Harley Green Higbie Jr
Marriages
Lorraine Nichols
Obituaries
Vail Daily page A4 - March 27, 2018
In both sadness and celebration, we announce that Harley Green Higbie Jr. passed away, at 93, in his home on Sunday, March 18, surrounded by his family and, outdoors, by freshly falling snow.
Harley was born at home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Oct. 23, 1924, to Dorothy Scherer and Harley G. Higbie Sr. He had one younger brother, Hugo, now deceased. His early years he spent in California, where he later attended The Webb Schools and loved playing quarterback for the football team and sailing.
He trained in the Air Force as a weatherman at the University of Iowa. After the war, he graduated from Yale University, Class of '49. While pursuing his passion for skiing on the slopes of Zermatt, he met the love of his life, Lorraine Nichols. They married soon thereafter in Woodstock, Vermont, and settled in Denver in 1959, via Oklahoma City.
An earnest and wise businessman, Harley's work took him from the natural gas business with his long-term partners George Caulkins and Keith Brown, to the citrus groves in Florida, to the stock market and his own investment business, where he helped many gain economic stability.
His deepest career passion was creating a ski resort and town out of Pete Seibert's amazing find of a mountain with fabulous snow and "Back Bowls." Along with the original Inventors of Vail, he held the vision and dedicated the hard work of manifesting what is now Vail. As he said, "It was about the spirit of the place, building something new." For 18 years, Harley sat on the board. And he was the last living of the Vail founders.
Harley's other passions included politics, education and music. Despite his friends' hawkish leanings, Harley was an adamant dove. He marched in the streets of Denver against the Vietnam War in the '60s. To him, war was never, ever the answer to conflict. His commitments to education led him to serve on the boards of Graland School and the Colorado School of Mines for many years. For the sake of Beethoven and Mozart, whose music fueled his soul, he also sat on the board of The Denver Symphony and Colorado Public Radio.
What a successful, dedicated and unassuming man. Mostly, he loved the company of his family and friends. We remember him for his ever-jubilant, warmhearted greetings; his consistent, nonjudgmental acceptance; and his generosity. His intelligence came accompanied with a keenness for the well-spoken word and grammatical correctness.
Carrying on his love of the mountains are his wife, Lorraine Higbie, four children, Lorraine Fairmont, Madeleine Wolfe, Lolita Higbie and Harley Higbie; eight grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews whom he has also grandfathered.
Donations are gratefully received by the Colorado Symphony or the Colorado Snowsports Museum. If you want to do Harley a favor, then remember to turn off any lights when not needed, as he religiously reminded us.
There will be a memorial on Thursday, April 5, from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Denver Country Club. In June, we will spread his ashes on Vail Mountain.
Vail Daily - March 18, 2018
Harley Higbie, the last living member of Vail’s founding board of directors, has died
Editor's note: The quotes from Harley and Lorraine Higbie and others in this story are from previously published material in the Vail Daily, Colorado Snowsports Museum and Hall of Fame, "The Inventors of Vail" by Dick Hauserman, video interviews about Vail's history by Suzanne Silverthorn and the town of Vail.
VAIL — Harley Higbie loved Vail and loved his adorable bride, Lorraine, not necessarily in that order.
Higbie, the last living member of Vail's founding board of directors, died Sunday, March 18.
"You can attribute some of the success of Vail to the fact that there was a lack of a sense of greed. Nobody was in it to make a lot of money. We wanted to see it succeed. There were many complications and problems, but the group never gave up. We didn't want it to turn into a company town. Vail was all things to all people," Higbie told Dick Hauserman for Hauserman's book, "The Inventors of Vail."
In those days, there was not much to be greedy about. Caulkins said the fledgling ski company didn't throw off any money until 1976.
WHY HARLEY WAS SOLID GOLD
Here's where Harley Higbie was solid gold for Vail.
Most of Vail's investors were wealthy enough that their income tax rate in those days was 90 percent. Harley calculated that if they invested $10,000 in a business like, say, an upstart ski area, they could claim up to $8,500 worth of tax breaks.
"That's how the deal was done," Harley said.
But building Vail wasn't about making money; it was about creating something new.
"It was about the spirit of the place, building something," Harley said.
The Higbie clan moved into their house on Mill Creek Circle, an upscale address now, but the edge of the earth then.
"The Trailways buses went through here on Highway 6 on their way to Aspen," Lorraine said. "We could look out the window to see the buses, then run over to the other window to see if they stopped. If they stopped we knew we had some customers."
HARLEY AND LORRAINE: A VAIL LOVE STORY
Harley Higbie was one of four guys skiing in Zermatt, Austria, when they spotted Lorraine and offered her a ride down the mountain.
It might not have been love at first sight, but it came on pretty fast.
They met in March, were engaged in September and were married in October in Woodstock, Vermont.
Lorraine got to go to Europe skiing only because she agreed to bring her mother along. Her mother approved of Harley and so did Lorraine.
LIFE HAPPENS; SO DOES LOVE
Our lives are a product of the decisions we make, and in the 1950s, Harley was offered a job in his hometown, Grosse Point, Michigan, and another in Oklahoma City with George Caulkins' oil company. When he and Lorraine decided to try Oklahoma, their future was set.
Caulkins was single at the time and owned a house in Aspen. In the late 1950s, Harley and Lorraine would load up their kids and drive all day and all night from Oklahoma to Aspen to ski. When they headed back to Oklahoma, Lorraine would get a kink in her neck looking back to the mountains they were leaving behind.
One day, as fate would have it, they skied Aspen with Pete Seibert, who started working in Aspen just after Walter Paepcke launched the Aspen Ski Co. in 1946. Seibert lived in Aspen up the street from Caulkins, where Harley and Lorraine stayed when they came skiing.
They first heard about Vail in 1958, when George returned to Oklahoma City from Aspen and announced Caulkins was getting involved with building a new ski area in Colorado.
Seibert invited George to join their Trans Montane Rod and Gun Club, the name he and Earl Eaton gave their enterprise because they were afraid someone would steal their ski area idea.
To make that involvement easier, in 1959 Caulkins moved his Caulkins Oil company from Oklahoma City to Denver. Lorraine and Harley headed to the Mile High City with the job. One day, Seibert said, "C'mon, I'll show you the mountain."
They rode up Vail Mountain in a yellow jeep, Pete and his wife, Betty, Harley and Lorraine.
Higbie took one look at the Back Bowls and said, "That's it. I wanted to be part of this."
That's the way it went most of the time; your $5,000 investment in Vail Associates would buy you a piece of history, Higbie said.
"We took people up the mountain, and they'd come down with pen in hand ready to sign the contract," Higbie said. "Remember, $5,000 was quite a bit of money in those days."
Keith Brown was working with Higbie and Caulkins at Caulkins Oil and jumped on the Vail bandwagon.
"If you're going to do it, I guess I have to do it, too," Brown said.
That Vail would succeed was not unanimous.
In March 1955, Lefty MacDonald, of Aspen, made the trek with Eaton to the top of the then-nameless mountain that would become Vail. MacDonald told Eaton the Back Bowls would never be good for skiing.
But Brown recruited John Murchison, who started the Dallas Cowboys. Murchison came up with a huge bunch of the money to launch Vail in 1962.
Staff Writer Randy Wyrick can be reached at 970-748-2935 and rwyrick@vaildaily.com.
