The King of France
Coincidence?
There is something about serendipity in this life. And though hard work and perseverance are the keys to success, I would be remiss if I didn't say that it has been involved in some of my achievements. Whether it was being in the right place at the right time or taking door #1 over door #2, it really makes me wonder. In fact, it didn't even hit me until last week when I was purging some old junk from my house and I found something from high school with my name on it.
This is the story of Steven Hunt Grabow. Where there is a will there is a way.
Inside a $29,990,000 Mountaintop Mansion on 38 Acres
Detroit, by Wayof the Army
My father, Gerald Leonard Solomon, known by his close friends as Jerry, born in 1946 and raised in Detroit, Michigan, had a tough life. While working two jobs and staying out of trouble he was drafted into the army and was sent to Vietnam. When he got out, the army offered him San Francisco or Miami Beach, and the choice was easy. He went to Miami Dade Community College and received his Associate in Arts, then transferred to the University of Miami, and earned his bachelor's degree there in 1972.
Before all of that, and in between it, he played football on the beach. Football was my dad's life for as long as he could hold a ball.
Back then in the 1970s my father would play at 85th Street beach and Haulover beach. Most of the guys on that sand weren't from Florida either. Steven Hunt Grabow was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and raised on Long Island. So was Kenneth Grossfeld — born in Brooklyn the same year, schooled on Long Island. There were more — Joe Greene, Moses Stillerman, Irwin Baker. These were names I heard from my father more times than I can count. I met some but I never met Steven or Kenny.
There were younger guys on that sand too. Brian Slavin came down from Washington, D.C. as a boy in 1967; he died suddenly in 2002, at forty-three. And Scott Rakow was the only one actually from here — a Miami Beach kid, more than a decade younger than the older men. My father said he played with him. Scott became a Miami Beach police officer. In June of 1988 he was shot chasing a suspect during an undercover drug operation, and he died the next day. If you grew up on the Beach you know his name whether you realize it or not — the youth center on Sheridan Avenue is named for him.
542 Carroll Drive · Starwood, Aspen
Why Hunt?
Here's what my father said about Grabow.
He was good looking. He dressed well. He was into health and fitness before anybody else was — before it was a thing people had a word for. He was athletic and coordinated. He couldn't see out of one eye. "Steven was always wiping the sand off the ball so it didn't go in his eye."
He was my father's friend, and he was my father's competition. "We were never on the same team. I played quarterback for my side always with Joe, Brian, Moses, and Irwin and Steven would play quarterback for his team always with Kenny..."
My father once told me a story about Steven waterskiing in front of all the guys and he caught a wave and was on his way down, but Steven knew everyone was watching so he managed to stay up. "The guy was so coordinated. He caught himself midway from wiping out because there was no way he was going to look bad in front of us."
Other people described him the same way, in print, and they were strangers to my father.
“Dark-haired, olive-skinned, and handsome, Grabow was a ski instructor once featured on the cover of the local phone book.”
— Ted Conover · Whiteout: Lost in Aspen
“He had this big hairy chest and a big smile. A nice guy, warm, affable and outgoing. He always had more stylish ski suits than I did.”
— Bob Braudis, former Sheriff of Pitkin County
Touring a $29,990,000 Gated Estate Above Aspen, Colorado
The Eye
A firecracker took the sight of one of his eyes while he was in school in Miami. He said so himself, to a reporter, in March of 1985.
Then he moved to Aspen — in 1969, at twenty-two — and stayed sixteen years.
“I'd rather be broke and washing dishes in Aspen than be the king of France.”
— Steven Hunt Grabow · Rocky Mountain News, December 1985
On one eye he skied about a hundred days a year. In January 1974 he took third in the Winterskol Hot Dog Contest, a judged freestyle jumping event off the Willoughby Jumps at the top of Mill Street. He played A-flight tennis at the Aspen Club for a decade. He heli-skied the Bugaboos in Canada. And at some point the town put his face on the cover of the phone book.
Depth perception is the thing that tells you where the ground is. He went off jumps anyway. My father told me that he was also in a James Bond film as a stunt double skiing but I couldn't find evidence to confirm this fact. I wish I could talk to my dad right now — he passed in 2017 — and ask him more questions about Steven.
davidhuntsolomon.com
Aspen Royalty
Everyone knew Steven. He was plugged into everything and definitely a trend setter.
In November 1984 a federal grand jury indicted him. The government said he ran cocaine into Aspen. Nine men were charged. Eight of them pleaded guilty. He didn't.
On December 8, 1985, a pipe bomb under the driver's seat of a borrowed Jeep killed him in the parking lot of the Aspen Club — 1450 Crystal Lake Road, at the end of Ute Avenue on the east side of town. He was 38. He had just finished playing tennis.
He was never tried and never convicted. Nobody has ever been charged with killing him. The case is still open.
2880 Fairgreen Drive · Miami Beach
The SixtyThousand Dollars
Nine months before he was killed, and while he was under indictment, the government was holding $60,000 of his money — seized cash, sitting in six packets of hundred-dollar bills. He was fighting to get it back and insisting there was nothing illegal about it.
Then he told his lawyer to stop fighting, and to give it away.
Aspen's Camp School for the Deaf was facing a deficit of sixty to seventy thousand dollars. He asked that the money go there. The camp's president called it "a real windfall."
The reason he gave was the eye. He said he sympathized with the hundred-odd children in that summer program because of what a firecracker had done to him in Miami.
“If the government gets to keep the money, it goes into a general fund and the public will never know where it went.”
— Steven Hunt Grabow · March 1985
Nine months later he was dead in a parking lot.
It Was AlwaysGoing to Be Aspen
Here's what most people don't understand about how names get chosen.
When my father picked mine, none of the rest of it had happened yet. There was no indictment. There was no bomb. There was a friend from the beach who'd gone to the mountains and made a life out of being the fittest, best-dressed, most coordinated guy in a town full of them. My father was as straight as it gets. No alcohol, no drugs.
My father named me after a skier. He named me after someone he respected. He said, "I told Steven, 'One day I am going to have a son and when I do I am naming him after my father who passed when I was 4 years old and I am going to give him your middle name.'" My dad always said to me, "Use Hunt because you too will always be well dressed, good looking, and a trend setter."
When I got the call to fly out to Aspen to see 542 Carroll Drive, my middle name was the last thing on my mind. And even working out at a local gym and experiencing the town, it still didn't occur to me. But were Miami Beach and Aspen always in the cards for me? Like so many others, there is a huge tie and connection between Aspen and Miami, but was anyone named after someone like Steven Hunt Grabow? Someone who frequented both places and was really a local celebrity in both towns?
542 Carroll Drive sits high in Starwood on 38 acres, looking down the valley. It is listed at $29,990,000, and I'd love to show it to you. Watch the tour, step inside, or see the listing.
542 Carroll Drive
And the thing I found last week, purging the old junk? An old letter, addressed to me when I was published in high school. My full name across the envelope: David Hunt Solomon.
Occasionally I get asked the question, where did David Hunt Solomon come from? In fact my 6-year-old son asked me the other day. I told him:
“Papa Jerry named me after my grandfather David Solomon and Hunt came from a guy named Steven Hunt Grabow. He was one of my dad's friends who he played football with.”
I left out the firecracker, a phone book cover, a hot dog contest in 1974, sixty thousand dollars given to deaf children, and an unsolved murder involving a bomb under his car seat in a parking lot outside a health club.
And underneath all of it, two guys on a beach at 85th Street, playing football against each other, with no idea that one of them was about to spend a lifetime pointing the other one's son at a mountain range.
Reply and tell me the story behind your name — I read every one. And if you want to see the valley from 542 Carroll before the snow flies, call me. I'll meet you on the hilltop.
— David Hunt Solomon
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