John Holden secured the support of benefactors and members of the community that would lay the foundation for Colorado Rocky Mountain School. He built an initial Board of Trustees that included Harald “Shorty” Pabst, one-time Aspen mayor and valley property owner, and Henry Stein, a rancher from Aspen by way of Chicago, whose daughter, Pat, we also recognize here this evening.

Shorty was actually 6’4”, according to John. And he loved the Holdens’ educational vision. Through a complicated land exchange involving multiple parties, Shorty facilitated the transfer of the 350-acre Bar Fork Ranch he had owned next to the school’s original 10 acres at a steep discount to the school. The ranch sat on the confluence of the Crystal and Roaring Fork Rivers and derived its name from its brand of a “bar” and a “fork” representing the merging of these two rivers into one. The ranch’s Barn was notable for its triangular roof, which was inspired by the Buddhist temples the ranch’s original owner saw in his time with the Navy in Siam.

Obituary

Former Aspen Mayor Harald “Shorty” Pabst, the son and grandson of two of the men who ran Pabst Brewing Co. in Milwaukee, died Monday in Grand Junction at age 89.

Pabst, a lifelong rancher, was an executive vice president at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (now simply the Aspen Institute), president of the Aspen Meadows, a director at the Aspen Skiing Corp. and a trustee at Colorado Rocky Mountain School. He was also a director of the First Wisconsin National Bank in Milwaukee. He was mayor of Aspen in the early 1960s.He first came to the Roaring Fork Valley after World War II, when he bought a ranch near Carbondale to raise cattle and sheep. The focus of his long ranching career was on raising registered Hereford cattle and selling yearling bulls as breeding stock. Over the years, he owned ranches in Snowmass and Fairplay and near Livingston, Mont.He served several terms as president of the board of trustees at Colorado Rocky Mountain School, which is located on what was once his ranch in Carbondale.

In the 1950s, Pabst became an early advocate of zoning and land-use regulation. A student of famed Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold, Pabst stirred controversy while mayor of Aspen by opposing a proposal to host the Winter Olympics in Colorado. He said they would damage the environment and become a burden on the state’s economy.He also opposed paving Independence Pass, which he said would increase access to Aspen by allowing more traffic to come over the Continental Divide from the east.The son of Ida and Fred Pabst of Oconomowoc, Wis., Pabst was preceded in death by his parents and six siblings. His grandfather was Capt. Frederick Pabst, who built the Pabst Brewery into a national company. Although Pabst’s father, Fred, also ran the brewery, he devoted much of his time to raising prize-winning Holstein cattle and Hackney horses at Pabst Farms in Oconomowoc.After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1938, Harald Pabst studied agriculture at both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arizona. In 1941, he was married to Patricia Lee Johnston, whose father and grandfather ran Milwaukee’s Robert A. Johnston Co., maker of cookies, crackers, candy and various chocolate products.