ASPEN RECALLS DEAN'S STINT AS '70S SKI BUM

Flashbacks Range From Dishwasher To 'Loser'

ASPEN - Like so many other ski bums, the young Yale graduate didn't
leave much of an impression on a town where even the biggest
celebrities frequently fail to draw a second glance.

But now that he is running for president, Howard Dean's 10 months in
Aspen during the early 1970s have prompted the residents of Glitter
Gulch to dredge their memories and scratch their heads.

"Everybody thinks they remember him because they know him now," said
Georgia Hanson, executive director of Aspen's historical society.

But from the restaurant owner who employed Dean as a dishwasher and
remembered him as a pot-smoking "loser" to a buddy who said they were
there simply to ski, no one anticipated his future in high-stakes
national politics.

"It was just a glorious time to be a big kid," said Dean's boyhood
chum Taylor Pyne, who skied with Dean on weekends. "It was just a
bunch of guys who decided they wanted to take some time off before
they grew up."

Dean, who finished second in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday after a
third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, spent the winter of 1971-72
in Aspen.

He washed dishes in the mountain town at a time when a local musician
named John Denver played benefit concerts at the Wheeler Opera House
for $2 admissions.

He poured concrete in an era when Aspen newspaper ads offered slalom
skis, at the length of 210 centimeters, for $40.

He skied as Clint Eastwood's "Hang 'em High" played at the Opticon,
which offered seats to the Saturday matinee for a buck apiece.

And he created a controversy for a political campaign that would take
place three decades later.

Dean's winter in Aspen, when he paid $250 for a ski pass and claimed
to have been on the slopes 80 days, came after he obtained a medical
deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War.

This has been noted in the competition for the Democratic presidential
nomination against candidates such as combat veterans Wesley Clark and
John Kerry.

Dean's campaign staff did not return calls for comment, but the former
Vermont governor has said his back still pains him occasionally yet
does not prevent him from participating in many activities.

"The United States government said, 'This is your classification,"' he
told NBC's "Meet the Press." "...I didn't have anything to do with the
decision. That was their choice."

The condition, spondylolysis, is essentially a fractured vertebra that
can cause debilitating pain in some cases, said Dr. Thomas St. John,
an Aspen orthopedic surgeon who specializes in treatment of the spine.

"Most people that have it function fairly well," he said. "It's not
necessarily a lifelong condition. It can heal."

The military classified him 1Y, meaning he would be called to duty
only in a national emergency. It may have been a reasonable
precaution, St. John said.

"If you have that, it's certainly something that can be worsened by
marching or prolonged standing. I imagine it could be worsened by any
combat duty," he said.

But Dean's medical condition wouldn't necessarily hinder skiing, St.
John added. And, in fact, it didn't.

"I was a ham down in those days," Dean said in a 2002 interview with
Democracy in Action, a political-information project at George
Washington University. "I was a hot-dogger."

He said he enjoyed "hard stuff" such as the expert-level Silver Queen
run.

"He was a very good skier," recalled Pyne, who went to high school
with Dean and later attended the University of Denver, joining him on
weekends in Aspen. "He was a very aggressive skier. ... He wasn't
Jean-Claude Killy, but he didn't kill himself falling down, either."

Dean - who has acknowledged that he tried marijuana and drank too much
beer in his youth - and fellow Yalie Greg Wylde rented a cabin named
Trout in a valley near Aspen.

They lived a fairly quiet life, Pyne said.

"I'm not going to say he was a choirboy. But the reason for being
there was skiing. If you stayed up all night and caroused, you woke up
the next morning and didn't feel like skiing," Pyne said. "As far as
orgies and rock 'n' roll parties and stuff like that, I'm sorry. I'm
going to disappoint you."

Armed with their Ivy League degrees, Dean and Wylde cleaned dishes at
the famed Golden Horn restaurant, said former owner Trudy Erhard.

"He was a very mediocre person when he worked for us," Erhard said
from her home in Stowe, Vt. "I remember him well. He was just a loser.
He was a totally lost kid. But lots of kids in Aspen in the late '60s
and early '70s were totally lost."

Aspen was different then.

Blue jeans and hiking boots, not full-length furs, were standard
attire, and many streets weren't paved, recalled Mayor Helen
Klanderud, who moved to town in 1971, the year Dean arrived to ski.

That same year, Kerry, already a war hero, testified in Congress on
behalf of veterans against the Vietnam War.

Aspen's wars were strictly cultural.

"The freaks - us - we weren't welcome here," recalled Bob Braudis, who
moved to Aspen in 1969, leaving behind corporate New York to ski.

Now the Pitkin County sheriff, Braudis reflected: "There are an awful
lot of graduates of the freak movement making decisions in government
today."

At least tangentially, Dean would be one of those.

Pyne, a Republican, said he's proud of Dean.

"It's nice to think that an assistant dishwasher can run for
president," said Pyne, who lives in New York. "I never would have
foreseen something like this ... (but) he was always very confident
and sure of himself."

Erhard - now retired in Dean's adopted home state - recalls nearly
falling out of a ski-lift chair when she learned that the same Howard
Dean who had cleaned dishes for her in Aspen more than a decade
earlier had become the lieutenant governor in 1986.

"Several years later (after leaving Aspen), he did write a letter to
my husband and me thanking us," she said. "It was a touching letter
about how we helped him reach for excellence the year he worked for
us."

She resented, however, that in all of his years in Vermont politics,
Dean never came to visit the couple at their new restaurant, also
called the Golden Horn, which she said was a political hangout for
state elected officials.

Erhard, a transplant from Norway, said many of Dean's policies as
governor, such as universal health care for children and property-tax
shifts to aid poor schools, unfairly burden the middle class.

"I have never been a supporter of his over here," she
said.

In Aspen, however, the former ski bum resonates with the town's famed
limousine liberals. His opposition to the military involvement in Iraq
is popular, said Camilla Auger, the head of the Pitkin County Democrats.

"Most of the people who are supporting him today," she said, "are
supporting him on the basis of his courage to speak out against the
war."