Affair at Sun Valley

It was doubtful whether Joseph Sepp Froelich, sharp-eyed as he was, had ever noticed the quiet, unremarkable man who lived in one of the cottages, spent his time hanging around Sun Valley Lodge, watching the skaters during the indigo-shadowed afternoons, sitting in the cafe through the starlit evenings.

But that quiet man had noticed Mr. Froelich.

Froelich was one of the handsome Austrian and German experts whom W. Averell Harriman had brought to Idaho to teach Sun Valley colonists how to ski. Mr. Harriman had imported yodeling German waiters and musicians too, but Froelich and the other Skimeisters, Tyrolean hats cocked on their heads, were the climatic touch. They whizzed around the towering cornices of the hills, swooped like eagles over the white slopes of the Sawtooth Mountains. The ladies loved them.

Froelich, in fact, had got himself married. His wife was rich Natalie Rogers, granddaughter of the late Kuhn, Loeb & Co. banking partner Louis A. Heinsheimer. Frederick (Friedl) Pfeifer had married, too: headstrong, ski-crazy Hoyt Smith, daughter of a socialite Salt Lake City banker. Sandy-haired Hans Hauser could have been married half a dozen times. But Hans was too happy-go-lucky for his own good, according to Froelich, who was able to give up the business of teaching clumsy Americans how to do "snow plows" and "stem turns," and become a colonist himself. This season he and his rich wife lived in a hunting lodge a mile away from the inn.

The Skimeisters made Froelich's lodge their rendezvous. They talked about the war. They talked about the National Open Slalom tournament on Mount Hood in 1939, when some of them had refused to race until the Nazi flag was displayed with the flags of other nations in the lobby of Timberline Lodge. They talked about little Peter Radacher, who had since gone back to Germany to fight. Much beer, much talk flowed at the Froelichs'. One day the talk suddenly ceased. In Washington, the Congress of the U.S. declared war. In Washington, at headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Government men scanned a long report, all the data which the quiet, unremarkable man, an agent of the FBI, had gathered about the Skimeisters of Sun Valley.

Last week, in the continental cafes, around the heated swimming pools, on the ski slopes, among the Hollywood stars and millionaires, the socialites and diplomats, the rich European refugees and playboys of Sun Valley, gossip was as thick as a blizzard in the Sawtooth Mountains.

Froelich, Pfeifer, happy-go-lucky Hans Hauser, four others had been whisked off to the Salt Lake City jail.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.