George Stranahan

In the late 1950's Mr. Stranahan, whose family owned the Champion Spark Plug Company, had recently inherited $3 million. He assembled a group of funders, nonprofit executives and fellow physicists, and he put $38,000 toward the construction of a building. The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena. In 1962, its first summer in operation, the Aspen Center for Physics played host to 42 physicists. Now every year it usually turns away hundreds of applicants and welcomes more than a thousand during winter and summer sessions. The center turned out to be just one part of a Rocky Mountain avalanche of businesses, nonprofits, side projects and boondoggles that made up Mr. Stranahan’s career. The only-in-America array of fields he threw himself into ranged from craft beer to free-speech activism to saloon management to childhood education, along with a dash of literary patronage. Mr. Stranahan served as the center’s first president and then as a board member. Mr. Stranahan died in a hospital in Denver on May 20 2021. He was 89. His wife, Patti Stranahan, said the cause was a stroke and other health problems that emerged after heart surgery. In 1972, Mr. Stranahan left his position at Michigan State University, where he had received tenure as a physics professor, and cut back on his involvement with the Center for Physics. In 1989, Mr. Stranahan’s family had a 35 percent stake in Champion Spark Plug when Cooper Industries bought the company for $800 million in cash. in 1980, he opened a bar near Aspen, the Woody Creek Tavern, where he spent several years mixing drinks while also pitching in for humbler tasks like janitorial work. He launched his single-malt manufacturer, Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey. He turned much of his 1,500-acre property into a ranch for raising cattle. In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000. He also founded the Flying Dog Brewpub in 1990. The company devised labels and beer names that made profane reference to feces and female dogs. As of last year, Flying Dog was the 35th-biggest craft brewing company in the United States, according to the Brewers Association. Flying Dog’s raunchy labels are designed by the illustrator Ralph Steadman, whom Mr. Stranahan met thanks to the fact that Mr. Steadman’s most famous collaborator was also a regular patron at the Woody Creek Tavern: Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. George Secor Stranahan was born on Nov. 5, 1931, in Toledo, Ohio. His father, Duane, served as vice president in charge of aviation at Champion Spark Plug. Mr. Stranahan graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1953, and in 1961 he received his Ph.D. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). He began working as a professor at Michigan State in 1965, but had a more meaningful experience teaching high schoolers in the area. Mr. Stranahan’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Patti, and his daughter Molly, from his first marriage, he is survived by three other children from that marriage, Patrick, Stuart and Brie Stranahan; a son from his third marriage, Ben; a brother, Michael; a sister, Mary Stranahan; and nine grandchildren. Another son from his first marriage, Mark, died last year. At the time of his death, Mr. Stranahan lived in Carbondale, Colorado.