David Darcy Brown

David R.C. Brown, who donated his family's land to turn Aspen Mountain into a ski resort 60 years ago, lived to be 95 and was a delight to the end, longtime friend Bill Coors said Wednesday.

Mr. Brown died Monday in Tucson.

Coors, 92, remembers Mr. Brown - known as Darcy because of his initials - from when they were boys in the 1920s.

Mr. Brown will be remembered as the man who headed the Aspen Ski Corp. as it grew from a two-chairlift hill at the foot of downtown into one of the most widely recognized ski resorts in the world.

Coors remembers him for that as well as for his tennis game, his expertise as a fisherman and his eagerness to engage in conversation about anything under the sun.

"Darcy had roots in Aspen," Coors said.

"He'd talk about his father coming to Aspen, driving a wagon across a trail, having to take it apart a couple of times to make it across a gorge."

The family owned some mining claims, and when Aspen Ski Corp. founder Walter Paepcke told him the best spot for a ski mountain was on Brown family claims, Mr. Brown agreed to lease hundreds of acres on Aspen Mountain.

He later headed the Aspen Ski Corp., building it into a huge moneymaker.

Coors, who joined the Aspen Ski Corp. board after his brother, Adolph Coors, was killed by kidnapper Joseph Corbett Jr. in 1960, recalls that Darcy was the face of the ski corporation - and that wasn't always fun.

"He took the brunt of things that the ski corp. did that the town of Aspen didn't like," Coors said.

 
"I remember when I got on the board, there was a tradition of giving a free season ski pass to everyone in Pitkin County - everyone, including all the firemen and nurses and everyone essential to Aspen functioning.

"I got on the board and I said, 'I can't believe it.

That would be like our folks in Golden giving free beer to everyone in Golden.' "
So, they stopped giving out the free season ski passes.

"I'm the guy who got it stopped, and they all blamed Darcy," Coors said, laughing at the memory. "I remember they burned him in effigy on Main Street."

Still, Mr. Brown is a legend in Aspen and the memories are fond.

He was still running things at the Aspen Ski Corp. in the 1970s when Twentieth-Century Fox "offered us so much money we couldn't turn it down," Coors said.

Coors recalls a couple of great years under Twentieth-Century Fox's ownership when "they gave us some credit for knowing something about the ski industry."

"Then (Denver oil billionaire) Marvin Davis bought Fox, and Marvin didn't need anybody telling him how to run anything," Coors said. So all the board members resigned or were let go.

Mr. Brown and the rest of the board always regretted Davis' takeover, Coors said.

Long ago, Mr. Brown was inducted into the the Aspen Hall of Fame, Colorado Ski Hall of Fame and National Ski Hall of Fame.
"He was not a self-promoter at all," his daughter, Darcey Brown, told The Aspen Times this week.

 
When someone once told him that he had been a positive influence in so many people's lives, he replied, "I sure didn't intend to be,' " Darcey recalled.

Mr. Brown was divorced from his first wife in 1946 and in 1947 married Ruth Humphreys of Denver, daughter of A.E. and Ruth Boettcher Humphreys, philanthropists in the Denver area.

Mr. Brown will be memorialized March 21 at the Sundeck on Aspen Mountain after the lifts close, according to a statement from the family.

The service is for family, close friends and people who worked with him.

In addition to his wife, Ruth, he is survived by five children, as well as three children from a previous marriage.

RIP Mr Brown! - You were a hell of a great man!