ASPEN, Colo. — For a lost soul like young Howard Dean in the early 1970s, this fabled ski town seemed the ideal place to drop out.
He had just graduated from Yale with ordinary marks, and like many in his class left school troubled over the war in Vietnam and the uncertainties of how to find his way in life. He had skirted the draft because of a bad back, and had no desire to follow his well-heeled father onto Wall Street.
All Howard Brush Dean III wanted to do was ski. The idea was to lose himself on the slopes of Aspen, far from his father's conservative tutelage -- although with the help of a trust fund set up by his grandmother.
Bad back and all, Dean skied 80 days that winter, by his own count. He got around town in a blue Chevy Malibu and washed celebrities' dishes at the Golden Horn restaurant. He partied so hard that he later told friends he was "lucky to get out of it in one piece."
Aspen was the first stop on a years-long journey of self-discovery and experimentation that took the young Dean to Wall Street, medical school and finally Burlington, Vt., where he would edge into politics. In Dean's youthful aimlessness and his efforts to distinguish himself from his prominent father, there are parallels with the young George W. Bush, who traveled his own tangled road toward maturity.
Dean's family and friends, and the candidate himself, say the odyssey grounded him in a world beyond his privileged boyhood. He worked construction, volunteered at an emergency room and later treated low-income patients as a medical student in the Bronx.
More importantly, as he emerged to become the leading Democratic candidate for president, they say it taught him that nothing of value comes easily.
Dean says he spent some of those wilderness years running from the man known as "Big Howard": his father. In his autobiography, "Winning Back America," Dean said his father's long shadow dogged him from Yale to politics.
Big Howard was sometimes glum and moody, and could fall into long silent spells when something did not go as he wished. But, Dean wrote, "he had the wisdom to let me make my own way, and he had the self-discipline to allow me to take the chance that I would fail. He knew I had to make my own mistakes."
Dean was the first of four boys, a scion of Park Avenue and the son expected to uphold family tradition and carry on his father's gilded name.
