Ira Riklis on his first trip to Vail:
We were on our way back to Philadelphia having traveled south along the California coast, then east to Las Vegas, and northeast to Aspen. We spent a few days in Aspen enjoying the pristine beauty. Aspen was intended to be our stop in the Rockies. However, the United States had a new president, Gerald R. Ford, and he was staying in his vacation condo in the then rather new village of Vail, Colorado.
Vail was only nine years old at that point and Ford had been a charter purchaser of a condo in the then new (and only) condo hotel in Vail, The Lodge at Vail, long before he ascended to the Presidency. We had never seen the president and thought that it might be fun to stop off on our way to Denver in Vail; after all, Vail was directly on the route from Aspen to Denver in 1975. It turned out that the president wasn’t in town when we got there.
This was the time of the great oil shortages and Ford was off inspecting a shale oil demonstration project; he left in the morning and returned in the evening. We were in Vail for lunch. We never got to see the president up close. We did, however, have a charming lunch on the outside terrace of Pepi’s Gasthof Gramshammer which is located right across the street from The Lodge at Vail and at the very center of the small town. We were enchanted, ensorcelled, and smitten.
We just fell in love with Vail and decided to return the following winter to ski.