George Caulkins, Oilman Who Helped Develop Vail
NY Times
George Peck Caulkins Jr., a businessman, civic leader and philanthropist, and one of the handful of skiing enthusiasts who developed Vail, Colo., died on Thursday at his home in Denver. He was 83.
His death followed a long illness, his family said.
Mr. Caulkins, who made his fortune in the oil business, joined a small band of promoters who happened upon Vail in the late 1950’s, when it was nothing but a snow-smothered mountain pass in the Colorado Rockies. The group raised the money to create what eventually ballooned into a busy and pricey resort replete with tanned celebrities and Tyrolean chalets.
At the outset, Mr. Caulkins and Peter Seibert, an experienced mountaineer and ski-area operator, proselytized among wealthy skier friends and raised $100,000 in seed money. Still short $1 million, they set off in Mr. Caulkins’s Porsche to scour the country, offering 100 partnerships at $10,000 apiece, to be sold by the Caulkins Securities Corporation.
“We drove around putting on a dog and pony act,” Mr. Seibert later recalled, “in living rooms, in country clubs, wherever we could.”
The idea caught on, given an added boost by the still-fresh memory of the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Calif. The first Vail ski trails and a gondola lift opened in 1972
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