Think “Stand By Me” meets “Dazed and Confused,” but set in Aspen in the 1970s and ’80s — that’s the vibe of “Growing Up Aspen: Adventures of the Unsupervised.”
The new book, comprising personal essays written by four friends who grew up in Aspen, takes readers back to the days before Prada, Gucci and paparazzi — back when Aspen was like Mayberry in the mountains but with John Denver, Nick DeWolf, Hunter S. Thompson and Ted Bundy.
The four authors — Andy Collen, Chris Pomeroy, Dean Jackson and Lo Semple — write about the unwritten rules they followed, the pranks they pulled and the jobs they had. They write about lawn darts and Sandy Munro’s banjo shop and building snowboards from old skis and wooden boards they’d stolen from dumpsters; they write about Devil’s Punch Bowl, the Aspen Community School’s “funky days” and the nights sneaking booze from Cooper Street Pier.
They write about where they came from and where they went, sharing the tales of when their lives overlapped in the place that shaped them.
“Growing Up Aspen” is a story every bit about growing up in small-town America as it is about growing up in a remote, resort mountain town.
“I would say that for the people who read this book, it will serve as an affirmation to them of either A) why they moved here or B) what they love about it,” Semple said. “And when you write anything about Aspen, you really run the risk of having a small audience, but this is a story of growing up in America as much as it is growing up in Aspen.”
Semple, who is the only one of the four authors still living here, said that “Growing Up Aspen” serves as a catalyst for conversation. The honest writing and intimate stories capture the essence of small-town living and the importance of a tight-knit community and will entice readers to ponder the evolution of Aspen and the greater Roaring Fork Valley, Semple said.
This weekend, Semple will reunite with Collen, Pomeroy and Jackson in their hometown to spur some of those conversations among today’s Aspen community. The four childhood friends and authors of “Growing Up Aspen” will be discussing their book for an event on Saturday at Explore Booksellers. The event starts at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
“I think that this book is a success —the past will inform the present and guide the future, in the sense that really good writing does that,” Semple said. “And I like to think that there's really an element of that in these four different stories — coming from four very distinctly different parts, backgrounds, personalities — that informs the present by talking about the past.”
Memory lane
The “Growing Up Aspen” project started during the pandemic and was spearheaded by Collen, who is based in Portland, Oregon, where he runs an independent animation studio. Collen had remained in touch with Pomeroy — who has lived in Athens, Georgia, with his family for the past 22 years —and in recent years, had reconnected with Jackson, who is based in the San Francisco Bay area.
Though the three of them left the Roaring Fork Valley after graduating from high school, they’d kept up here and there with newspaper articles and Facebook posts commenting on their hometown — including the columns by their old pal, Semple, published in the Aspen Daily News.
Around the time that COVID-19 hit, the three friends began reminiscing about their Aspen memories more cordially.
“And so we started to think about, maybe what we should do is talk about what Aspen gave to us — what things we learned from from Aspen; what parts of it and what events happened that changed us,” Collen said. “And so we decided to write some stories.”
In doing so, Collen explained that they were able to reveal, to themselves, bits and pieces of their youth that they never really realized as kids at the time. And it was at a time, Collen said, during which a subset of different people and cultures existed in Aspen.
There were the cowboys and the people who’d fled Europe during World War II to find a place similar to the Alps; then the hippies came and the wealthy investors and the A-list celebrities who locals always treated like normal people, Collen said.
“There was like this huge enclave of different melting-pot folks that were there, and I feel like you don't think about it when you're a kid, but when you go back and remember some of the events, you realize how much all these people really were part of the community,” Collen said. “And that's what makes me wonder like, what is the community now? Is there room for those different cultures to exist? Are people willing to connect on that level?”
At some point in the process of sharing one another’s stories — which Collen, Pomeroy and Jackson each wrote individually — Collen said he realized that the three of them were talking about “old Aspen” and he thought: “But what about the new Aspen of today?”
To fill that gap, Collen reached out to Semple about the project. He’d been reading Semple’s columns in the Aspen Daily News and noted how a lot of Semple’s articles cover the terrain of their childhood tales, while also speaking to the issues of Aspen today.
“And I felt like, in a way, hearing our stories first and then hearing [Semple] talk about today through our voice would be such a powerful tie into everything,” Collen said. “So all those arguments and Facebook chatter, people would start to think a little differently about it — and we'll see, we'll find out — but that's sort of what the hope was with the book, and also, you know, it's therapeutic going through all these old things and rehashing some stuff.”
‘Dark underbelly’
Revisiting their experiences growing up in Aspen, and through this collaborative writing process, was therapeutic for all four men, indeed.
Semple said when he first read the essay entries from Collen, Pomeroy and Jackson, he was “astonished” with how poignant and touching the writing was. He said that reading their stories was like “ripping off an emotional scab,” because beneath the fun times and wild memories lies a darkness that came with being a kid during Aspen’s free-spirited, hippie era.
“It really opened up kind of a floodgate of new stories and new ways to look at things,” Semple said. “You know, like, for example, the whole Hunter Thompson era that you see now as kind of glorified — this like glorified drug use and people talking about stories of reckless, abandoned partying — well, we were kids when that was going on, these were our parents.
“So, there's a dark underbelly to that that the children kind of endured,” he continued, “and that's I think why you won't find a lot of kids from that Aspen era who are huge, amazed fans of that drug use era because a lot of them, you know, their families were damaged in that, their relationships were damaged.”
For Jackson, writing these essays was a journey, he said, and certainly wasn’t an easy one. Jackson’s folks were bartenders, until his dad eventually opened up a store. He and his parents first lived in a single-room cabin in the midvalley before they moved to employee housing in town.
Jackson’s passion for theater became his escape from all the booze and drugs that he grew up around in the household. After working many different jobs in town as a kid, in his early teenage years, Jackson started getting paid as an actor involved with the Theatre Under the Jerome (now known as Theatre Aspen) — an experience that he writes about in his section of essays. Jackson’s passion for theater also would eventually become his ticket out of the valley, when he was accepted to New York University.
“I think a lot of people think if you grew up in Aspen, you're rich, you had it really good, you had the world handed to you, and really, with very few exceptions, the kids who grew up there didn't,” Jackson said. “It was really the working class in what was becoming a very rich place, and we were under people's feet, you know, the kids around who were seeing things — positive and negative things — and I think writing this, I'd forgotten in some respects how much I'd seen.”
The writing of these stories was healing for Jackson, in a sense. He said that coming out on the other side of this project has opened his eyes and allowed him to really get down to forgiveness and gratitude.
Pomeroy described this writing process as cathartic. He said that one of the first memories that came to him when he sat down to write his stories was when he and Jackson would wander the pedestrian mall in the early morning, finding “hundreds of little brown bottles with the black caps,” and not knowing what they were then, he said.
“I mean, there is an underbelly… from the catharsis part of writing it, it brought a lot of those memories back, and to be honest with you, it's been hard,” Pomeroy said. “But I did choose to write about my positive memories of being that fun-loving kid that had no clue what was going on around me, you know, just living as a Gen X kid on my bike and on my skis and whatever else.”
Small-town America
Pomeroy’s dad owned the popular Pomeroy Sports ski shop at the base of the Nell. He said he was put to work by the age of 7 and that being a part of a family that owned a local business, and especially one which catered to the tourists, meant all hands on deck.
As a young boy, Pomeroy was running the cash register, dusting store shelves and restocking products at his pop’s ski shop. He said he was maybe 12 when he got his first official job as a dishwasher at the former Shlomo’s restaurant. Pomeroy helped his friends get jobs, too, because “you weren't cool if you didn’t have a summer job” in those days, as Collen put it.
Pomeroy would later get into the newspaper business, working for The Aspen Times before he left the valley in the 1990s to pursue a career in newspaper management. Earlier in their youth, all four “Growing Up Aspen” authors had in fact had jobs peddling The Aspen Times, selling the paper to businesses and townspeople for 20 cents a copy.
Pomeroy writes about that small-town, local-kid working culture in the book. It’s something he appreciated about growing up in Aspen, and he said he doubts that those days — spent running around the mom-and-pop shops that lined town’s streets and knowing the goofy characters who ran them — could ever be replicated “up there” again.
But Pomeroy looks back on those stories with nostalgia, a feeling that he hopes the “Growing Up Aspen” book, in its entirety, will spark for all types of readers, no matter where they came from.
“I really think what all four of us wrote, on some level, is very relatable,” Pomeroy said. “So anyone growing up in America at that time is gonna have some pangs of recognition when they're reading it, and I hope they will walk away with it thinking nostalgically about their own upbringing in wherever they're from, be it Aspen or elsewhere.”
Collen added: “The biggest thing I want out of this is I would love for people to be able to talk about their childhood, their life, what they remember, what Aspen was like when they were kids or whatever, but have the book create conversation and for people to connect with each other because of it.”
The “Growing Up Aspen” authors will be at Explore Booksellers on Saturday for a free reading and discussion. For more information about the event, visit explorebooksellers.com.
