BY MATT BIEKER
Ski shop owner
of factors. Mount Rose is my favorite go-to ski area because the elevation offers usually better-quality snow and it’s a convenient place. … I get my 10 or 15 runs in and I’m pretty much done for the day. And you know, I enjoy skiing the whole mountain, the front side, the backside, the trees—the Chutes are obviously real popular with me when they’re open.
So how did the store come to be? My dad was the head coach at Middlebury College in Vermont—head ski coach, baseball coach, football coach, golf coach, tennis coach. … He was one of the most respected ski ambassadors in the industry back in the ’60s and ’50s. And, so, in 1956, he was asked to be the men’s alpine head coach of the Olympic team in Cortina, Italy. … In 1960, he was on the Olympic committee in Squaw Valley, USA. He had the good fortune to be able to come out West and see what it was like out here. And he fell in love with it because he saw 190 inches of snow and blue sky for seven days in a row. And he said, “You can’t get any better than this.” So, his plan was to eventually come out West, and in 1966, he left his job in Middlebury and moved our whole family out to Alpine Meadows. He became the managing vice president of Alpine Meadows Ski Corp. … In 1969, we moved down to Reno, and he opened up a
PHOTO/MATT BIEKER
Steve Sheehan is the co-owner of Bobo’s Ski & Patio, which celebrated its 50th anniversary of outfitting the valley’s skiers and snowboarders this past November. The son of original owner and founder Robert “Bobo” Sheehan, he spoke to the RN&R about the shop’s different incarnations, how often he manages to hit the slopes and the iconic Bobo’s radio ads. little store called Reno Ski Shop on Wells Avenue on the west side of the road. … In 1971, we moved to a new location up on 1200 South Wells … and we remained there for 27 years, and that’s when we took over the store from my parents in 1984, and basically built it from there.
After all these years, do you guys have any real competition in town as far as ski supply goes? Well, this is one of America’s last holdouts of specialty retail ski shops. There aren’t a lot of specialty retail ski shops left in the country—maybe 150. There’s a lot of really small shops that maybe do rental and so on and so forth, a lot of those around the country.
So, where’s your favorite ski spot and how often do you make it up during the season? I personally will get anywhere from 20 to 50 days a year depending on a lot
Everyone who knows Bobo’s knows the radio ad— You want to know about the “whoop-de-doo?”
I do. Where’d it come from? In 1990, I purchased Mogul Mouse from a corporation out of Eugene, Oregon, that had 10 stores. They were going out of business. The only last two stores were this store and one in Bend, Oregon, that I knew of that were part of the original Mogul Mouse chain—10 or 11 stores. I bought this store in 1990 when they were going to go out of business, and I just called the owner in Oregon and I said, “What’s it going to take for me to take over that business?” And he said, “Not much.” … We had a deal in two days. And then I went up to Oregon. I drove a van back and someone else drove a truck with a trailer, and it was full of stuff. It had Mogul Mouse on the side of the trailer, and we drove it here and it was full of whatever was leftover in inventory, which was primarily plastic bags and a few jock straps. And then where the “whoopde-doo” came from, it was originally part of the Mogul Mouse chain. □
BY BRUCE VAN DYKE
Love of learning One of the great cultural positives of our digital modern world is YouTube, which continues to grow into this Vast Amazing Brainboggling Thing. Lately, I’ve been using YT to listen to various lectures from learned men who had something to say decades ago, philosophical cosmologists like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Terence McKenna. Guys who weren’t much on breaking down blitz packages or filling out brackets, but whose lofty thoughts still provide illuminating balance in a scene now being constantly goofed by bizarro gaslighters. In one of his remarkable lectures, McKenna (who ran one jiffy psychedelicatessen in the ’90s) quotes various guru types who regularly remind us that “everything is on track, everything is as it should be.” And, of course, that’s right. That’s spot on. How could it be anything else? And when you say
something like that, which drips with Calming Big Picture Perspective, you imply that, eventually, things will be OK. Right? To assert that Everything is rolling along as it should is to also acknowledge there’s a trajectory toward some kind of reward, a trajectory toward some kind of success. That some day, things will—eventually—be better, in terms of an overall more tolerable human condition. The key word here is “eventually.” How long will it be until we get to That Place, until we grab that Carrot on the Carousel called Eventually? 10 years? 50? 100? 157? 1,000? 10,000? Tomorrow? Never? (Tomorrow, I’m sorry to report, rates as a huge underdog.) • Somewhere between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, my good ole iPhone 6 took a dump, developing an instant case of Coallumpitis.
Just like that, it went to the Dark Place. And there it still resides. Once I got over the initial shock of not having a functioning phone (which took a little longer than I'd like to admit), I settled into a surprisingly comfy “OK, this is fine” mode. As in, “It's cool. I'll be just fine without the damn phone.” (I told myself about 14 times a minute.) After a while, I was able to revisit my head circa 1993, that much simpler time when I had no clue that haranguing people via text would become a large part of my future existence. To be untextable due to a legitimate technical breakdown of phone was sorta … refreshing! That throwback attitude lasted all of a day. Maybe. The next morning, I wasted no time in hustling down to the store and getting a slick new 8 for Xmas. Strung out on my communicator! I know you can relate! Technomonkeys unite! Ω
12.12.19
|
RN&R
|
39
