Lederhosen and Tyrolean Hats
Forging Community with Brands
Just as army surplus stores began to pop up nationwide, a different trend emerged: mountaineering and climbing shops flourished in cities that recreationists considered gateways to the mountains. Many of the new stores were family affairs, with women designing, sewing, packaging, and mailing the equipment and clothing. Because women participated as gearmakers, these companies were more attuned to selling to women and children, and expanded their product offerings as a result (although outdoor companies in general still conveyed the idea of a non-commercial man’s world). These small shops shared an important feature with much larger industry players: they helped consumers cultivate a sense of belonging.
The rise of Holubar Mountaineering, a store in Boulder, Colorado, run by Alice Holubar and her husband, LeRoy, illustrates how some Americans turned to outdoor products as part of their identity. Alice Holubar, a gearmaking “genius” and climber, based her business on community and connection. These commercial transactions, in other words, were much more than that. Like similar business owners, the Holubars started by reselling war surplus. Eventually, they turned to European imports and the use of wartime technologies like nylon to develop and manufacture their own superior products.
Although the population of climbers and mountaineers was minuscule in comparison to car campers and fishermen, Holubar Mountaineering’s cultural impact reached beyond a cadre of elite climbers. Holubar Mountaineering created an outdoor cognoscenti. Holubar customers saw themselves as the chosen few who had access to the best equipment as well as an insider community. Their identity as climbers was shaped not just by the mountains they climbed, or even the jackets they bought, but also by where they bought their jackets. People acquired ideas about community or wilderness politics based on their connection to the Holubars of the world. Holubar products were a shorthand for being yourself, a remarkable shift toward the rise of a world where brands created loyal followings of customers who proudly wore logo-emblazoned clothing.
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The rise of Holubar Mountaineering tracked the larger national rise in outdoor industry brands as well as the trend of businesses using promotional materials to cultivate a sense of community among users. During World War II, outdoor companies such as Hirsch-Weis and Coleman had promised American consumers that victory meant access to modern consumer products in peacetime. When army surplus inventory dried up, companies like the Holubars’ grew in that space, and with a similar appeal. Outdoor styles remained hybrids of recreational, military, and overseas influences. Like other communities who bonded over the consumption of Tupperware at home parties or responded to a ringing doorbell to make a purchase of Avon lipstick, white suburban Holubar aficionados connected over their shared enthusiasm for outdoor activities. For these consumers, buying particular brands of outdoor goods became a way of defining community, identity, and a distinct subculture.
The house at 1215 Grandview Avenue in Boulder, Colorado, a few blocks from Boulder High School, was conspicuously busy in the early 1950s. LeRoy Holubar, known as Roy, left for work as a university math instructor every weekday morning. Alice Holubar’s schedule was less predictable. A housewife and occasional German teacher and tutor, Holubar also managed the couple’s growing mountaineering equipment and clothing business from the family basement, where every step of the process, from gear production to packing, took place. As Roy taught classes, Alice raised their daughter Linda and fed the cadre of young men who moved into and out of the basement while working for the company.
At the end of World War II, Roy resold surplus army equipment. Alice had ideas and a contempt for badly made things. She didn’t think much of the surplus items that her husband sold and knew she “could make things better than anyone else had ever done.” Over the course of her career, Holubar imported and sold mountaineering equipment and clothing from northern and central Europe and developed and manufactured new designs for sleeping bags and jackets. She built an international network of gearmakers and invited customers into a community space she cultivated one meal and conversation at a time. From 1947 to 1968, Alice Holubar helped to reshape the American market for custom-made, high-end equipment. Her timing could not have been better.
Holubar Mountaineering customers and Alice’s husband considered her a creative genius. Shewould wake up from a dream about patterns and sewing and realize she knew how to make the parka or sleeping bag design that had eluded her. Holubar could fix a customer’s Primus stove, take an order over the phone, and measure and sew a rush-order parka even as she worked as a mother, cook, tutor, and neighbor.
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The Holubar home did not look like an industry-defining outdoor goods design center. And at first glance, the Holubars seemed to adhere to the era’s gender norms: Roy’s $150 monthly salary supported his family, while Alice managed their daughter and house. After earning a master’s degree in German, Alice taught at Boulder High School and at the university, at times also tutoring Ph.D. candidates in German. “With the male partner making the decisions,” one newspaper article explained, “the female member of the Holubar household [was] able to give her time to cutting and sewing.” But the newspaper article got it wrong; most accounts of the couple’s years building Holubar Mountaineering feature Alice as “the real spark plug” of the business. Moreover, her role in the business made space for women and children in the “man’s world” of the outdoors.
Alice Freudenberg was born in Suchteln, Germany, in 1911. Her father had a “fondness for the West” that shaped young Alice. After he died during World War I, Alice’s mother moved her and three brothers to the United States. They settled on a ranch in “a large meadow across from high red cliffs” in Left Hand Canyon, a fair distance from Boulder, Colorado. She learned English quickly but still spoke “funny,” according to some contemporaries. One friend later wondered if the years isolated with her family in Left Hand Canyon shaped her “remarkable verve and warmth for people.”
Alice met Roy, a Boulder native, in high school. Roy had “always liked the mountains,” but it was Alice who talked him into going on his first Colorado Mountain Club trip. She was class salutatorian of their high school, while Roy was valedictorian, and both graduated a few years later from the University of Colorado. After marrying in 1937 they spent their honeymoon “on the trail.” It would be more than two decades before they could take that much time just for themselves again.
During World War II, Roy continued to teach at the university while the men who would later become his colleagues and competitors in the outdoor industry joined the ski troops. The ranks of the Colorado Mountain Club dwindled during those years, but together, the Holubars kept the club going. Even with the challenge of limited gasoline ration stamps and few experienced volunteers to lead the groups, Alice Holubar stood determined to serve Boulder by leading the organization for the city.
Mobilization for World War II transformed Colorado. It changed Denver and the surrounding areas, creating jobs and linking residents’ fate to government contracts. The 10th Mountain Division training facility at Camp Hale brought world-renowned skiers and climbers to the area. The postwar era brought new residents, wealth, and developments. Roy Holubar, who had grown up in Boulder, recalled that in the early years of his company thirty thousand new homes dotted the prairie on the hills near Boulder. The growth made sense to him, in a way, because the nearby mountains were as inviting as ever. Boulder residents, including a growing university population, looked to the mountains as a place of freedom, as did Americans across the country.
Boulder residents, including a growing university population, looked to the mountains as a place of freedom, as did Americans across the country.
— “Shopping All the Way to the Woods” by Rachel Gross
They saw travel as a way to affirm their individuality, status, and leisure time. For many, a national park road trip fulfilled a desire for authentic experiences that eluded them in everyday life. For some in the postwar era, the new enemy of authenticity was conformity — in particular, suburban life. Equipped with more leisure time and discretionary income, Americans could be most themselves, and their authentic selves, on the open road, based on where and how they traveled.
Airlines and automobile clubs marketed Colorado’s high country as a wonderland and iconic escape. “Vacationland,” tourist boosters called it, hoping to lure both visitors and residents. New ski resorts at Aspen and Snowmass contributed to this draw, as did the Rocky Mountain National Park. Climbing and mountaineering were part of this larger trend.
After the war the Holubars supported the arrival of Gerry Cunningham, who, like them, was part of the first wave of outdoor entrepreneurs to improve on army surplus. Cunningham had joined the 10th Mountain Division just out of high school. He had designed a teardrop-shaped backpack during high school to take on outdoor activities and was interested in the ski troopers because of his love for the outdoors and especially outdoor equipment. Cunningham found the army brutal. The innovative equipment he had expected as a ski trooper never materialized. Instead, he spent many cold nights at Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colorado, making line drawings of tents and backpacks that would outperform his army equipment. Cunningham’s miserable wartime experience at Camp Hale convinced him that the best place to start a business would be somewhere in the West, with easy access to mountains. Cunningham wanted to be the “L.L. Bean of the West.” He likely couldn’t afford the company’s products, but he knew how Bean wrote catalog copy and liked its goods for hunting and skiing.
In 1946, as Gerry and his wife, Ann, were driving west toward California, they stopped near Ward, Colorado, for lunch.The “pretty little meadow” across the way, 120 acres, was for sale. They spent their $600 savings to buy the place because “they knew they wanted to live somewhere out in the wilderness.” After he settled in, Cunningham sought out Roy and Alice Holubar, whom he heard “were both very active in the Colorado Mountain Club.” Roy later remembered that the Cunninghams lived in an “Indian tepee” that summer as Gerry built the family home. On the weekends, the Holubars helped the Cunninghams build. Thus the Holubars’ community involvement paved the way for two outdoor companies.
Cunningham had come to Colorado determined to improve on the army’s terrible equipment and to become the foremost outfitter of the intermountain West. It was a leap to assume there would be sufficient mountaineers for such a business. Roy recalled that there were perhaps only fifteen thousand mountain climbers nationwide in 1946, by his count. Going into the outdoor equipment business full time “looked awful risky and speculative.” Mountain tourism might have been taking off in Colorado, but it was more leisure drives to national parks than actual climbs up mountains. So Roy was more temperate in his ambitions. He kept his “bread and butter” teaching job while Alice and Gerry embarked down the speculative entrepreneurial path, to make new and improved equipment for their climbing peers.
Cunningham used his military connections to send potential customers a catalog of mountaineering equipment and, later, clothing. His former sergeant Art Draper asked Cunningham to write a column for the National Ski Patrol newsletter. In return, Cunningham asked for the Ski Patrol’s mailing list. In that way, Cunningham accessed a network of elite athletes most likely to purchase high-end camping and hiking gear. Cunningham’s mailing list grew to include climbing clubs around the country, including the Mazamas of Oregon, the American Alpine Club of Colorado, and the Iowa Mountaineers. From a small mailing list in 1946, Cunningham’s readership expanded to thousands who might have otherwise had access only to army surplus equipment. Encouraged by Cunningham, who said “there’s room for both of us” in this industry, Roy Holubar procured a sales license in 1947. Gerry Cunningham supplied the names for the Holubars’ first mailing list.
Together, Cunningham and the Holubars helped make Boulder, Colorado, one of the hubs of innovation for outdoor equipment in the postwar era, along with Los Angeles and Seattle. These three cities shared some common characteristics. They were all growing western cities that had benefited from the wartime economy and continued to benefit from postwar federal investment in the aerospace industry. The cities were all close to military bases that resold surplus, which meant veterans and their business partners could establish surplus resale shops nearby, so they had experience in retail. They all had strong outdoor club histories dating back decades, and were home to mountaineers and climbers.
Together, a set of new companies — all connected through personal networks — tapped the market of new outdoor consumers. They shaped a postwar outdoor identity, quite distinct from the East Coast, hunting and fishing and woodcraft identity of Abercrombie & Fitch and L.L. Bean. These new companies served a narrow swath of outdoorspeople — climbing and mountaineering and backpacking were nowhere near as popular as fishing, hunting, and camping. But they were important nonetheless because they changed the culture of the outdoors, creating a distinct outdoor subcultural community. The companies imported modern European products rather than selling the American products of the woodcraft aesthetic. Furthermore, Holubar Mountaineering conveyed certain novel visions of outdoor manhood to a broad range of customers, even those who didn’t buy their products. And Holubar Mountaineering and its competitors were the precursor to some of the most well-known brands of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Patagonia, the North Face, and JanSport.
Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the outdoor industry and author of “Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America” (Yale University Press, 2024). She is an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver where she teaches U.S. environmental, business, and public history.
