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Colorado Summit Magazine / Winter 2010 / Edna and Me

Edna and Me

A special walk down memory lane as we pay tribute to the legendary Edna Dercum. See why Summit County will never let her be forgotten.

The Bond Between a Legendary Skier and a Local Author

(Editor’s note: Sadly, Edna Dercum passed away shortly after this article was written. She will be missed in Summit County and far beyond.)

“You’ve searched all day for the ruins of the Lenawee Mill? Edna Dercum’s voice queried. “I’m standing here looking at them from my kitchen window.” She continued, “Why don’t you join Max and me and some friends for dinner at seven? You can see it for yourself.”

Though we had never met, I telephoned the Dercums in frustration. My husband, Larry, and I had spent a sweaty Saturday in 1979 crashing through underbrush and scrambling up rocky slopes to hunt down the historic 1906-built Lenawee ore mill.

Finding and photographing the timbered bones of the old structure was one of the final research tasks to complete the first edition of my book, SUMMIT, A Gold Rush History of Summit County, Colorado.

The massive mill, constructed by mining promoter Colonel James Haves Myers, would have left large ruins. How could something this big be missing?

An hour later, we stood on the Lenawee site. Max Dercum showed us the weathered mill frame and also his wine cellar, a niche just inside the Lenawee mine tunnel where the temperature remained a perfect 55 degrees year round.

Later in Max and Edna’s living room, Max pulled out copies of the 1909 Montezuma Prospector, a newspaper published by the colorful Colonel Myers.

Edna captured my imagination with stories of the Colonel’s daughter-in-law, 1902 Frisco schoolteacher Lula Osburn Myers. Keystone’s long, meandering Schoolmarm ski run is named for this lanky, lovable and thoroughly non-conformist woman of local history.

We went home not only well-fed and well-informed but also lavished with love and kindness, the kind of fondness and support countless others have received from Max and Edna Dercum.

Over the next nearly 30 years, a cherished friendship blossomed between Edna and me. She called me with article ideas (“Why not write about old-time skiing at Chalk Mountain?”). She regaled me with stories over lunches at Dillon’s historic Arapahoe Café.

She crammed my mailbox with old news clips and xeroxed photographs of early day ranchers and rodeos.

I stood in awe of this woman, whom I considered a legend. I tiptoed around imposing or intruding upon her but she initiated almost every contact. I experienced not only her genuine warmth and enthusiasm for recording and preserving local history but also her uncommon goodness.

The year we met, Edna turned 65. Her name, Edna, originates from the Hebrew female name, Ednah, which means “ to revitalize, re-invigorate, rejuvenate.” She proved her name that year.

I clipped the news stories when she won gold medals in senior circuit ski races in Italy and Switzerland.

She ranked as the oldest woman ski competitor in the world. The same season, she and Max each received the honor of induction into the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame.

The giant slalom champion of the National Seniors since 1955 and the possessor many gold medals, Edna inspired my awe.

But our relationship was simple, woman to woman. When my fifth-grade son, Matt, and Edna’s grandson, Lance, played in a kids’ basketball league, we chatted in the elementary school bleachers.

This world-class woman athlete, born into a Norwegian family in Clarissa, Minnesota in 1914, boggled me by confiding that as a girl she was forbidden to run.

 

Little ladies did not run, according to Edna’s mother and aunt. “I ached to race across those open fields,” Edna lamented, “and they wouldn’t let me.”

We discovered we both grew up in Minnesota and that Edna attended my neighborhood school, Roosevelt High, in Minneapolis.

She left Roosevelt to finish school at her sister’s home in Pennsylvania after her father, Julius Strand, died. When she went on to Penn State, Edna became the first woman in 1936 to join the university ski club, a group spearheaded by a young forestry professor named Max Dercum.

Edna, irrepressible and daring herself, was attracted by Max’s love of adventure. In 1940 as his wife, Edna chaired the first Penn State ski championships, and in 1941 she zipped up the Pennsylvania state downhill and slalom championships.

She has gone lickety-split every since. Edna supplied the wax that helped glide Max’s vision of launching Arapahoe Basin and Keystone ski areas across the finish line and into reality.

Presiding over the West’s famed early-day mountain lodge, Ski Tip, she hosted and taught skiing to celebrities and statesmen — America’s elite — who came to try the avant-garde sport of skiing.

As a woman, Edna filled her life with friends. She mothered fledglings, newly released from the family nest, who came as young ski enthusiasts to wash dishes, cook and clean at Ski Tip. (Some of them later emerged as ski industry notables.)

As an author herself, Edna took me under her wing, despite the constraint of competition. One winter afternoon, I called Edna to ask a question about my favorite historical character, Lula Myers. “I can’t talk,” she whispered. “I’m with my editor.

We’re working on my book, It’s Easy, Edna, It’s Downhill All the Way.

She’s warned me that I can’t share my stories. I’m supposed to save them for my own book.” The phone call quickly ended.

Two hours later, my phone rang. “She’s gone,” Edna said. “What do you want to know?”

One of the stories she related reveals her love of the competitive spirit, for Edna is a dauntless competitor. Her racing comrade, Jackie Gorsuch Pyles Evanger, wanted to compete in a Gunnison ski race in 1948.

One drawback: she was nursing a three-month-old baby. The two women drove southwest from Summit County in a convertible with the infant tucked in back. At the race the next day, the first female racer crashed, flew into the timer shack and broke both legs.

The race delay stretched on. Instead of caving in to fear of another disaster happening to her, Jackie approached the officials.

“Get the race going,” she pleaded. “I have a baby down at the bottom to feed.”

Edna admired Jackie’s nerve and happily points out that the baby grew up to be race champion Scott Pyles.

Friends are also full of stories. Alan Rice, whose family ranch encompassed all of today’s Summit Cove, remembers his father’s first visit to welcome new neighbors, Max and Edna.

The young couple had just taken up residence at the old Black Ranch, which became Ski Tip.

“Bright-eyed, they exuded enthusiasm over the dirt-floored, mice-ridden building,” Alan recalled at Max’s 90th birthday party. “We lived in a dump but their place was worse.” As his dad waved a congenial goodbye to the Dercums, he got in the truck and said to Alan, “They won’t last two weeks here.”They’ve lasted nearly seven decades.

Edna went on to serve a stint as Summit County Clerk and Recorder. On her drive from Ski Tip to Breckenridge, she passed through Old Dillon, its site now submerged by the waters of Dillon Reservoir.

One day she stopped at the Blue River Inn for a sandwich. Julius, one of the old Swedes, came in and in his heavy accent bellowed, “I’ll take some of that squirrel yus.”

The bartender allowed, “We don’t have no squirrel juice. How ‘bout some Old Crow?” “Yesus, no!” exclaimed Julius. “I don’t vant to fly. I yust vant to yump a little.”

Soon Ski Tip demanded all Edna’s time. She began her day in the office at Ski Tip, left to teach skiing at Arapahoe Basin, and returned to more work in the office. She cooked, supervised staff and oversaw details of Max’s projects.

She drove to Denver twice weekly for Ski Tip groceries since Summit County lacked a grocery store until 1978. “She never sat down for dinner,” friend Kikken Miller recalled.

“She was the mover and the shaker.” Edna agreed: “I ran my legs off eight days a week.”www.keystone.snow.com

You can’t separate Edna and Max. Max taught Edna to ski. He shone as the creative thinker and Edna as enthusiastic support staff.

The pair celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in 2007. They skied into their 90s. T

heir children, Rolf and Sunni, ski raced (Rolf raced in both the U.S. and Europe), became ski industry professionals, and are now artists.

The grandchildren and families include actors, authors, concertmasters and more.

Edna often pondered a challenge posed to her as a newlywed at Penn State. A professor questioned, “Do you and Max have a goal in life?”
“Do we have a goal in life?” she repeated to herself.

Looking back at the origin of Arapahoe Basin and the launch of Ski Tip Lodge both in 1946, and the debut of Keystone Mountain in 1970, plus a long string of ski race championships for both Max and Edna, the question now seems irrelevant.

  Reminiscing in her 80s, Edna quoted Aspen ski great Fred Iselin. “Back then, my facial skin was tight and my pants were baggy. Now my pants are tight and my skin is baggy.”

I cherish these comments. I glance at her notes and cards, stacked haphazardly on my desk. I pick up a photograph of us together, smiling, at a party. If I had to write a short version of this story about Edna, I’d say, She gave. She cared. She loved.

One chamber of Edna’s generous heart is about people. The other chamber is about skiing. She once told me, “If Saint Peter gives me wings, I’ll trade them in for skis.”

www.arapahoebasin.com, www.keystone.snow.com, www.alpenrosepress.com

In nine books, Mary Ellen Gilliland has chronicled not only Summit County’s history but much of the Colorado Rockies as well. Her well-known hiking guides, The New Summit Hiker and The Vail Hiker, are well known to many Coloradans.