Lol… truthfully it was very basic… gourmet and beautifying the plates was unknown and would have been met with derision! We had a new cook who produced really nice Danish pastries for breakfast which were met with howls and demands for the usual pancakes & waffles.
Ulla at the time was a private club and you couldn’t make a reservation without being referred by a member. We carried on the club idea as both the Williams & the Gadds had set the tradition. Actually the club consisted of lots of Yalies & Harvards and their girlfriends plus their friends. My husband was also a Yalie. In retrospect it was all very primitive.
Ulla consisted of a girls’ dorm with a large bathroom with a few tubs & wash basins & no privacy, a men’s dorm, two private rooms and a horrible shed-like room behind the kitchen reserved permanently by two friends (both lawyers who ended up in corner offices at one of the most prestigious white shoe law firms in NY). One of them, David Tappen was the first Sugarbush lawyer.
Then there was Sam’s House, the separate building still there named after Sam Hall the terrific cook everyone inherited from Sewell & Arthur Williams. When the Williams’ rehabbed the farmhouse into Ulla, their family sent them Sam & Evie Hall who were sort of family retainers… Sam was a terrific sort of southern family-style cook… meaning very basic menus well prepared. I think the Williams were from Maryland. We added on 3 rooms between the main house and the silo which everyone hated, because they all hated change (Danish pastries!). It was promptly called The Motel…
We got our water from a stream behind Ulla which was run through a large garbage can in the basement with a formula of Clorox to make it potable… no one ever got sick (I used the same formula when living on a sailboat in Turkey as their water was not potable). We would burn all the garbage in the spring (it froze during the winter) behind Ulla.
There was a Franklin stove in the Living Room and a small room off it that was the bar. It had numerous cubbies with names painted on each one where the faithful who came every weekend left their bottle of liquor. There was nowhere to buy liquor so we always had a few emergency bottles to hand over if someone ran out. Everyone enjoyed partying. I don’t know how everyone always got up for breakfast, skied all day and then repeated the previous night… a tribute to youth! Many of the faithful were part of the original Sugarbush investors.
Oh I forgot… no children were allowed. Of course, no one had any so it wasn’t a big deal until people had them & then it was a big deal.
— Patty Slingluff
