Word: vail
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 on their property gave Vail a lot more...
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...
There was a brisk demand for land, condominiums and store space. Vail Associates limited businesses to a few of each kind and imposed architectural controls on builders. Sensitive to the ecology, the company helped form a sanitation district and took other environmental-protection steps that have since won praise from federal officials. Residents raised money for a twelve-bed clinic, where four doctors treat 15 to 20 skiers on a busy day. Some commercial property, bought for just over $100 an acre in 1957, rose to nearly $300,000 this year. An original investor...
...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...
Seibert himself owns Vail stock worth more than $600,000. But, he insists: "Money is really not my thing. More important, I'm right where I have wanted to be since I was a kid. Driving at night sometimes, I come round that turn at the end of the valley-and suddenly I see all the lights. Then it comes back to me that there was nothing here not all that long...