While aristocrats and billionaires fight over the $10,000 hotel rooms of St Moritz, says Elena Clavarino in Air Mail, a five-storey cement house smack in the centre of town stands gloriously unkempt. Two large cracks are visible on the chipping façade and huge iron beams have been erected by town officials to stop it falling down. With prices locally hovering around $25,000 to $35,000 per square foot, the property is estimated to be worth around $34m. Tourists take endless photographs, unable to believe it exists. But locals know it to be the home of 89-year-old Adolf Haeberli: “the curmudgeon of St Moritz”.

In the 1950s, Haeberli’s mother owned the local beauty salon, which catered to some of the town’s first glamorous residents. The following decade the local authorities built a car park that damaged the building’s foundations, and offered a payout. But Haeberli refused, demanding more money, and the two sides have been locked in a legal feud ever since. His open letters – clacked out on an ancient typewriter then copied at the local police station and distributed to residents, often addressed to “all community morons” – have become legendary. They are sometimes signed “Santa Claus” in reference to his 10-inch white beard, which he likes to pair with military garb or a Muslim dishdasha. He stops in at the Palace Hotel most days to read their free newspapers; dinner parties are frequently thrown in his honour (“he loves the glitz and glamour”, says a filmmaker who followed him around for a documentary). The mayor is a close personal friend. And he shoots, says a local policeman. “So when he carries his rifle around town, we get a lot of calls.”

🛷🧨 Haeberli is the only honorary life member of the Cresta sports club, where John F Kennedy and Errol Flynn, among others, hurled themselves headfirst down an icy toboggan run. At the Kulm Hotel’s Sunny Bar – the place for bull shots and rösti after races – a wooden frame in the entrance displays a large chunk of Haeberli’s beard, cut off in a bet. To mark the end of the ski season, the late-octogenarian propels himself down the Cresta circuit wearing a bodysuit filled with fireworks, and lights them as he passes Shuttlecock, the most lethal bend.

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Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the US, never missed an opportunity to experiment, says Ferdinand Mount in the London Review of Books. As a boy, after teaching himself to swim from a book, he devised flippers for his feet and paddles for his hands. He used a home-made kite to “irrefutably” show the connection between lightning and electricity. At a rally held by one of the founders of Methodism, George Whitefield, in Philadelphia, Franklin didn’t try to get closer to the action – he walked away, to the limit of Whitfield’s voice, to calculate how many people could hear him and therefore how many troops a Roman general could have addressed (25,000, he reckoned). Franklin’s biographers tend to portray these and other scientific endeavours as hobbies – as “diversions from his statesmanship”. But that’s balls. The great scientists of the time hailed both his discoveries and his methods. And as Franklin himself said, he would rather talk science with “philosophical friends” than chat politics with “all the grandees of the earth”.

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”
Orson Welles

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