leaving. I can't be in New York any longer. 'That was the
last time I went to New York till this spring.
Kent:
It was my impression that you were struggling when you
first came here. How did you feel at this time?
Rick:
The struggle was more to calm down—to let myself have
a good time and relax. When I left New York, I was
making good money and had some continuing income that
would come in for over a year from City Corp from profit
sharing—stock options, those types of things. Financially,
I did not need to struggle at all. What I needed to do was
to relax and let myself have a good time and be compelled
to go out and get a job—not be compelled to accomplish
something every day.
Kent:
It was my impression from your remarks about the pay you
were receiving from CMC that you needed more. Maybe you
could clarify that?
Rick:
For about the first six months I lived off of the savings
I had brought with me. What replaced accomplishment
through work was learning how to ski, learning how to
climb and enjoying the out of doors. After that I decided
that I didn't want to touch some of the investments I had
and wanted to hold on to those for a period of time.
That's when I started looking for opportunities to work.
It was real tough then to find anything that was
reasonable. I didn't expect to be making fifty thousand
dollars a year
here, but at the same time I didn't expect to be making
$2.75 an hour. You go talk to
people in some of the larger businesses here, ski
corporations and that type of business, and everybody
started from the bottom up. You started sweeping floors or
loading chairlifts, or tail maintenance or something to
that effect. There was the opportunity to move quickly from
that, but I didn't see any recognition of management skills
that they would say `those skills
are transferable.' If you know how to manage people who
are coding checks, then you know how to manage people who serve food in a cafeteria or who teach skiing. At that time, in the early seventies,
there was still the mentality that you had to know the job
from the inside out to be able to supervise and manage it.
I found out that pretty frustrating. So that's why I chose
to not get involved in serious work within the community
and try to find permanent employment here for a long time.
I chose to take advantage of opportunities where I could
make good money consulting and then just come back and
live here and enjoy it. That worked out rather well for
awhile.
Kent:
So, what keeps you here?
Rick:
Ah, the love of the out of doors and the amount of
pristine countryside that we have here. The opportunity to
be able to take off a few hours from work and go out and
ski the woods and have some really beautiful wilderness
areas.
Kent:
You haven't gotten burned out on the charm that brought
you to this area? Do you still have some of the magic feelings?
Rick:
It has a lot of magic for me! After four or five years I
thought that maybe I had tasted it enough and I needed to
move on to find something else. I went on to Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and the typical places that
people in the West look for in a place to live. And found
I didn't really find anything that was really any better
than this—especially for the winter activities, skiing,
winter camping, and ice climbing. This was as good as it comes
around here. I really like the sunny weather. I don't mind
the cold, but I like days with lots of sun and there is a lot
of sun here.
Kent:
Do you see any problems here in the high country that
haven't been addressed that you're concerned about?
Rick:
There are lots of problems. The one I'm most concerned about
in communities like Breckenridge is that there really
needs to be a growing sense of community here. One of the
things I found in Washington, Oregon and Idaho is that
the people have lived there for a long time and there are two or three generations of people. They work well
together as generations, whether they are family or only
friends. There is very little of that here. There is so
much of a transient nature to the community—so many
people who come every year and after a year or two
leave—there aren't many people who invest
themselves into the community. There isn't a sense of
caring. There are small groups that care. There are church
groups, fire departments, ambulance services,
and rescue services. There are small pockets of that, but there
isn't a true community population that draws together the
way there is in a lot of other small communities. I see
that as a serious problem that I would really like to see
resolved in this community.
Kent:
What do you think creates this situation other than the
transience of the people here?
Rick:
I think part of it is that people come here as if it's Disneyland—an opportunity to
play and have a good time. But most people don't come here
thinking, "This is where I'm going to live my life." They
think they're going to come here and just play for awhile.
I think that people come here with the expectation of
living here for a short period of time and getting a
certain fulfillment out of it, whether it's a year of
skiing, learning to become a ski instructor, or getting
away from their family or school. There are
more people now coming here who are in their
thirties or forties, planning to make a home.
But most of them come here because they feel there's an
economic opportunity. So they come here to build a shop,
a store, or a business. Some might buy a restaurant. They get overwhelmed and it takes everything for them to try to
make a living. They really don't have
much time to truly care for people and that's what I see
missing...the caring for people. As I say, I see it some
in churches and in some of the small groups, but not
throughout the community.
Kent:
Do you think you'll retire here or will you leave at that
time?
Rick:
No, I don't know. I love it here, but I also wonder
whether it's worth the struggle against the weather on a
year to year basis. So, somewhere in my genes I have a
strong tie to the earth and to growing things and living
peacefully with the earth. Looking at my lettuce that's now at
its prime but has two inches of snow on it in the
middle of September really makes me wonder about my
sanities. So I think that there is going to be a time when
I'm going to say, `Enough is enough—it's time to move to
a more temperate climate.'
