ALTA — Things don't change much around here, and sitting in front of me is Exhibit A.
Bill Levitt, owner for the past 50 years of the Alta Lodge — the oldest hotel in America's second oldest ski town — is getting ready for ski season No. 51 by making sure the front desk staff is on the telephone to upcoming guests, letting them know the current snow conditions, which can be summed up in one word: "lousy."
If they'd like to cancel, that would be fine.
"It's the right thing to do," says Bill, who has been running the lodge on that philosophy since he bought the place in 1959.
A native New Yorker who was born in Brooklyn, Levitt might never have discovered Alta, and in turn the Alta Lodge, if a similar courtesy hadn't been extended to him.
The year was 1954, Levitt was a successful documentary filmmaker in New York, and while on a business trip he had put on his first pair of skis at a resort in Vermont known as Big Bromley. The sport intrigued him enough to want to try it again. For a proper introduction to real skiing, he was advised, he should go "Out West."
He and his wife made reservations for the opening of the next ski season — about this time of year — for Aspen. But days before they were to fly to Colorado the hotel called and gave them the Aspen snow report: "lousy."
"You should go to Alta. They have snow," he was told.
"Alta? Where's that?" Bill asked.
"It's in Utah."
Remembers Levitt, "Of course, being a wise guy, I said, 'Where's Utah?' "
But he came to Alta, he skied with, was taught by and became friends with Alf Engen and Junior Bounous, and that was that. He was hooked.
Five years later, he quit his job as a filmmaker, bid New York goodbye forever and moved to Alta to ski, soak up the rare but clear oxygen at 8,600 feet and run the lodge.
He'd acquired the property from a businessman named Jay Laughlin, who the previous summer, out of the blue, had asked Levitt while on a hike through Alta's wildflowers, "Would you like to buy the lodge?"
Levitt surprised himself by how quickly he said, "OK."
Their conversation about the purchase price was equally brief.
Laughlin named a price and Levitt said, "OK."
He chuckles at the thought of what happened next.
"A few days later, I got a call from Jay," he says. "He said he'd been looking over his papers and he was sorry, but the figure he had first told me wasn't right. I said, well all right, what is it? And then he gave me a new figure — and it was less!
"That's what this whole romantic Alta was about," Levitt says, still marveling half-a-century down the road. "It was what's fair, what's right. It was never about how much you could squeeze out of somebody. I think that's continued to this day."
It's hard to argue the point with a 92-year-old man still as hands-on, alert, energized — and fair — as the day he moved here.
He's conceded some things to the aging process. He stepped down as Alta's mayor four years ago, after 34 years at the helm, and two years ago he stopped skiing due to nerve damage in his legs.
"In 50-something years, I've never gone down in a toboggan," he says, "and I don't want to start now."
But he still has all his hair; he still walks daily the 62 steps between the Alta Road and the lodge entrance; he still greets the guests like he's known them for 50 years (which in many cases is true); his story-telling, if anything, is better than it ever was; and when it doesn't snow much in November, he calls up the guests and tells them so.
In all the important ways, the Alta ways, he's changed about as much as the mountains around him.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.