James Breasted, a former Aspen City Councilman and Pitkin County Planning Commissioner who helped create the Roaring Fork Valley bus system and pushed for the wilderness preservation of the Hunter Creek Valley portion of the United States National Forest lands to the east of Aspen, died Saturday morning, March 19, 2022, at his home in Carbondale, Colorado. He was 84. His family said the cause of death was cancer.
James Henry Breasted III (“Jim” to all familiars here) was born in 1937 in Colorado Springs, CO, the son of James Henry Breasted Jr. a teacher and art historian and Helen Culver Ewing Breasted. His grandfather, James Henry Breasted, was America’s pre-eminent Egyptologist in the early 20th century and helped to authenticate the discovery of King Tut’s Tomb in 1922. Jim’s great aunt Helen Culver was one of Chicago’s first successful businesswomen and donated Hull House, her cousin Charles Hull’s home, to Jane Addams, the founder of the settlement house movement in America.
Young Jim’s family moved to southern California when he was four, and two years later, his father became director of the Los Angeles County Museum. Jim had been enrolled in a Rudolph Steiner school in his first years of education, given such unconventional instruction there that when his parents later enrolled him in Pasadena’s Polytechnic School, it was discovered he couldn’t properly read, and he was made to repeat the Third Grade. Jim liked to recall that he first fell in love with mountains at Desert Sun School’s summer camp in the Sierra Nevada town of Idyllwild, CA.
In 1952, his family moved to Kent, Connecticut, where Jim’s father took a job as Art History teacher at Kent School. That fall Jim was enrolled as a freshman boarder at Phillips Academy Andover, the buttoned-up Massachusetts prep school. He was a good student, but he hated the school, and after spring break of 1954, he ran away from it, setting out to hitchhike back to California.
The state police picked him up on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Andover graciously took him back into its fold, but Jim set his mind on finding another school that summer. He had remembered loving the look of the campus of Putney School, which sits atop green rolling hills in southern Vermont. The property, once called Elm Lea Farm, had been briefly owned by Jim’s great aunt Katherine Everts and her companion Elizabeth Whitney, the last heir to the Eli Whitney Cotton Gin fortune. (Both women were also friends with Jane Addams and the circle of women who lobbied President Wilson to form a League of Nations after World War I.)
Young Jim knew that his father valued academic rigor very highly. He discovered Putney’s director of admissions (later headmaster) Ben Rockwell was vacationing in Jackson, NH near his family’s summer home in Tamworth, NH. He called upon Rockwell to plead with him to convince his father that Putney was up to the job, making such a fine impression that Rockwell made the journey to Tamworth to make the case. Rockwell succeeded so well that Breasted senior became a huge fan of Putney, and Jim got his wished-for transfer to the school.
He spent only one academic year there, for his parents were bent upon a European adventure with all their children the following year. But Putney, with its wonderful music courses, frequent live performances and then-unique approach to educating the young to challenge themselves in all aspects of creative, physical, esthetic, moral and intellectual life, left upon Jim a deep and lasting impression. He sailed away happily to Europe in the summer of 1955 with his family and immersed himself in the curriculum of a French-speaking Swiss boarding school on the shores of the Lake of Lausanne, Institut Monivert.
Jim then attended Harvard College where, majoring in French, he received an A.B in 1960 as a member of Kirkland House and the Harvard Class of 1960. But at every opportunity when he was at Harvard (1956-1960), he went back up to Putney to hear the music, visit with Ben Rockwell and contemplate the school’s Thoreauvian ethos for making the most out of all aspects of life.
His generation was hearing from the Beats and from Hemingway and Salinger that living as a free spirit was far superior to the middle-class careerist rat race. But his parents still hoped he might find a career he liked. His father encouraged him to try architecture because Jim had demonstrated a fine drawing talent. He took a job for a year at The Cambridge Tennis & Squash Shop in Harvard Square, then did a year in Ivory Coast in the Peace Corps, teaching French to young African boys, a job he did not relish, as the teaching style was the French rote learning method.
He returned to the States after a year of this and faced the peril of being drafted to fight in Vietnam. To avoid that, he signed up for the Air Force Reserves and spent six months in Texas sweeping out planes. Yielding finally to the pleadings of his father, he enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design to begin studying architecture. A friend invited him to come along one summer to the sweet little former mining town of Aspen. There he discovered the Aspen Music Festival.
After that visit, the job of architect seemed even less desirable. Jim tried switching to the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture, which did have the highest respect in the profession. But then summers in Aspen beckoned again. Then a winter. And by 1966, he was an Aspenite. He moved into the Garret. At first he took any job, usually as a waiter. But eventually, he happened upon Alpine Surveys. Jim made beautiful maps, and the company had those coveted Aspen flex hours. In summer he and the other surveyors started work early and took off early to get outside in the long daylight. In winter, they skied early, then came into the office for the darkening afternoon. He held that job until the 2009 financial crisis when Alpine Surveys was dissolved.
Jim’s parents and siblings visited him from time to time. His younger brother John took a job with the snow packing crew in the spring of 1967 and tragically hit a tree on Ajax early one March morning. Jim’s friends from the Garret were also on the packing crew and on the ski patrol. They rescued John, who became a lifelong paraplegic, still a frequent visitor to Aspen and then Carbondale, and a lover, like Jim, of the Aspen Music Festival.
Two sisters, came to visit Jim in the Summer of Love, 1967, bringing along with them a lanky, shy, dark-eyed beauty named Jennifer Deveaux, the best friend of Jim’s youngest sister Helen. She and Jennifer were 17.
By 1969, Jennifer had transferred from BU to the University of Colorado and moved in with Jim. In 1975, they were married. They lived in two older houses, first in Aspen, then in Woody Creek. At last, they built a house Jim designed on a lot in Aspen. When they divorced and had to sell it in 1982, it went for $55,000. Jim noted not long ago that the same house and property sold most recently for $10 million.
Jim had long since moved to Carbondale. He came to the town in 1995 first, living as a renter on Sopris Ave and then as a house owner a block down the street. Many of his friends from the Garret Aspen days had also moved to Carbondale, shocked by the prices and the concomitant cultural changes in Aspen. When Aspen’s list of billionaire homeowners reached 50, Jim sent out (from Carbondale) copies of the Aspen Times report to all his siblings.
When doctors in Aurora’s University of Colorado Hospital asked Jim about his life two weeks ago, he spoke most firmly and proudly about his terms on the Aspen City Council and on the Pitkin County Planning Commission in the 1970s. His proudest achievement was the Roaring Fork Valley bus service. But right behind it came his planning and zoning work which laid down rules for retaining the charming layout of Aspen, its open spaces and its lovely old Victorian houses. He told his nurses that he sometimes had got wind of a development proposal in the offing from sources on the planning commission, and he was able then to squelch the ones he thought would be ruinous to Aspen’s charms.
“We did too good a job,” he told the doctors. “We made a place where the rich wanted to live.”
He also told the hospital staff how avidly he had pursued the sport of cross-country ski racing through his forties, again, a pursuit that was the antithesis of careerism. His best race was the 55 kilometer American Birkebeiner, the year he came in 84th out of a crowd of over 5000 racers, sometime in the 1970s. He had been on the ski team at Harvard, his specialty on the Nordic side, especially in cross country skiing.
When he last ran for public office in Carbondale, he spoke fervently of wanting to keep the charming “small town appeal” of the place. He loved living where he could walk to all his favorite stores and restaurants. Even in his final days of illness, he walked the Carbondale streets with his walker and used the free valley bus service to get to doctors’ appointments.
Most people who have heard of Jim Breasted in these parts know him from his letters to the editor. In one of his last to the Sopris Sun, April 1, 2021, he concluded:
“This is also to rejoice in all the development, which is currently going on, because it is taking place where Carbondale-elected and appointed citizens agreed it should go, after long discussions and conversations. I love living here. I used to pay for sushi meals in restaurants; now I buy sushi at City Market and I buy sake at Sopris Liquor. Housing is being built right in town where it should be. People will still be moving here because they love this place. Aspen: eat your heart out.”
Three years ago he moved into the federally subsidized Crystal Meadows senior housing project, and there he would sit outside happily drinking beer in the summer sun with his new neighbor Jacques Houot, the locally famous elderly ski racer and mountain biker. The two of them could be heard chatting away in French and laughing.
When Jim was given his grim prognosis, he told his GP he wanted to sign up for a medically assisted death. But a few days before he was to sign the papers for that, Jacques came to visit him, to tell silly jokes and to flirt with all the women in the room. He spotted the beautiful Jennifer (now Mrs. Hearn) standing on the other side of Jim’s bed.
“You were married to her?” he asked in French.
“Oui!” said Jim, looking most proud, “beaucoup d’annees,” Jacques said something else in French that sounded like, “I wish I had seen her first.”
More jokes, more flirting.
“I’m thinking of changing my plan,” said Jim. “My suicide plan.”
“Oh, that’s great!” said his friends and relatives.
And he did, going off instead at nature’s bidding under the care of hospice and the gentle team working for Heather Craven, as peacefully as a well-fed baby.
Mr. Breasted is survived by his four siblings, Barbara Whitesides of Newton, Mass, John Breasted of Great Barrington, Mass., Mary Breasted Smyth of Tamworth, NH and New York City, and Helen Breasted of New Gloucester, ME.
There was a gathering in Jim’s memory in Carbondale on April 16, 2022, to be followed sometime in the summer of 2022 by a longer celebration of his life.
This is a slightly modified version of the obituary published March 22, 2022, by The Aspen Daily Times.
