When Dave McCoy first saw the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California he said, “I’d never seen anything like it. I loved the snow: I started dreaming about it. I said, ‘This is where I am going to spend my life.’”
Many people reading this understand that experience and subsequent path.
That same year McCoy received the foundation of what he called ‘…the best possible education.’ He told Leigh Buchanan: “When I was in the eighth grade my folks separated. It was during the Depression, and so my mom and I got on a Greyhound bus and went to meet my father’s parents in Wilkeson, Washington. We got acquainted, and she left me there. I stuck around for two and a half months, but I didn’t like the rain, so I took my knapsack and headed back to California. I rode with the bums on the trains, ate at their campfires at night, and listened to their stories. It was the best possible education.”
At the time Dave was 13 years old. His formal education ended with high school, but with that best possible informal education, his love for snow and mountains, hard work and fun he built Mammoth Mountain Ski Area from a rope tow on the side of hill to one of the largest and best ski areas in North America. Many people reading this already know it but for those who don’t Dave’s influence on skiing and skiers is incalculable, and that story is best told in Robin Morning’s fine book “Tracks of Passion.” Dave, who I’ve known since 1953, will be 100 years old in August. I hadn’t seen him since his 90^th birthday party but a few weeks ago I had the privilege and pleasure of spending a few hours in conversation with him.
That talk illuminated and reiterated why I am among many, many people who consider Dave McCoy among the most remarkable, decent, genuinely good human beings we have ever known, a great man by any measure. That is, his successes, accomplishments and positive impact on the community of Mammoth, the larger world of skiing and thereby the world at large did not make him a great man, but rather, the other way around. We reminisced about several people, events and dynamics of the life and lives we know and consistent perspectives and themes kept surfacing in Dave’s narrative:
“Most people are essentially good,” he said, “and if you give them the right chances they will show you that goodness.”
“All of us make mistakes. That’s part of learning. The thing is to learn from them and to move on and not repeat that one and don’t be afraid of making a different one.”
And there is this as told to Leigh Buchanan: “In 1991, we had to lay off 150 people, because we had six years of very light snow. Instead of keeping all the best people, I looked at the people that were really able to take care of themselves and let them go first. It worked out, because they ended up doing greater things than they had been doing. It may not have been wise, but that’s the way it is with me.”
Thanks, Dave.