Year in Review: People
What follows are excerpts from some of the personal profiles we ran this year. We lead off with Dave McCoy because how can we lead off with anyone else?
DAVE MCCOY (AUG. 25): The venerable Dave McCoy turns 97 this Friday, August 24. I made a pilgrimage down to his home in Bishop to wish him a happy birthday earlier this week.
He’s still way smarter than I am.
In his usual, cryptic way, he deflected every question back with the deftness of a Roger Federer. And when I asked him to explain something, he laughed. “That’s something I never do,” said Dave. “I don’t want to be misinterpreted.” Personally, I sort of like the confusion. Dave always challenges you to come up with your own answers.
I asked him if and when during his life and career did he ever start feeling like a businessman.
“There was never a point where I thought I was a businessman … everybody in Los Angeles owned Mammoth.”
He did point out, however, that when he started, there were 52 other rope tow businesses in Inyo and Mono counties, so he’s got to know a few things about business – or at least about perseverance.
Before he made me put away my pen – talking on the record does have a way of stunting a conversation – he did make this general observation about the modern ski industry. “Everything I did was for Mammoth Mountain. I separated myself from the Town. That’s what’s wrong with the ski industry. The company wants everything on the town and the mountain.”
As for advice in managing people, Dave said give ‘em space and let them do their jobs. “Don’t tell ‘em all that stuff about the numbers. Just ask, ‘How can I help you [be better]?’”
Finally, as I was readying to leave, I threw out a casual question: Can you blow out 97 candles?
Dave immediately peppered me with questions. How big are they? How close together? Can I blow more than once?
If you’d like to say hello to Dave, he’ll be up at Mammoth Mountain on Sept. 8 for the dedication of a plaque in his honor by the local chapter of e clampus vitus.
Sheet: So what is this event about?
Dave: They’re making a plaque and saying something good about me. –Lunch
DR. ANDREW BOURNE (Jan. 28): In response to the death of his friend Andy Bourne, local writer David Page penned the following:“Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows,” wrote virtuoso novelist David Foster Wallace of those who find themselves compelled to take their own lives. “Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.” In other words, it’s not that they want to fall. It’s that the fear of being burned alive is suddenly a greater fear—if only slightly greater—than that of hitting the pavement below. “And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
Everything he had experienced in his life—all the lives saved, the peaks climbed and skied down, the places visited, the smell of sage, the wisdom gained and sound advice given, the depth of knowledge, the talent and grace, the conversation, the good food and cold beer, the beautiful boys, the unstinting love of a good wife—all of this was ultimately eclipsed in his mind by the flames lapping at the windowsill. Perhaps he took one last look back toward the town of Mammoth, where he’d left his dog at home, his wife at work, and his two boys at school. Perhaps he could see the flames running across the valley, leaping the creek, climbing the rise toward the old Suburban. Or perhaps he could not bring his eyes up to the west. But the flames were there, licking at his boots, roaring over the silence of the morning, over the cackle of magpies.
He crossed the road along the gate and made a track through the snow to the south. On the far side of a volcanic outcropping he set down his pack. He hung a dual IV drip from the branch of an ancient juniper and inserted a line into his own arm. He sat back against a boulder, looked out at the snow-caked scarp of his beloved Eastern Sierra—Morrison, McGee, Red Mountain, the Wheeler Crest. To his left, through a cleft in the rock, he could see the north and south summits of Glass Mountain, beyond which lay the cabin he had built once upon a time with his brother Jonathan. But the mountains could not save him.
MARC MARGULIES (Feb. 18): On the heels of its most successful Wounded Warriors event yet in January, Disabled Sports Eastern Sierra (DSES) teamed up with local resident Marc Margulies for a fundraising event coinciding with the premier of “Act of Valor,” a motion picture that hit theaters the following month.
Margulies has been a cameraman since 1978. He and his wife, Lou, own the local Mammoth Lakes Laundromat, the Laundry Annex and Aloha Sudz. Marc was part of the crew for the new film, which is cast with active duty Navy SEALs.
The film follows an elite team of Navy SEALs as they embark on a covert mission to recover a kidnapped CIA agent. Also threaded into the plot is the hunt for the “bad guys” who kill the U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines at the beginning of the film. The Ambassador getting offed is a face that many locals will recognize, as it is none other than Margulies himself, who was cast in the role during filming by co-director Scott Waugh.
Margulies’ scene was filmed in Cambodia, and in a small hint he related that his character’s death revolves around an ice cream truck. While acting, Margulies also had to run interference with the camera crew, which didn’t know how to load the film into the camera without him.
“I worked as an actor and a camera assistant on that day,” Margulies said.
The film, according to Margulies, honors service people.
“It’s so real, it brings you right in,” he said. Using active Navy SEALs makes the experience even more authentic. –Kirkner
DAN WRIGHT (June 23): When I was first introduced to Dan Wright, I couldn’t imagine anyone more foreign to me: he drove a little red sports car, always wore sunglasses, never had a hair out of place. He also sat on the Mammoth Lakes Town Council from 2000-2004 and as he reflects upon it now, believed in the Town’s vision and direction at the time. “As they say, I drank the Kool-Aid,” he said this week when I caught up with him at the Summit Condominiums.
Wright and wife Carrol moved with their three children to Mammoth from Arcadia 23 years ago. He took the job as the Summit’s property manager. “I loved it [both the job and the Town] from the very first,” he said. “It was the right fit for me.”
By nature and in practice, Dan describes himself as “not a doomsdayer. I’m maybe optimistic to a fault,” he says. “Collectively [in Mammoth] there are just a lot of good people in this town who care about this town.”
It is this sentiment, and Dan’s community activism, which was also somewhat foreign to me. But Dan and people like Dan are what make communities run.
“It’s been a great ride,” Dan said. The Wrights moved to Indio in 2012. –Lunch
RUSSELL KILE: (Dec. 8): I’d never heard of Maranatha Drilling & Pump Service until I conducted an interview with Maranatha’s owner and operator, Russell Kile. Kile is a one-man operation, a small businessman drilling for water in a region whose water wars linger on into the present day, and I was intrigued.
R: The business had the name changed, I think it was in 1982, from Kile’s Water Well Drilling to Maranatha Drilling. Maranatha means ‘Jesus is coming soon, be ready’ from the King James Bible. Maranatha is also one of the few words in the English language that has four As.
S: So how is your business doing out here? I know you mentioned having to cut back on your staff. Are you still finding consistent work?
R: I have more work than I can possibly do, because I have done work for so many years that I have customers that say ‘I ain’t gonna let nobody drill a water well on my property, cause I know all the horror stories. I will wait for you.’ So I got people that have waited over a year.
But in the last year, I have began to say to my customers, ‘Life stress has got to a level that’s too high for me, personally.’ I need to lay down and quit, until my life scale goes back up again. –Vane
