More than 300 people rode up the Silver Queen Gondola on Friday afternoon to pay tribute to D.R.C. “Darcy” Brown, Jr., who died March 10 at the age of 95.

    As friends, family and former employees of Brown’s were riding over the top of Bell Mountain toward the Sundeck restaurant, ski patrollers down below were sweeping the mountain and yelling “Clear!”

    It was an unwitting tribute to the former president of the Aspen Skiing Co. at the hour of his symbolic last run on Aspen Mountain.

    Brown was an original investor in SkiCo in 1946 and served as the boss of the company from 1958 to 1979.

    His father, D.R.C. Brown, Sr., drove a wagon over non-existent roads in 1880 to the mining camp that would become Aspen.

    Darcy Brown grew up in Denver and spent summers on horseback in Aspen and sleeping under the stars at a cow camp near Snowmass Lake.

    While many in the community knew Brown as the stern leader of the Ski Corp. through the turbulent 1970s, his children and grandchildren knew him as a man most comfortable on a horse.

    Standing on a stage next to a portrait of her late father projected on a screen, Ruth Brown said it was moving “to know that so many people cared about that old cowboy.”

    She said her father was known variously as D.R.C. and Darcy to the community and the ski industry and as Daddy and “Bappa” to his five children and many grandchildren.

    “The friendship of this community kept him young and ornery to his last days,” Brown said.

    Three former Ski Corp employees told the crowd at the Sundeck that they respected Brown for his integrity, his loyalty, his fairness and his “make-a-decision-and-go” approach to life.

    “Every trip we made with Darcy was an adventure,” said Larry Beidleman, who was the company’s ski area planner and spent years with Brown flying around in Brown’s plane scouting ski areas around the West.

    “I treasured the friendship I had with Darcy,” said Beidleman, after recounting several comic tails of life on the road with Brown.

    Tom Richardson, who succeeded Brown as president of the Ski Corp after the company was sold to 20th Century Fox, wrote a letter read by his daughter Annie saying, “Darcy knew what integrity was. The new owners had none.”

    Richardson recalled one flight in Brown’s twin-engine small plane when an engine cut out over the Continental Divide. Brown quickly, but calmly, dropped the plane to a lower altitude and then re-started the engine.

    “No white knuckles for Darcy,” Richardson wrote.

    Sue Smedstead, who served as Brown’s “right-hand everything” at the Ski Corp. for years, said Brown was more than her boss — he was also her “mentor, role model, surrogate father and best friend.”

    “I am forever grateful for his presence in my life,” Smedstead said.

    Brown was remembered for the things he loved, which included spending hours on horseback, rafting down big Western rivers, tending his garden, dressing up for dinner, and reciting numerous bawdy poems from memory for his grandchildren.

    His daughter, Lorni Cochran, said the “menagerie of characters” in the poems her father often recited after dinner had traits similar to his, including being headstrong, formidable, opinionated, bold, independent and rough around the edges.

    “Those were qualities that served him well most of the time, and perhaps not so well other times,” Cochran said.

    A son and a grandson, Boots Brown and Chandler Kelley, together read the “Ballad of Yukon Jake” by Edward H. Paramore as a tribute to Brown, who they said loved the poem in part because of its reference to “Ruthless Ruth.”

    Ruth Brown, the namesake of Ruthie’s Run on Aspen Mountain, was married to Darcy Brown for over 60 years and she was in the audience Friday to hear many speakers pay tribute to her as well as Darcy.

    At the end of the tributes, Brown’s son, David Brown, asked the crowd to stand for a moment of silence.

    Then a bagpiper leaned into “Amazing Grace” beneath an image of a joyous Darcy Brown, late in life, standing next to a pair of  tall wood skis wrapped with a big red ribbon.

    As the bagpiper headed out of the Sundeck and toward the empty slopes of Aspen Mountain, the sound of the powerful tune faded to silence and the sense in the room was of a great man leaving.
bgs@aspendailynews.com