Unusual Hat Rack
August 13th, 2007
George has conjured up yet another business idea, and this time it involves me. The idea occurred to him one Saturday evening and by the following Monday I heard the pitch. It was the day of the Woody Creek tour, the day I thought to myself that I had too many projects on my plate and was looking forward to unloading a few in the coming months. When George described the idea, my first reaction was that I could not possibly do more with an eleventh month old daughter to raise. But I listened closely, and ran it over in my mind for five days, and by the weekend I was open to furthering the discussion – exactly as, I intuited, George had expected. After our second meeting about it, I began writing the business plan, shelving another business idea I had been contemplating since March but had made little progress on.
Patti, George’s wife, seemed to think it was a good idea too. The first time I met Patti was on the side of Woody Creek Road while I was in George’s car and they were arranging a social dinner for that evening. I noticed then what I noticed the second time I met her at their home the day of the tour - that she has the warmest and largest smile I have ever seen. She looks at least ten years younger than her age (she is twenty years George’s junior), and in the most natural way possible. It’s her gentle skin, visibly untouched by toxins or the surgeon’s knife or needle. She does not fit any cultural stereotype, but is surely the psychologically - and physically - grounded one in the marriage. With a honey blond mane framing her sturdy face, she is a mountain lioness, assured in her secluded lair.
The second time I met Patti was in their home, where she had just returned the evening before from driving their son Ben to Los Angeles for his second year of acting school. She was wearing an apron, politely embarrassed that George had not warned her that we were on our way. The two of them showed me around the less private sections of their handcrafted house, alive with exposed tree trunks, works by some of the most accomplished photographers of this century, friends’ paintings (one, an almost photographic portrait of Dr. Thompson), their dogs (two of which are Alaskan Malamute siblings), and an entertainment room equipped with musical instruments, card and billiard tables, steam room, and Jacuzzi all above a pool that once was George’s physical therapy and is now covered over by a wooden floor.
As I was becoming more of an insider to George’s life, I started to feel that his connections to people, ideas, projects, businesses, community, and the land were a wound ball of thick string. Whereas men are often accused of compartmentalization, George better resembles women in his fluidity. I didn’t question the real source of the emerging business idea, but the more I contemplated it, the more it seemed to fit me like a worn-in winter coat. Other ideas I had conjured up in the past may have been clever, but they were not inherently me. This pending role could be me, so that acting out the role would be less a contrived act than a reflection of my varied talents, a public figure I could operate through that would pull me from my retreating cocoon.
I wonder if this business idea occurred to George, and then, as a second thought, my participation made sense since I was right there in front of him. Or perhaps, it was my being there that assisted in the idea’s origin. It’s strange to imagine someone thinking about you when you’re not there. I never assume people really do, with all the competing subjects in the universe, which is odd, really, considering how self-involved I am. And yet, George is forever a teacher, with the concern and investment of a seasoned father. His collected writings about the Aspen Community School/COMPASS and the Aspen Education Research Foundation focus on the emotional lives of children, and how schools need to be democratic and community-driven to optimize learning. I suppose he looks at the adults in his life as children, too (perhaps even as his children) – and like the way he cares for children, his relationships are not condescending or unbalanced, but rather opportunities for shared growth, and precious.
As I remember it I got a blind phone call from one Michael Moore saying that he had an investment proposal, a publishing venture, and that Bob Craig had suggested that I would be interested. Now Craig and I go way back to the late 50s when he was the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and I was a graduate student in theoretical physics dreaming of a summer research institute in Aspen. The fact is that we pulled it off, there is an Aspen Center for Physics on the Institute grounds. And the unintended consequences were that Craig and the Center for Physics were separated from the Institute within a few years of the founding. So Craig and I had shed blood together and I took Moore’s call seriously. He agreed to come to my home in Okemos Michigan to make his pitch.
I remember his visit; my own life was in rapid change, and I was looking for things upon which to hang my hat, for all the usual hat racks of my life were upset. The most vivid memory was that we, wife-on-the-way-out, Mike and I, chaperoned the high school prom together. Michael wrote his own memory of the beginnings:
My own association with George began some thirty or more years ago. I was then sole “proprietor” and employee of a disappearing little rag called The Skiers’ Gazette. I was about to fold it up when Bob Craig, a friend of the publication, suggested I seek out some capital to prop the thing up, and he gave two names: one was George Stranahan and the other was that of a gentleman in Iowa whose name I long ago forgot, for I never made it to Iowa after a long weekend visit to George’s home, then in East Lansing.
I still remember that fall weekend, the clear weather, the river and the woods, and the surprising household - the underage drinking, the Sunday dinner brought in from MacDonalds, and this inscrutable man Stranahan, the quiet architect of what seemed to me then as a bold and maybe anarchistic and certainly chaotic domestic experiment.
I recall that it was almost time for me to leave for the airport before the subject of money finally came up that weekend. If I recall correctly, I was looking for around $35,000, half from George and half from the gentlemen without a name in Iowa. George picked up a check from a cluttered desk. It was for a large sum, far more money than I was seeking, and written to him by a bank and carrying a date that was more than a year old. “Maybe I should just sign this over to you,” he teased. “I’ve been keeping this around because I know it gives the bookkeepers fits down at the bank.”
What George did do that day was decide he didn’t want the fellow in Iowa involved in that project, and he would fully fund it himself. So The Skiers’ Gazette became Mountain Gazette [www.mountaingazette.com], and over the course of the next several years it became something of a success in many ways, though never self-sustaining, and so it may have been one of George’s more quixotic philanthropies.
My own image of George draws heavily from that time and that experiment. This was Stranahan the creative facilitator: he gave freely of his support, financial and moral; he was never judgmental, never controlling. We always had the free hand to do whatever we wished, and I have always supposed that this atmosphere of freedom and openness to experiment was there in all of Stranahan’s many projects.
There was a personal side to all of this too, and not so easily written down. But I was going through my own difficult period in those days, with depression and alcohol, and George was more than sensitive to all of this: he gave me a great deal of his time and understanding and offered a friendship was almost brother-like.
Michael remembers things that I do not, and I cannot dispute those. I think that for here and now we simply say, “This is the way it was.”
