HARTLAND — The people in Bill McCollom’s world knew him as something of an all-around extrovert. McCollom realized this as well, and he could tease himself about it.
Some writers don’t take themselves too seriously. For 15 years, McCollom frequently displayed a feel for self-deprecation in columns for Ski Racing magazine, a bunch of which he compiled for a 2014 book, The View From the Finish Line.
Skiing permeated McCollom’s life, from learning at the Suicide Six Ski Area to coaching at Woodstock Union High School, from competing on the masters race circuit to taking downhill adventures in the Alps or running a Vermont ski academy. Humility occasionally came along for the ride, such as when he considered the attributes required to find success and satisfaction on the golf course.
“Just maybe I will one day complete a round of golf employing a similar degree of discipline and control,” McCollom wrote in a 2003 column titled “Quills,” comparing his attempts at the sport to how his dog, Buster, learned to stop confronting porcupines. “And yes, on that day, the Easter bunny and tooth fairy will be my playing partners.”
“He was probably the happiest person I ever met; that’s how I fell in love with him,” his wife, Karen McCollom, said last week. “He enjoyed doing everything. He got angry about things, but basically he was the friendliest, most outgoing, positive-thinking person ever.”
William Alexander McCollom, New Jersey-born but a Vermont resident from age 7 onward, died on June 29 of cardiac arrest. He was 73 years old.
An All-American ski racer at Middlebury College in the late 1960s, McCollom made his first athletic love a pivot point of his life. Beyond that, he tried most anything athletic: golf, tennis, motocross, mountain biking, trail riding, kayaking and many others, sometimes in a competitive milieu but mostly for the camaraderie of it. He did it out of the joy of being with people, not necessarily out of a need to beat them to the bottom of a hill.
“He was notoriously, maybe maniacally, active,” son Eric McCollom said. “He couldn’t sit still. He wanted to be outside. If it was about moving and the outside, he was going to try it.”
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I’d like to think that I’m a New Age sensitive guy, but my wife frequently reminds me that I’m just a sap. I can get blubbery on almost any occasion — most notably weddings, graduations (even if I don’t know anyone there), hearing children sing, sporting events as well as particularly moving TV reruns of ER.
— Ski Racing column: “The Last Schmaltz,” April 2005
McCollom, his parents and sisters, Anne and Marion, moved to South Woodstock from New Jersey in the early ‘50s. Not much later, McCollom discovered Suicide Six, using the South Pomfret ski area’s rope tow to get up the mountain and barreling back down.
“The kids all say they ran wild,” Karen McCollom said. “They were not supervised, and I think he loved that and learned to do things on his own and be independent. I think he was also very athletic, so he could do anything. It was fun. He had a huge sense of fun.”
That carried over to his competitive skiing career. In addition to his Middlebury accomplishments, McCollom competed in the first FIS World Cup race held in the United States, at New Hampshire’s Cannon Mountain in March 1967, and continued on to masters racing as he got older.
“He was my play buddy,” admitted Peter Carter, of Norwich, of a friendship dating back to their mutual college racing days. “You could always count on Bill if you wanted to do something. We skied all winter together. He would come to the cape with us for a couple of weeks. The only problem was he’d wear us out sometimes. He would be up at 6 in the morning and have the coffee cooking and the bacon on, and it was full tilt from there.”
Except when his body disagreed.
McCollom’s columns are dotted with the tribulations of trying to stay competitively young while growing physically older. Two tales humorously dealt with recovery from separate torn knee ligaments, both from ski racing. (Buster needed to repair one, too, the result of a swimming injury.)
It may have been the only way to slow McCollom down.
“He was always talking it down, but he was always a competition jockey,” said Eric McCollom, who followed his father’s ski tracks to the Middlebury College alpine program. “The results are secondary, but he liked to sort of build toward getting better and faster and certainly compete against other people. But it was much more about at least the community of sort of like-minded folks coming from all over.”
McCollom poured a similar level of energy and devotion into his personal life.
He and Karen lived for more than four decades on a side-hill Barnard farm that they built and gradually expanded so she could board and train horses. Carter helped with the construction; much of the early work was done without the benefit of power tools.
“Slowly, over time, we cleared a little bit of this and that, built a barn ourselves,” Karen McCollom said. “We always added on to it, and it was fixed up by actual contractors when it started to tip over over the years. But over those 46 years, we built a beautiful place for horses.”
The McColloms sold the Barnard property and moved Karen’s business to a new Hartland site, Moonfield Farm, a couple of years ago. Both places enabled the McColloms to merge his love of outdoor places with her passion for horses.
“He tolerated them, but he was not passionate about riding,” Karen McCollom confessed. “But he did it, and you could put him on any horse I had.”
“He invested a huge amount of his time and effort in building stone walls and keeping grass mowed and running the tractor,” Eric McCollom added. “The sort of quieter, more domestic moments were a big part of his life.”
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The bus rides to the races generally serve as my window into how well these teens are conforming to modern teen culture. I’d even practiced yelling, “Turn that dreadful music down,” in anticipation of a barrage of rap, punk and funk that would instantly turn my hair white. But what am I hearing from the back of the bus? The Beatles? Oldies? Some crooner named Michael Bublé? Give me a break!
— Ski Racing column: “These Teens Are So, Like, NOT Typical,” February 2008
Before taking to ski journalism full-time, McCollom’s professional career centered on education in teaching, coaching and administrative roles. He was a ski coach at Harvard University when he first met his future wife. He helped found the Killington Mountain School and later returned to be its head of school. He also ran the Vermont Alpine Racing Association for a time.
The Ski Racing magazine gig provided McCollom a way to engage in all of his loves and document them for the reading public. That included a return to coaching in 2007 with the Woodstock High ski team when it appeared the Wasps would have no one to guide them.
In the magazine, McCollom called his decision to apply for the job “a moment of nostalgia-induced, temporary insanity.” It turned into a successful union.
“I had this little office, and he was such a tall guy,” said Wendy Wannop, the Woodstock athletic director who hired McCollom. “To walk through that door, his presence and smile and positive attitude, he really just loved his team.”
The boys won two state championships right away in McCollom’s first two seasons. The boys and girls swept matching crowns in 2015, his final winter in charge.
“A good way to go out!” current Woodstock coach Fred Dieffenbach wrote in an email.
However, it’s too simplistic to frame everything Bill McCollom was about solely through the lens of skiing, his son said.
For one thing, Eric McCollom will remember his father’s love of music, something that also stretched to performance. He enjoyed being in Woodstock-area musicals, a BarnArts production of The Producers serving as his last foray about two years ago.
“He liked all kinds of music: blues, bluegrass, rock-n-roll,” Eric said. “I remember riding in cars and debating Stevie Ray Vaughan vs. Jimi Hendrix as guitarists. He loved musicals. He had to listen to Amahl and the Night Visitors every year. I’m not sure where that came from, but he was always moved by that.”
Eric could see his father trying to figure out ways to stay busy in more sedate ways in the days before he died. He was digging out old songbooks, reconnecting with tunes, “trying to learn how to cope with a less-active lifestyle, although none of us could imagine that.”
“He was a big, goofy playmate when I was a little kid,” Eric said. “There were points, when I was a teenager, when it was hard to escape his shadow. Then, as an adult, things shifted when my two children arrived, and he moved into a grandfather role. I think I sort of came to appreciate some of the values that he had instilled in me without me thinking about it.”
In the preface from The View From the Finish Line, Bill McCollom mused that he couldn’t imagine how his boss, his readers or he “could have ever anticipated the adventures we’ve had.”
“But isn’t that the essence of life?”
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.