Word: seibert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Vail rises in a valley below the jagged Gore Range, and 15 years ago the area was nearly as empty as when the Utes roamed it in the days before the white man. It was developed by Peter Seibert, 48, a well-muscled, jovial man, who has dreamed of building a ski town ever since he was a boy in Bartlett...
...World War II, Seibert joined the 10th Mountain Division, which trained at Camp Hale, 20 miles away from what is now Vail. Fighting in the Italian Apennines, Sergeant Seibert was wounded three times in three days. He lost a kneecap, and doctors said that he would never ski again. But in two years, after extensive surgery, he was on the slopes at Aspen as a member of the ski patrol. Later he taught skiing, raced, worked as a logger and studied three years on the G.I. Bill at Lausanne's Ecole Hôtelière. All the time...
...raise more capital, the partners approached 20 wealthy people, asking for investments of $5,000 each. John Murchison signed up, and others quickly followed. With their money as a base, Seibert then sold limited partnerships for $10,000 each to another 100 people. Each of the initial investors got limited partnership shares in the enterprise that became Vail Associates, as well as four lifetime lift passes and a half-acre lot. The lot had to be built on immediately. "That was an ingenious idea," recalls Texas Financier Dick Bass, one of the early investors. "The obligation of shareholders to build...
...Seibert marked off the trails himself. One of the first and most exacting he called Riva Ridge, after a battle that the 10th Mountain had fought in Italy. Three days before the scheduled opening of Vail in December 1962, two lodges, a restaurant and a couple of stores waited for customers, but there was no snow. Seibert hired an Indian snow dancer and lo, it snowed. In later years, whenever there was little snow, he fired old railway flares packed with silver iodide into the clouds to seed them. "My three kids thought I was crazy," says Seibert, "but when...
When Vail Associates grew so big that it could no longer be run by Seibert alone, he moved up from president to chairman. As the new president, the company recruited Richard L. Peterson, a Harvard M.B.A., now 37. The two men also brought in several other business-school grads, giving Vail professional management. Last year the company grossed $6,700,000 from lifts, ski school, restaurants and land sales, and earned $812,100 after taxes. Expanding, it recently spent $4,600,000 for 2,200 acres at Beaver Creek, seven miles from the main development; the area is scheduled...