McCoy founded California's Mammoth Mountain ski resort, one of the country's top ski resorts, it covers 3,500 acres and employs 2,600 people during ski season.
When I wasn't in school, I'd take jobs on pig farms or picking fruit. I made my first pair of skis in high school shop class. After graduation, I hitchhiked back to Independence and got a job at Jim's Place, a restaurant where my mom was working. I waited tables, washed dishes, and cleaned up after it closed. That's where I met Roma -- she and her friends were cheerleaders who came in one day.
In 1936, when Dave McCoy arrived in the village of Bishop, Calif., about 50 miles southeast of Mammoth, he was already the image of the macho mountain man. Roma Carriere, then a 17-year-old bank clerk, recalls the way the stranger looked when he first came to town: "I would see him going down Main Street in the dead of winter with his shirt open and his skis tied along the side of his motorcycle.
He always wore a red bandanna over his hair. Sometimes he wore a black leather jacket. Oh, he was good-looking. I said to my sister, Frances, 'One day I'm going to get a date with that guy.'
She meant everything to me then. Still does. We've been married 67 years. Six children. Eighteen grandchildren. Twenty great-grandchildren.
Skiing was getting really popular, and some friends and I built portable rope tows. I wasn't thinking about business. I did it because it was fun.
I wanted to set up a rope tow on McGee Mountain, which was right on the highway and had good snowfall. I needed to buy parts, so I went to a bank and asked for a loan of $85, using my motorcycle as collateral. The bank manager turned me down, because he didn't think I looked responsible. But Roma was his secretary, and she said, "If you don't give him the loan, I'm quitting." She ended up quitting anyway after we got married.
I got a job as a hydrographer with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, measuring snow in the winter so they could predict how much water would be available in the spring and summer. Some days I would ski 50 miles for work.
With an eye for snow conditions, which he had developed on the hydrographer job, McCoy judged Mammoth to be a better ski site than McGee.
On weekends, we would set up rope tows and let people use them for free using a Model A Ford truck to power a portable rope tow, which they rigged on prime spots on McGee Mountain.
They would drive a Model A Ford truck to a likely slope, jack up the rear wheels and hook a length of half-inch rope around the rim of a wheel. Then they would climb the hill and attach the rope and a block and tackle to a tree. The setup would move the rope through a long, thin loop—and would pull the skiers up the hill after each run.
Among the friends who worked with McCoy on his early tow was Cortland T. Hill, an avid outdoorsman and skier and grandson of the Great Northern Railway baron, James J. Hill.
In the mid-'40s, McCoy installed a permanent tow on McGee.
I was still working for the water department; Roma and I barely had enough money for food. So one day I asked Roma to put out a cigarette box and get skiers to donate whatever they could. Until then, it had been a free ride. We made $15 that first day -- a lot of money for the time, about 50 cents a person.
The Forest Service asked for bids to develop Mammoth into a ski area. I took a piece of paper and drew three lines, which were for chairlifts. That was the business plan. They gave me a permit that let me put lifts wherever I wanted in a 40- or 50-mile area of the Eastern Sierras.
Severe weather and inaccessibility were problems that could have doomed the project. The road to Los Angeles was nothing but a dirt track that disappeared in the Sierra storms.
In Dec 1947 I was able to buy four Army surplus snow vehicles -- called Weasels -- at a San Diego auction, to get skiers in and out, and banked on the belief that many L.A. residents loved skiing as much as he did--enough to take a little time and trouble getting to the snow. "We'd load people into them, and others would hang on to ropes coming off the back, and we'd haul them over the snow to the tows. Everyone would be singing and laughing and having a good time."
McCoy also turned to coaching and produced some of the best U.S. racers of the 1950s and 1960s. In '49 he coached his first national champion, U.S. junior slalom titlist Charlotte Zumstein, and one of his star students, Jean Saubert, won two medals in the '64 Olympics. Saubert later said, "Dave was by far the best coach I ever had." In all, he sent 17 racers from Mammoth Mountain to Olympic or world-class competition—including his daughter, Penny, now 35, and his son, Pancho, now 39. McCoy himself might still be coaching, but in the late '60s and early '70s there was so much cheap politics in the U.S. Ski Team that he washed his hands of the whole operation.
in 1985, Sports Illustrated did an article, and at that time reported:
Mammoth Mountain has 23 chair lifts, four surface lifts, two gondolas, 54 miles of trails, huge lodges at two different base locations, a 170-room inn, a fleet of 26 grooming vehicles and countless dump trucks, snowmobiles, cars and snow-plows as well as some 1,400 winter employees.
Mammoth Mountain's location is key to it's success, from Los Angeles, it's 350 miles away, a six-or seven-hour drive on U.S. Route 395.
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-02-23/news/vw-11269_1_mammoth-mountain/2
https://www.inc.com/magazine/20081201/how-i-did-it-dave-mccoy-mammoth-mountain.html
https://www.si.com/vault/1985/02/25/627699/a-man-and-his-mountain
http://www.mammothlakes.us/travel/ski_history.shtml
http://www.fwsa.org/Awards/bios/WSH2006-Morning.pdf
