Summer 1977

My days working at Hertz Rent-A-Car are filled with many fond and funny memories.   People from all walks of life rent cars and those same people come to visit Aspen.  These visitors have their reasons for being there, some come for vacation, others come to see if they might live there someday and still others come because their jobs sent them there.

On this particular day two middle aged gentlemen showed up at our rental counter without a reservation.  They needed a car, the least expensive one we had and they only needed it for a couple of hours.  The completed rental agreement showed that it was being billed to their employer, a company known as Oxford-Anschutz Corp. 

At their request, really their boss’s request, they needed the cheapest thing we had on the lot and we had just the car, a four year old Ford Pinto.  This car had seen better days and was rarely rented out, but they seemed OK with their transportation.  They told us they had to go look at some ranch property and would be back in a few hours.  Now these guys were not big by any stretch but in that car they looked like circus clowns as they drove off.

Four hours later the two gentlemen showed back up at our counter and they looked like that had gone to battle and lost.  They pulled out the rental contract which had been bunched up in a ball and was coated in mud.  When we asked them what had happened they just about died laughing and so the story goes….

When they got to the ranch they went through a gate and parked in the middle of a field.  There were a number of horses nearby but they paid them little attention as they went off to inspect the wells, property features and other aspects of the ranch.  Their employer was interested in purchasing the property and wanted someone to take a look at it.  Off in the distance they heard some “odd” noises but did not think much of it, that was until they returned to the car.  The Pinto that had been parked there an hour or so earlier now looked like an abandoned hunk of junk.  In their absence, one of the horses decided he did not like this new Pinto in his field and went about destroying it.  All the windows were broken, not a single side panel remained undamaged and there was blood and mud all over the car.  The roof was even slightly caved in.

Bleeding and muddy, the perpetrator stood nearby, looking like he was ready to take on these two men next.  The two of them stated that they climbed into what was left of the Pinto, luckily enough it started, and they got the “hell outta there!”

Their boss may have been cheap but, on this day the two men did spring for the insurance even though it added a dollar to the cost of their rental.  Good thing!

The lesson learned here was never to leave a four year old Pinto in a corral with a two year old Quarter Horse.  By the way, the Anschutz family purchased that ranch in addition to the one in they have owned in Carbondale for the past century.