Home / Branding, Entrepreneur, Reno+Tahoe / Age Discrimination: Part I: The Myopia of Adult Relationships with Youth, Plus: A Little Colorado Ski Town ‘Racism’ in the 80′s

Age Discrimination: Part I: The Myopia of Adult Relationships with Youth, Plus: A Little Colorado Ski Town ‘Racism’ in the 80′s

“Here I sit my cheeks a flexin’ giving birth to another Texan.”

The men’s bathroom stalls of pretty much every ski resort in Colorado during the 1980s were adorned with that poem. Standard issue. And when AIDS became mainstream, we hung boxes of “Texas T-Shirts” in those same men’s stalls. Despite being the economic life-blood of the Colorado Mountain Ski-Town, by-and-large the Texan’s typically arrogant, loud, flashy and better-than-you we-got-helluva-lotta-oil-money attitude created a fueled our bathroom poet laureates. More often than not…with PLENTY of good cause! They could be horribly demeaning: “Do y’all even have schools here?” Action-reaction. JR Ewing was not an aberration.

I spent most of my youth working in my Dad’s shops at the ski resort waiting on those Texans that bought the “Knee-Deep Sky-High” T-shirts, I-Ski Sunglasses, Scott goggles, Smith no-fog-cloths and Playboys/Penthouses from us at a rate so frequent and high enough margin that our family could eat and afford ski. This was the 80′s. Big oil money. Texans in 10 gallon hats and dinner-plate sized gold belt buckles. JR Ewings in sheepskin coats doused in too much men’s cologne smelling like Scotch.

By and large I was treated like dirt working in the ski shop. And not because I was a punk ski-town kid looking to meet their daughters either! It was my age. I noticed they treated their own kids the same way, and their kids had tremendous contempt for them. ”Junior” was an idiot for not being old enough to drink or drive. Their interactions with my father, however, were quite the opposite. Dad was usually trying to grade P-CHEM 401 tests while ringing up customers in the shop. Professor-by-day-entrepreneur-by-night. After they learned he was a nuclear scientist-turned-college professor turned Dad-in-Crested Butte-outdoors-bum who hunted elk and flyfished the local waters since he was age 10 and was raising a 3rd generation of skiers, they couldn’t spend enough time talking to him. Apparently, age, intelligence and ‘intrestingness’ had a lot to do with how you were treated by adults.

“What kind of sunglasses would YOU wear?”

Every so often a Long Tall Texan would make a connection with me…the punk kid at the ski resort. They’d hang out in the store for 30 minutes longer and ask me lots of questions. “What’s the best locals hang-out? Who’s got the best steak? If I really want to get a good instructor, who should I ask for? What’s the scariest run? Where can I buy some cocaine? <got that a lot in the 80s>”

To my surprise, they’d often remember my name year-after-year as they showed up for their annual two-week family ski vacation. Sometimes they would give me a crisp $20.00, $50.00 or even a $100.00 bill for helping carry luggage, lug some firewood up to their condo, or sherpa their skis over to the shop for tuning. A crisp Ben to a 14-year-old was unforgettable. Most, it seemed, carried money clips with inlaid turquoise fat with what appeared to be $10,000 folded up. These rare-breed Texans asked me lots of questions and listened intently to my answers. They, in turn, often gave me some really great advice. They were simple. One in a thousand, and they stood out, and not because of the Willy Bogner fur-lined one-piece they were wearing.

As I rambled in to college I  took many internships and jobs with the “local elite” and “national elite”. Mostly I worked for the National Judicial College where I met and mingled with thousands of the nation’s best and most respected judges. Again, like the JR Ewings, most could not be bothered to acknowledge someone many years younger than them. Maybe a “thanks” for holding a door open.

And yet this time, when the I observed the odd judge interact among their peers and later on with me I realized what natural leaders they were and how comfortable they were in any social setting. Mills Lane was one of those judges. (Maybe he spotted that can of Copenhagen in my pocket and we became friends over that.) Or maybe all that time he spent refereeing boxing matches with Mike Tyson gave him an affinity to hang out with people much younger than him. But he was genuinely interested in my perspectives when we talked and he would remember our conversations year-after-year. There were several others like that and over time I realized they were similar to Mills Lane in their communities. Very prominent, very self-confident and very passionate about their vision. They always transcended the age-barrier. It was as if they were ageless. They were simply comfortable hanging out with any age-demographic. I first met Chuck Alvey then. He was the GM for Channel 8 and not the EDAWN CEO he is now. He probably doesn’t remember, but he and I hung out many times chatting on the lunch patio at the Judicial College.

I interned at the Truckee Meadows Regional Planning Agency when Elisa Maser (then Erquiaga and the assistant director) was defining and implementing the Regional Quality-of-Life Factors. (Whole post on that someday!) I spent a year forming and holding these focus groups with every mucky-muck in town and once again experienced largely the same repeated pattern. I met the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce over 20 times for the “first time”. The then-Mayor verbally berrated me for not having ice for the sodas in front of 10 other local leaders when I had nothing to do with F&B. And then Max Page — a man I would later work for at Fitzgeralds — hung out with me and asked me a bunch of questions about what I thought about downtown Reno and what should be done.

The battle between the young, inexperienced and often idealistic versus the older, experienced, scared and more realistic generations seems to be forever-generations old. That sucks.

I intend to be the older dude  in the suit that holds the door open for the college kid instead of vice versa. I’ll think I’ll enjoy being a bridge between generations as I slide out of my 30s and in to my 40s. My parties and companies will be filled with both the young-in-age and mature in mind and the older in age and ageless in attitude folks. The self-important age discriminating can stay home uninvited and bitch about how the world is out to get them and why the age-demographic on the other end is holding them back. 

It shouldn’t be about the age of a person. It’s about the connections and the conversation between people. Age discrimination is a concern and practice of the self-conscious, the ignorant and the unethical individuals unwilling to remake themselves in to the human being necessary to gain access, acceptance and rapport with others.

…stay Tuned for Part II

Comments