News of Ed Bradley’s death today rattled close friends in Woody Creek, the Aspen-area enclave where the veteran CBS news reporter had a home and kept counsel with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson.
“He will be terribly missed,” said Michael Cleverly, a Woody Creek resident and friend. “That really stinks.”
Bradley, 65, succumbed to leukemia after battling the disease for more than a year.
Fond of hiking and skiing in the mountains around Aspen, Bradley was renowned for driving his beloved Porsche around town but never putting on airs.
“People who knew him liked him enormously, and people who didn’t know him held him in awe. He was completely accessible, but he wasn’t the type of person people would disturb during dinner, either,” Cleverly said.
Bradley was fixture in the kitchen crowd at Thompson’s Owl Farm, and he was one of the few people that the “gonzo journalist” allowed to speak during televised football games.
Bradley told Vanity Fair magazine in 2003 that he treasured his time in Colorado because it was so different from his work life.
“I go to sleep at night in New York with my window open and I can hear buses, cars, boom boxes, alarms,” he said. “I go to sleep in Woody Creek with my window open and all I hear is the river.”
Despite being a highly paid star reporter, he could often be seen hanging out in common spots such as the Woody Creek Tavern, and he lamented the influence of money on Aspen’s famously well-heeled Glitter Gulch.
“The sad thing now is that so many of the people who were here when I came here in 1975 are no longer able to live in town,” he told CNN in 1993. “They have to live down valley because of the prices. And I have to accept part of the responsibility.”
