Aspen's better man.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz - Klaus Obermeyer

Klaus Obermeyer, who lives, works and skis in Aspen, wasn't supposed to end up in Colorado, making clothes for a living. Educated in pre-war Germany as an aeronautical engineer, Obermeyer was supposed to spend his professional life huddling over drafting tables as he puzzled over propulsion theories and celestial mechanics.

But when he came to the U.S. in 1947, the airplane business, post-war and pre-Boeing 707, was in a slump. The only engineers getting hired were rocket scientists.

"I was out of work," Obermeyer remembers. "And I thought, 'Well, I can always be a ski instructor.'"

And so begins the story. Obermeyer, who is fit and athletic at 90 years old, has recited it a thousand times: to journalists, employees, audiences at banquets, business colleagues and filmmakers. How a friend led him from Idaho's Sun Valley to an unfamiliar place called Aspen. How he hooked up with a small ski school, teaching tourists how to ride T-bars and make it down the hill. How he paid $5 a night to stay at the Hotel Jerome. And the best part: how he invented the down-filled parka.

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He tells it in his rich Bavarian accent, as thick as a Hasenpfeffer stew. 'This" becomes "theece." A sweater is a "sveater."

"The problem we had is we only got paid in ski school when we had a class," Obermeyer says. "So these people came to Aspen with 14-day vacations, but they left after two or three days."

He didn't blame them. It was freezing on the mountain. Skiing was considered a genteel sport. Men wore knickers and suit coats. Women skied in skirts.

The engineer in Obermeyer identified a problem, and the problem presented possibility. "No problem comes without an opportunity attached to it," Obermeyer says.

Obermeyer went back to his rented home and thought. On his bed was a down-filled comforter. His German mother, convinced that the "North" in "North America" meant it must be cold, had insisted the young Obermeyer take it with him. What the hell, Obermeyer thought. Working in an attic, he cut the white comforter into pieces and hand-sewed them into a vague resemblance of a jacket.

"It looked like the Michelin Man," he says. Obermeyer took it to a ski class, rode up the lift with it on, skied down, and stayed warm the whole time. A student asked to borrow it. "He skied in it, and he yelled at me: Three-hundred fifty dollars!'" Obenneyer recalls. 'You...