[msb-alumni] George Stranahan, Former MSU Professor and Benefactor of Physicists and Beer Lovers, Dies at 89 on May 20, 2021
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2021 17:01:55 -0400
BlankGeorge Stranahan, Benefactor of Physicists and Beer Lovers, Dies at 89. By
Alex Traub.
A venturesome millionaire, he forged an only-in-America career in fields
ranging from craft
beer to free speech activism to scientific research.
For three summers in the late 1950s, George Stranahan lived in a remote
mountain valley near
Aspen, Colo., with his only professional tools a pencil and a piece of paper.
He was a
graduate student in theoretical physics. Staring at a blank page one afternoon
in 1959, he
made a discovery: You can't do physics alone. You need someone to talk to.
Mr. Stranahan dreamed of creating a physics think tank in the Rockies. He was
not your
ordinary 27-year-old with a lofty goal. Mr. Stranahan, whose family owned the
Champion Spark
Plug Company, had recently inherited $3 million. He assembled a group of
funders, nonprofit
executives and fellow physicists, and he put $38,000 toward the construction of
a building.
The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of
the Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world's most powerful
particle
accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists
as the most
promising candidate for a 'theory of everything' that would explain all the
universe's
physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. 'I'm convinced all the best physics
gets done
there,' Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center's website.
Another, Brian
Schmidt, called the center 'the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the
entirety of
my career.
The center turned out to be just one part of a Rocky Mountain avalanche of
businesses,
nonprofits, side projects and boondoggles that made up Mr. Stranahan's career.
The only-in-America array of fields he threw himself into ranged from craft
beer to
free-speech activism to saloon management to childhood education, along with a
dash of
literary patronage. Mr. Stranahan died in a hospital in Denver on May 20. He
was 89. His
wife, Patti Stranahan, said the cause was a stroke and other health problems
that emerged
after heart surgery.
In 1962, its first summer in operation, the Aspen Center for Physics played
host to 42
physicists. Now every year it usually turns away hundreds of applicants and
welcomes more
than a thousand during winter and summer sessions. Mr. Stranahan served as the
center's
first president and then as a board member.
In the 1980's and '90's, when ownership of the center's land seemed uncertain
and threats
appeared from developers, including Donald J. Trump, Mr. Stranahan guided it
through stormy
local politics into gaining title to its own property, its president at that
time, Michael
Turner, said in a phone interview.
In 1972, Mr. Stranahan left his position at Michigan State University, where he
had received
tenure as a physics professor, and cut back on his involvement with the Center
for Physics.
Two seemingly irreconcilable facts indicate the eccentricity of what followed.
In 1989, Mr.
Stranahan's family had a 35 percent stake in Champion Spark Plug when Cooper
Industries
bought the company for $800 million in cash. That was the scale of the fortune
that Mr.
Stranahan lived on.
Yet in 1980, he opened a bar near Aspen, the Woody Creek Tavern, where he spent
several
years mixing drinks while also pitching in for humbler tasks like janitorial
work. His
daughter Molly Stranahan remembered him as a skilled cooker of soup for
customers, including
ranchers and cowboys.
It did not take much to get Mr. Stranahan started on something new: He launched
his
single-malt manufacturer, Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, after he watched his
barn burn down
alongside a volunteer fireman who, he learned, shared his appreciation of fine
spirits.
Soon thereafter, that fireman, Jess Graber, installed a distillery in another
barn on Mr.
Stranahan's property.
This was not the kind of professional life easily summed up in the occupation
box of a tax
return. Mr. Stranahan called himself a "pilgrimosopher."
He became serious about the pilgrim part in the early 1970s, when he turned
much of his
1,500-acre property into a ranch for raising cattle. In 1990, Mr. Stranahan's
Limousin bull
Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a
highly regarded
trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo's semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated
that he lost
$1 million during 18 years of ranching.
Mr. Stranahan earned the "-osopher" suffix when he founded the Flying Dog
Brewpub in 1990.
The company devised labels and beer names that made profane reference to feces
and female
dogs.
In 1995, the Colorado Liquor Board pronounced Flying Dog's labels obscene,
forcing the
company to remove them from the bottles of $250,000 worth of beer. After a
five-year legal
battle, and with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, the brewery beat
the state.
In 2015, it won another legal challenge in Michigan regarding an
expletive-heavy beer name.
"We are actually trying to spread a political message: Challenge authority,"
Mr. Stranahan
told The Rocky Mountain News.
Asked what 'flying dog' meant, he recited a stemwinder about hiking to the
summit of K2 in
1983 and having a revelation in a hotel room in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
"The flying dog stands for doing what you should have known better, taking a
risk that was
maybe further out there than you expected, but pulling it off," he said in a
video produced
by the company.
As of last year, Flying Dog was the 35th-biggest craft brewing company in the
United States,
according to the Brewers Association.
In 2010, a 'beer panel' convened by the New York Times food critics Eric Asimov
and Florence
Fabricant to rank pale ales declared Flying Dog's Doggie Style Classic its
"consensus
favorite."
Flying Dog's raunchy labels are designed by the illustrator Ralph Steadman,
whom Mr.
Stranahan met thanks to the fact that Mr. Steadman's most famous collaborator
was also a
regular patron at the Woody Creek Tavern: Hunter S. Thompson.
Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan.
The details of
the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost
in a haze of
friendship and misbehavior.
The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they
took mescaline
that hit him "like a sledgehammer."
"We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot," Mr. Stranahan said about
their
friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. "If you're a rancher, you
have access
to dynamite."
George Secor Stranahan was born on Nov. 5, 1931, in Toledo, Ohio. His father,
Duane, served
as vice president in charge of aviation at Champion Spark Plug, and his mother,
Virginia
(Secor) Stranahan, was a hospital volunteer and homemaker.
He had five siblings and an expensive education, but he grew up lonely and more
interested
in the reading he did on his own than in school. Physics provided a way to
understand the
world at a remove.
"If I could understand atoms, pretty soon I could figure out how my grandmother
worked," he
explained to The New York Times in 2001.
Mr. Stranahan graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1953,
and in 1961 he
received his Ph.D. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie
Mellon
University).
He began working as a professor at Michigan State in 1965, but had a more
meaningful
experience teaching high schoolers in the area. He later created two charter
schools, for
students from kindergarten through eighth grade, in and around Aspen.
Mr. Stranahan's first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his wife,
Patti, and
his daughter Molly, from his first marriage, he is survived by three other
children from
that marriage, Patrick, Stuart and Brie Stranahan; a son from his third
marriage, Ben; a
brother, Michael; a sister, Mary Stranahan; and nine grandchildren. Another son
from his
first marriage, Mark, died last year.
At the time of his death, Mr. Stranahan lived in Carbondale, Colo.
When his son Ben was 7, Mr. Stranahan and Mr. Thompson "initiated" him "into
manhood," Mr.
Stranahan told The Denver Post.
One night, Mr. Thompson came over to Mr. Stranahan's place to show him a new
gun. They got
to drinking and talking about politics, and Ben woke up and joined them. The
conversation
turned to Ben's pet tarantula, along with the notion of holding the tarantula
in their
hands.
"Hunter and I decided this is the moment of courage," Mr. Stranahan recalled.
Mr. Thompson reached into a bag he had brought with him, pulled out some
lipstick, and gave
himself and the boys a once-over.
Patti Stranahan awoke to find her husband and Mr. Thompson, both drunk, with
her young son,
the whole group wearing lipstick and playing with a venomous spider. Just your
typical night
at home.
"She turned around and went back to bed," Mr. Stranahan said.
Other related posts:
- » [msb-alumni] George Stranahan, Former MSU Professor and Benefactor of Physicists and Beer Lovers, Dies at 89 on May 20, 2021 - Steve
