by Paul Teetor
For more than 60 years, Dave McCoy was Mammoth Mountain and Mammoth Mountain was Dave McCoy.
You couldn’t mention one without the other.
When McCoy died just short of his 105th birthday, back in February 2020, everybody mourning his passing celebrated his connection to Northern California, its magnificent mountains and its influential skiing culture.
Especially the LA-area skiers – and later snowboarders — who happily made the 300-mile trek from SoCal to access some of the finest trails in the world.
But few of the LA-area skiers knew of McCoy’s roots in El Segundo, known to locals as Mayberry by the Sea because of its small-town values and resemblance to the mythical rural town where the Andy Griffith Show was located.
El Segundo is well known in sports circles for producing big league baseball players including Hall of Famer George Brett, his brother Ken Brett who had a 12-year big league career, and Scott McGregor, who was a dominant pitcher back in the 1970s.
And of course, it is the home of the 2023 Little League World Series champions.
Far less well known is that El Segundo was the birth place of skiing pioneer McCoy, who almost single handedly built the Mammoth Mountain ski area up from a remote, storm-tossed wilderness into one of the largest ski areas in the world.
When he decided to retire and sell his life’s work in 2005, it was valued at a cool $365 million, significantly more than the $135,000 he borrowed in 1953 to build the area’s first ski lift.
His later years were a far cry from his early years when his family lived a spare, frugal lifestyle in El Segundo, with a nomadic father, Bill, who worked in the oil fields and a mother, Edna, who worked hard in the family garden, raising chickens, goats, rabbits and a single cow.
McCoy’s epic life story has been documented in not one, but two books by author Robin Morning that complement each other perfectly. Morning was one of the many world-class skiers – she was named to the 1968 US Olympic Team — whom McCoy nurtured and developed over his many decades at Mammoth. For her, writing the two books was an act of deep-rooted respect for a beloved coach and mentor.
“I sensed that Dave’s extraordinary place within California history and the world of skiing was in danger of being forgotten,” Morning says. ”Determined to keep that from happening, I felt compelled to capture his story.”
It was also a way of capturing, in words and pictures, the sheer exhilaration and pure joy of skiing, especially in the early years before corporations took over ski areas like Mammoth, which started out as mom-and-pop operations.
Her first book is a nearly 400-page colossal achievement called Tracks of Passion: Eastern Sierra skiing, Dave McCoy and Mammoth Mountain. The format is a step-by-step, photo-by-photo story – with text — of his journey from his first six years in El Segundo to his years living in tent camps in California’s Central Valley and finally to becoming a Mammoth visionary and, eventually, a beloved mogul presiding over his mountain kingdom.
Digging deep into the family archives, she found photos of his family in El Segundo that jogged his memory of those long-ago days in the early part of the 20th century.
“We lived right near the tracks where the Red Car went,” McCoy recalled. “One day the engineer saw me walking naked by the tracks. He stopped the train, picked me up, and carried me home.”
Her second book, called For the Love of It: The Mammoth legacy of Roma and Dave McCoy, shows that the love story was not only between a man and a mountain, but also between a man and the beautiful, strong and loving woman who was at his side every step of the way.
As McCoy told the author when she pointed out to him that Roma’s name would be first in the book’s title: “Good! People don’t know how important Roma was in everything I did.”
Mammoth grew from a downhill depot with a single rope tow for a few friends to a profitable, debt-free operation of 3,000 workers and 4,000 acres of ski trails and lifts, a haven for generations of skiers and boarders
Mammoth was one of the three most-visited ski resorts in 2018, drawing about 1.21 million skiers and boarders, most of whom drove there on weekends from Southern California.
McCoy first visited the eastern Sierra mountains when he was 13. He made his first pair of skis in shop class.
The book is especially strong in establishing through vintage photos and well-researched text that there was already a rugged mountain culture in the high Sierras. But it was McCoy who saw beyond the obvious obstacles – primarily weather, climate and topography – and visualized what a magnificent ski area Mammoth could become.
“People told me it snowed too much,” he recalled. “They said it was too stormy, too high and too far away.”
Of course, the whole process was all driven by his intense love of skiing. There are photos of him skiing shirtless, skiing in world class races, skiing with the youthful racers he coached, and even a picture of his motorcycle with his skis strapped to the side.
Once he realized just how much he loved skiing, it was an inevitable progression to the mountain top.
In 1936, McCoy took a job as a hydrographer for the LA Department of Water and Power, which involved skiing up to 50 miles a day. At age 22, he became the California State Champion in skiing.
In 1938, McCoy got a permit to set up a primitive rope tow on McGee Mountain using parts from a Model A Ford truck. He went to a bank, seeking an $85 loan to set up a permanent rope tow. Initially, the bank turned him down, but the bank’s secretary, Roma (his future wife), urged the bank to make the loan.
They stayed together the rest of their lives.
With her by his side while raising their six kids, the slow-but-steady job of turning an isolated, remote Sierra peak into a destination resort was underway.
It’s an inspiring story, well told, of a modern-day combination of the rags-to-riches theme of Horatio Alger and the work-hard-treat-people right All-American Boy Jack Armstrong.
He’s gone now, but thanks to these two books Dave McCoy will always be Mammoth Mountain and Mammoth Mountain will always be Dave McCoy.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER
