The Word is Out

Through oversized glasses

Posted in Blog by People's Press on September 28, 2011

After six decades and an extraordinary collection of books, Mary Eshbaugh Hayes’s Aspen legacy is solidified in print.

By Alison Berkley

Anyone who has lived in Aspen for a decent amount of time has probably seen a little older woman with oversized glasses around town, likely toting a camera and a small notepad to document Aspen’s social scene for The Aspen Times, a beat Mary Eshbaugh Hayes has been covering for some fifty years. If you’re at an Aspen event, say the Food & Wine Classic or maybe the Art Crush fundraiser for the Aspen Art Museum or the Komen Aspen Ride for the Cure, she might come up and snap your photo and then quietly ask you for the correct spelling of your name. She has that quality of a good journalist and seems to embody the very definition of the silent observer with her slight, petite frame, light step, and soft-spoken voice.

In print, her voice rings much louder. Eshbaugh Hayes has been working for The Aspen Times in some capacity (writer, photographer, editor) since 1952. Her books about Aspen have established Eshbaugh Hayes as the premier expert on all things Aspen. She carefully collected the recipes and took the photographs for her cookbook Aspen Potpourri, which she first published in 1968, and she has done five editions. She wrote the book on Aspen, literally, entitled The Story of Aspen: the history of Aspen as told through stories of its people, in 1996 and there have been three editions. She has also published two children’s coloring books and a line of note cards featuring color photos of Aspen doors.

When I first moved to Aspen in 2002, I lived in a ramshackle house on the corner of Aspen and Hyman streets that was right next door to the white Victorian house Eshbaugh Hayes shares with her husband Jim, a silversmith whose aspen leaf belt buckles have become coveted collectors’ items. I know she wasn’t happy about the four dogs that lived with us and barked constantly or the noise from our frequent parties. But when I came on as a columnist at The Aspen Times, she welcomed me with the same quiet curiosity and gentle distance she gives everyone. More than once, she snapped my photo and put it into one of her columns.

The house that I lived in was finally torn down a few years ago and replaced with a brick monstrosity that now occupies most every square foot of the entire lot, leaving little in the way of a yard or any semblance of the past. The Hayes’ house still stands next to it, a constant reminder about why it’s so important to document Aspen’s past.

That’s only part of why we are so proud of our collection of Eshbaugh Hayes’s books, an archive of Aspen that’s richer and more dimensional than anything else out there. Through her words and photos, Eshbaugh Hayes always has been and always will be one of Aspen’s living legends.

For more information on Eshbaugh Hayes and her books, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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