REGIONAL: Magic lives forever: Rest in peace, Peter Yarrow | Arts & Entertainment

REGIONAL: Magic lives forever: Rest in peace, Peter Yarrow | Arts & Entertainment

It’s hard to imagine growing up in the last 60 years or so without being touched by the music and activism of Peter Yarrow. He wrote the classic “Puff the Magic Dragon” while still a student at Cornell in 1959, and Peter, Paul, and Mary helped pace the folk revolution of the early ’60s, enduring as iconic voices in American music and countless humanitarian causes, from the anti-war movement during the era of Vietnam to the Civil Rights Movement alongside leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yarrow passed away Tuesday at the age of 86, and the local community is grieving a man who has long been considered one of Telluride’s own. For longer than many locals can remember, Yarrow and his family have been neighbors in the Ski Ranches, and everyone from servers to hitchhikers, from generations of children to octogenarian activists, have a story to tell of Yarrow’s selfless kindness and unwavering generosity with his time and talent in Telluride.

“I think the whole country and the world will miss Peter, but, yeah, Telluride was a special place for him, and he’ll be especially missed here,” longtime family friend Dylan Brooks told the Daily Planet.

 

Brooks can barely distinguish between Yarrow the man and Yarrow the musician, having grown up alongside the Yarrow family, including Peter’s children, Bethany and Christopher, and watching him play for the community throughout Brooks’ childhood. His mother, the late Wendy Brooks, founder of the Telluride Academy, was particularly close to Yarrow, and they worked on projects together in Telluride and around the world, including goodwill trips to Vietnam and Israel.

“Peter brought an earnest love for people, and he brought magic into every room,” Brooks said. “He was a very dear friend, and I will always appreciate the amazing effort he made in March of this (past) year, when my mother was getting ready to pass to the other side. Peter postponed his own chemotherapy treatments in New York and flew to Mexico to come and lay by my mom’s side and sing to her in her last day of life, and he was the last person that she recognized. You (could) see the look in her eyes, and she was so amazed that he was there. He would give of himself so frequently that it seemed his default mode, to give.”

On his website, Yarrow posted his own perspective on visiting Wendy in her final days.

“A huge gift to me,” Yarrow wrote. “I made it in time to sing to Wendy and tell her I love her – a sacred precious time.”

For those who didn’t grow up with him as a neighbor, it’s easier to distinguish the folk icon who shaped their early life from the folksy man they shared community with later in life.

 

“He was an idol when I was a young person, Peter, Paul, and Mary, they were really important to me in the 60s, I listened to him a lot,” former San Miguel County Commissioner Art Goodtimes told the Planet. “And then I got to meet him when he was in Telluride as part of the Telluride Institute, and we worked together on the Institute stuff. You often find out that your heroes have clay feet when you get to meet them in person, but this certainly wasn’t the case (with Peter). He had winged shoes all his life. He was quite an amazing man, very kind, very generous, and that was really important to me.”

Despite career highlights like having Peter, Paul, and Mary’s debut album go to the top of the charts, releasing a handful of Top 10 singles, including “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” which hit No. 1 in 1969, and singing “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the March on Washington with King in 1963, Yarrow told the Planet his work with students through his “Operation Respect” anti-bullying campaign and the chance to write songs with the survivors of the Parkland High School shooting eclipsed all his other accomplishments.

“The most transformational experience I’ve had was working with students. It moved me in the core of my soul,” Yarrow told the Planet in 2019 before a fundraising concert at the Opera House for Operation Respect. “I saw their courage, and I saw their pain and trauma, and I saw that it was time to do something.”

Longtime Telluride community leader Amy Kimberly recalled winning an award from the Telluride Institute that she remembers as the Peter Yarrow Visionary Award, in recognition of her work with the Telluride Arts Council and the Telluride AIDS Benefit. She said receiving the award in person from Yarrow gave her the confidence to continue building community.

“When I was younger, I was going to anti-war marches with my mom when I was still in middle school and high school, so Peter’s music was a big part of my growing up,” Kimberly told the Planet. “(In Telluride), he would support things I was doing. He would show up for many things, very active for sure, and engaged. And he was lovely. He was just like you would expect Peter Yarrow to be, kind and gentle, and he really cared about the community.”

 

Marilyn Branch first met Yarrow in California and reconnected with him when she moved to Telluride and discovered he was a part-time neighbor. She remembers him as “my good, dear friend,” a man who never said “no” when asked to lend a hand to a good cause. She recalled Peter, Paul and Mary’s surprise free concert in Town Park in her early years in town, and frequent benefit performances in Telluride and Montrose.

“We had had prayers for his family and him at church last Sunday, but I didn’t know that he was going to pass so quickly,” Branch said. “I grew up with Peter. In high school and my early years of marriage and (through) all the Vietnam stuff, they were just always there. They were one of the mainstays, that was the music we listened to.”

In Telluride, that omni-presence in the soundtrack of American lives was matched by Yarrow’s presence as a good neighbor and friend.

“He was always somebody that was in the community,” Branch said. “I didn’t really see him as a celebrity. I just knew him as my friend, Peter.”

Yarrow sometimes referred to himself as “the dragon’s best friend,” but many saw him as embodying the characteristics of that rascal, Puff.

 

“You are magic,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis posted on Yarrow’s website recently as part of a living tribute. “And everything that you’ve touched has become magic as well.”

This story was originally published by the Telluride Daily Planet. 

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