Newbury, n.h.
McCloy, 67, retired this summer after holding various marketing, management and development positions at a multitude of Vermont and New Hampshire venues since 1971, including the last 11 years as Mount Sunapee Resort’s director of sales and marketing.
“I never once felt like I was coming to work, even though I had to be here at 6 in the morning for the ski reports,” McCloy said in an interview at Mount Sunapee’s Spruce Lodge this week. “That’s because I knew that when I had a break later in the day, I would get to be out on those same slopes, skiing. I can’t think of anything better to do outdoors in the wintertime.”
McCloy experienced that very sentiment during his first ski trip, a 90-minute voyage from his home in Oreland, Pa., a small town outside Philadelphia. His physical education teacher organized a trip to Big Boulder ski area in the Pocono mountain range.
“I’d never skied before, but I loved it right away,” recalled McCloy, who compared Big Boulder ski areas the side of Pat’s Peak in Henniker, N.H. “Myself and about 4-5 of my friends went back as much as possible all through high school.”
Three of those same friends joined him in on a Christmas break trip to Stowe, Vt., during their freshman year of college in 1966. They lodged in a Waterbury Center hostel where the owner, Martha Guthridge, hired them to return three times per year to help with chores.
“It probably held 40-50 people and for three weeks every winter, we’d help around the lodge from 7-10 a.m. every morning and then spend the rest of the day skiing,” McCloy said. “Some of the same people in the hostel you would see later at the ski areas or partying in Stowe at night. It was such a fun atmosphere, probably the best experience I ever had.”
McCloy instructed at a community ski area while studying marketing at the University of Delaware, then migrated to bustling Killington (Vt.) after graduating in 1970. The next year he became the resort’s ski vacation coordinator, in charge of Killington’s busy weeklong instructional programs.
“There were 1,000 people there every week, Monday through Friday, in this learn-to-ski program,” McCloy said. “Killington’s director of marketing, Foster Chandler, branded something called the accelerated ski method, which was a variation of what some other resorts were already doing. Families would come in Sunday night, watch a video Monday morning about what they were going to be doing, and be skiing down our bigger trails by the end of the week. It was an amazingly successful program.”
After Killington’s owners purchased Mount Snow in Dover, Vt., McCloy was transferred there in 1978 to become vice president and marketing manager. Taking advantage of an 18-hole golf course on site, he helped develop the resort’s golf school, bringing in professionals to teach patrons on two- or five-day packages during the warm months. It was the first program of its kind in New England, McCloy said.
“By then there was a big push to try to get people to come out and stay at the resorts in the summer. We’d done a lot with tennis for that purpose at Killington,” McCloy said. “I didn’t know anything about golf, but we made the golf school work by getting the right people around us.”
Mount Snow ended up as the longest stint anywhere for McCloy, who remained at the southern Vermont venue until 1994. Through various parent-company acquisitions and mergers, he migrated to Waterville Valley (N.H.) Resort, where he was vice president, general manager and director of marketing, and later to central Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort, where he was vice president and managing director from 1999-2001.
Between those stints he was the manager of summer development for the American Skiing Company, which counted Killington and Sugarbush among at least six Northern New England ski resorts. McCloy left the company in 2001 and became president at Customers First, providing services to retail and manufacturing clients of ski areas.
“It was a lot of database marketing and collections services; we developed an email marketing system,” McCloy recalled. “I applied for the director of marketing job at Sunapee (in 2005) because I missed being out there with people, meeting the customers, so to speak. It was something that had always drawn me to skiing and snowboarding.”
One of the biggest changes McCloy has adjusted to over the years involves communications and advertising.
“Pre-Internet, it was relatively simple. You developed ads for the big ski magazines, newspapers, radio and TV,” he said. “Then comes Facebook and just when you’re getting the hang of that, here comes Snapchat and all of the other (social media platforms). It’s not my specialty.”
Equally fascinating has been the improvements to equipment and attire McCloy has seen over the last 4 ½ decades. Lines are shorter, patrons are warmer and ski conditions are, generally, improved.
“High-speed chair lifts were a huge improvement. They used to be so slow we’d have to hand out blankets for them on cold days,” he said. “Snow-making equipment is also vastly improved, even just in the last 10-15 years. It’s so much more efficient; we’re making twice as much snow and using less electricity than we were before.”
As for clothing, wool is being replaced by synthetic fabric such as Gore-Tex.
“When you got wet, you used to get really cold,” McCloy said. “With the clothing out there now, you can ski comfortably in the rain, which is good because rain generally softens the snow a little bit and makes it great to ski on.”
Speaking of getting wet, McCloy isn’t yet sure if he’ll continue to participate in Mount Sunapee’s annual Slush Cup, a benefit for the Make-A-Wish Foundation that sends skiers and snowboarders skimming across a 90-foot, man-made pond.
“It’s just a crazy springtime event, and everyone loves it. We keep it to 200 people and it fills up fast,” said McCloy, who admitted he may never stop using “we” while describing events at Mount Sunapee. “I was always what you would call a floor runner, who comes screaming into the pond and crashes to get people in the mood. I’ll probably miss that as much as anything. It was a lot of fun but, really, every day was fun in this industry.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.