The Founding Ladies

Lee Dodge was a confrontational activist in the late 60s, a time of activism. She had a child in the Aspen schools and chose to be active in his educational experience. I recall a fuss that made at a school board meeting. She had discovered paint cans stored closer than the permitted fifty feet from the furnace. She recruited Margaret Albouy to the cause of reforming the education of their children. The two of them visited me at the Physics Center in the summer of 1969. Instead of reforming the existing school they would start a new one from scratch. They asked to use the Physics Center campus during the school year months when the Center was vacant.

Starting new and alternative schools was quite common then. Activists in the civil rights and anti-war movements argued that the military/industrial complex had co-opted the educational system to its purposes, and they sincerely wanted an alternative for their children. “Hell no, we won’t go” to your schools that produced the mindless sheep that looked the other way at segregation and an unjust war. I myself was beginning my own transformation into activism, both anti-war and anti-educational-establishment. But my interest in their school had much shallower motivation.

The Physics Center had begun as the Physics Division of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the brainchild of Cohen, Craig and myself and slipped into existence without much notice from an Institute board preoccupied with the succession to Paepcke. When they did finally notice they fired Craig and kicked the physics out from under their non profit umbrella. The relationship between the newly independent Aspen Center for Physics and the Institute were at a low point, even disagreeing on who had the right to determine the uses of the building that we had paid for. I made a pre-emptive strike on this issue by telling the ladies that they could use our campus for their “Hippy” school. I was greatly tickled that the building we were arguing over would be an anti-establishment quite contrary to the way we thought they positioned themselves. In other words, revenge.

Polly Whitcomb joined them as a power player as they planned to invent what became the Aspen Community School. The Department of Education was courted as a funder, Sylvia Ashton Warner was courted as a teacher emeritus, and both showed up.