If you didn’t know Ira Sachs, the (mostly true) stories about him can sound apocryphal. Ira was a study in contrasts. His daughter Lynne’s movie, “Film About a Father Who,” premiered in 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival and is a great watch to understand pieces of the man.
Before I ever left Lake Tahoe in 1979 to move here, my good friend Nick Badami told me I must meet Ira. Nick owned Alpine Meadows ski resort and had recently purchased what later became known as Park City Mountain Resort. He convinced me I would be OK in the former mining town I’ve now called home more than half my life. “We even have a Holiday Inn now,” Nick offered. “Two stories!” Since we both loved grand old hotels in San Francisco, this was meant as both a joke and a nudge. “You need to meet the guy who built it, Ira Sachs.“
When Ira first came to town, he lived in a Winnebago in a parking lot near the Utah Coal and Lumber building. At the time, that building marked the end of Main Street and the start of a dirt road known as Easy Street. Even in the ‘70s, Ira looked like Albert Einstein, with his slightly wild hair and mustache. He was a developer, and he saw into the future about certain local projects while working with folks to build Holiday Inns in the northeast. He often invited friends from back east to come ski, and then he’d invite them to stay and help them figure out how they could.
One of those people was David Belz, who maintains The Shop yoga studio here in town. When David was four, Ira, and David’s dad, Paul, were scheduled to travel from Buffalo to Memphis with an interior designer and architect for a new hotel they were building. Before they left, Ira checked in with a girlfriend who decided she wanted to connect that night. So Ira stayed behind while David’s father and the others left on a light plane that crashed. All were killed. Ira would tell the story that his love of women kept him alive that day, so he just kept on loving them all through his life.
Ira was a sight on the slopes: wild hair flying, icicles clinging to his mustache, and a cassette player strapped to his chest so he could schuss to his favorite tunes. Years later, he would replace the heavy cassette player with a Walkman, and then ultimately a brick-size cell phone that would serve business deals he made while while on the chair lift.
To be invited to an Ira party once he moved into the Stag Lodge was a test of one’s ability to pivot. The first unit he owned quickly became too small for his large life, so he sold it to his buddy Cheech Marin (of “Up In Smoke” fame). His second unit was filled with artifacts from his travels, mostly those to Bali. When it came time to sell that place, he listed it for somewhere around $3.2 million, or $3 million if the buyer kept all the furniture he had no desire to pack.
I remember one winter break when my then 20-year old son, Randy, was home visiting during his sophomore year of college. We visited Ira and encountered the usual suspects, plus some extra imports on account of the holidays. Someone put on a George Strait record, and Ira told Randy to go ask the blonde across the room to dance. My formerly awkward son agreed, and I watched the young man do a fine Texas two-step and know all the words to the song as he spun the laughing woman around. When he came back to me smiling, I asked what they had talked about. He said, “She told me I have great hair.” It was my turn to smile. I replied, “When the L’Oréal spokesperson compliments your hair, you take that.”
Then there is the story about Ira driving Hunter S. Thompson to Vegas for the National Police Convention on Narcotics. It came when I offered to grab him a glass of wine. He politely refused, explaining that he didn’t drink and shocking me in the process given all the other things he regularly and openly ingested. Ira explained he’d once been driving Hunter across a few states to the convention and that he was drunk most of the way. He stopped to get out and fill the gas tank in Vegas and fell down and broke his leg. “I stopped drinking after that.“ This summer, when a production crew was in town to shoot a film about Hunter S. Thompson, I asked Ira’s son, Evan, for a photo of the two rascals together so that I could show the cast. It was fun to pass along.
Ira was also the guy who organized his friends to chip in money and buy sleeping bags for homeless folks in Salt Lake City, and he did it for years. They would even deliver them. I looked for his business card when I heard he had died because it had some quintessential quotes. Luckily, David Belz remembered the ones I forgot, such as, “Appear Less. Be More.” Ira lived other mantras, including “Chop wood, carry water.” It is a saying he interpreted to mean, stay committed to the process and always be prepared. He lived it so exactly that once, when a Park City school bus traveling back from a field trip broke down, Ira drove into Park City to get water and then shuttled it back out for the kids while they awaited rescue on the side of the highway.
When Ira smiled and his mustache turned up and he’d utter, “Yeah,” he beamed. I’d like to think, writing this on a day with snow falling from an early November sky, it means Uncle Ira is skiing the heavens with arms spread wide and poles held high, like so many of his extraordinary Sundays in the Park…