But my mother meant “the Macy’s man,” as she also called Jerome B. Wheeler—she meant the actual president of Macy’s, the New York department store. Jerome B. Wheeler was a New Yorker who came to Aspen in the 1880s. Wheeler invested in the silver mines; he completed the first smelter. There was a railroad construction race, between the Colorado Midland and the Denver & Rio Grande—to see which line could beat the other to Aspen, across the Continental Divide. Wheeler put $100,000 into the Colorado Midland. And when prosperity came—when Aspen was a boom town—Jerome B. Wheeler paid for an opera house and the Hotel Jerome.

You would have thought my mom knew Jerome B. Wheeler, to hear how she talked about him. She was definitely on a first-name basis with him. “He was a Civil War hero, you know,” she told me. “Jerome rode with Sheridan. Poor Jerome was a colonel, but they busted him to major because he disobeyed some stupid orders!”

“What orders?” I asked her, wringing my hands.

“I have no idea—stupid ones!” my mother declared. “Poor Jerome crossed Confederate lines. He rescued a Union regiment—they were starving! Don’t wring your hands, Adam—they’re small enough already.”

“Poor Jerome,” was all I could say.

There were a few glory years for the Jerome, but the silver boom would go bust; upon the demonetization of silver and the crash of 1893, the mines shut down. Wheeler’s bank was forced to close. In 1901, Jerome B. Wheeler declared bankruptcy; he lost the Jerome for back taxes in 1909. The Wheeler Opera House caught fire in 1912. Poor Jerome died in 1918.

A former traveling salesman who’d been born in Syria became the bartender at the Jerome—this was in the “quiet years” of the grand hotel’s decline. Mansor Elisha, the Syrian American bartender, bought the Jerome for back taxes in 1911.

“It’s so sad!” my mom would exclaim—she meant poor Jerome and the fate of the hotel. “It’s become a shabby boardinghouse, but you can see what a swell hotel it was!” She declared that the Syrian family who took over the Jerome was a family of saints; she said the Elishas always welcomed the townspeople. “André Roch himself stayed five whole weeks at the Jerome,” my mother told me. She believed this proved her point: if the famous André Roch had stayed five whole weeks, the Hotel Jerome must have been swell.