Now that Stowe is a bustling four-season resort — well, to be honest, really two seasons, with two additional slow times in mud and stick season — people forget that it once had tourism only in summer, and later only winter skiers. The “four-season” hoop-de-do has existed only for the last three decades or so. Before that, you could nap in the middle of Mountain Road during off-seasons.
The town’s farming and logging community got an additional source of income — and equally needed diversion — in the mid 1800s, when Summit House was built atop Mount Mansfield and the swank Mount Mansfield Hotel opened for 450 guests on Main Street. Summer folk poured in with their steamer trunks packed with a month or two of finery.
We were the destination of asthmatics who could live wheeze-free high in the pure mountain air, and sports who spent evenings dancing in the pavilion across Little River in the village. By the 1880s that era was over; agriculture and forestry moved west, as did many of our young people.
Ironically, it was probably the cutting of ski trails on Mansfield by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s — a make-work program of the Depression — that started our ski industry. Veterans from the10th Mountain Division flocking here after World War II added energy and vision.
All of this is a long way of saying that for we ski-bums and transplants who arrived in the late 1950s and ’60s, no summer tourism meant it was excessively quiet for the young and restless. There were precious few places to hang out. The town’s one bar, The Yankee Tavern, was way too scary for most of us. A lot of imagination went into planning spectacular social events that usually involved costumes and excessive libations. The most outrageous of these were two “cotillions,” named in passing homage to the societies we had fled.
The first Cow-s*** Cotillion was in 1972, possibly instigated by Hugh Harley, Dick McNamara, and Sneaks Gordonnier. It was held at the Nimick house high on Shaw Hill.
I say possibly because my memory of the event is as damaged by time and excesses of youth as the memories of the seven other attendees I queried this week. None of us agree on anything. That period is mostly a kaleidoscope of hilarity. At any rate, all I can promise is that my version is correct in spirit if not in fact, and those three scoundrels were likely hosts as they were renting the farmhouse. The house was tiny but had a huge pasture and the boys mowed cow dung on the hillside.
As night fell, we were all prancing around in the pitch-dark pasture, egged on by full-volume tunes of the era. I remember Linda Wing dancing by in her 1950s tulle prom dress, scavenged from the top floor of Luce’s Department store in Waterbury, and Kitty Ross (Coppock), in her very own prom dress from high school in West Virginia.
From down on Strawberry Hill Farm, an annoyed Arthur Kreizel called the cops, who came and told us to quiet down. The music rolled on. From high on Spruce Peak, the Duponts or the Stuarts or the Welches called the cops, who came and tried again. Mitch Freid dropped acid in the punch bowl but got caught and threw it out before anyone drank it, and we danced happily on.
The septic tank gave out, the music didn’t, nor did we, and the cops gave up.
Everyone was so pleased with the evening that a repeat was organized the next summer at Spruce Peak base lodge. The spiffier venue urged people to surpass themselves. Ann Landon came as a rebel guerrilla in camouflage jump suit, unzipped to the navel, ample chest crossed with live ammo bandoliers, and rifle slung over her shoulder.
Darby Chambers hosted a pre-party cocktail hour on Barrows Road with Hank Cushman, Mary Horan (soon to be Jackson) and Jim Jackson, and then helicoptered the crew up to Spruce.
I can’t remember what Boo Arnold wore, but she was drop-dead gorgeous and looked great with Jim. The music was terrific, walls helped contain the noise, and everything was pretty much under control until Bob Lingren drove his motorcycle through the building with Darby on the back.
Ah, well, that was the end of the Cow-s*** Cotillions. But not our ingenuity. Or lust for epic partying. They are another tale.
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