with a travelling band who had stopped in Aspen, taken a job as the Jerome's bartender, and later acquired the hotel from Wheeler, who had by this time long left the city and was unable to pay the taxes as he had gone bankrupt. In 1918, the Jerome's parlors served as morgues during the flu epidemic. The next year Elisha threw a welcome-home dance for local soldiers returning from World War I in 1919. Prohibition had started by then, and to survive the J-Bar became a soda fountain. Liquor service continued, in the form of a popular drink called the Aspen Crud, still served there today, that is essentially a vanilla ice cream soda or milkshake generously spiked with bourbon. Whole families were known to stop by after church and share one. Mansor Elisha died in 1935, leaving his son Laurence in charge of the hotel. The following year the seeds were planted for the city's recovery when Tom Flynn, a former resident trying to sell some of his mining claims, showed pictures of them to Billy Fiske, a U.S. Olympic bobsledder who had competed at the Winter Olympics earlier that year. He saw perfect terrain for a ski resort, and went out to Aspen and bought some land. Over that winter the newly formed Highland Bavarian ski club built its first ski near Ashcroft. Its first two guides, Swiss skier André Roch and Austrian mountaineer Gunther Langes, lived in the Jerome for five weeks while the lodge was finished. A crude ski lift was later built in Aspen itself, the beginnings of today's ski resort. The outbreak of World War II put further skiing development on hold, but not skiing itself as the U.S. Army's Tenth Mountain Division's "soldiers on skis" began training at nearby Camp Hale. After one long cross-country skiing exercise over the mountains the soldiers went, still on skis, straight to the Jerome where Laurence Elisha, then the owner, let them spend the night and offered them free drinks. Many were struck by the vintage decor. "The only thing missing was a bunch of trail-worn cowboys or dirt-stained miners bellied up to the bar", one observed. Throughout their training, Elisha offered them a room and a steak dinner for a dollar a night. It became a popular for the Tenth's trainees on weekend leave, since Leadville was off-limits and Denver was a lot farther away. 1946–1984: