The Mouse That Roared!! – Part 2 “Dormancy and Resurgence of SODE`”

Editorial note: This is the second installment and will make little sense if read out of order. Please see earlier post directly below.

Well, it didn’t take long for Dave, Earl and I to realize that we may have ruffled either too many or the wrong feathers with the Titanic cartoon. While Dave and Earl were single, I had a family at home. Regardless we all decided that softening the blow and the frequency of the cartoons might be a wise move, if we wanted to keep our jobs. We continued to put out some cartoons but we much more cautious about this effort. Over the next 18 months or so it got to the point where we put nothing out at all.

About 1990 things had not improved much for the company and Earl was caught up in a layoff and a year or so later Dave moved on to other pastures. One could never know if the pasture he moved to was greener or not. Dave was an interesting guy. I remember one afternoon I saw him in our office and noticed that he had missed a button on his shirt which forced his collar to be so off kilter that it stuck up in a very obvious and peculiar way. I simply said, “hey, Dave, you collar is sticking up because you’ve misbuttoned it.” He looked at me and replied, “Oh yeah, I noticed that this morning at break.” and he simply went on with his day. He didn’t care at all. I miss Dave…sorry for that brief tangential walk down memory lane.

I found myself as the lone founding member of SODE`. No one, except for Dave and Earl even knew what the acronym stood for or who was involved. I never spoke of it to anyone.

In the fall of 1991 there was a large layoff at the ski area. Once again moral was down as employees found their friends and co-workers were gone and wondered if they would have a job next week. The company bus and van-system up from Bishop had all but disappeared and we were forced into carpools. I found myself riding with Kevin, Bill & Ryan each and every day.

With nearly an hour drive each way it didn’t take long before the four of us began to complain, once again, about fiscal decisions that seemed harmful to the health of the company. Someone brought up the topic of the cartoons from years past and how they missed SODE`. After a few more drives of this topic I decided I could trust these 3 and tell them of my involvement. After swearing them to secrecy we talked of the originally meaning and purpose of SODE`. They wanted in!!

After contact Dave & Earl and receiving permission to admit them we made it official. Kevin, Bill, Ryan and I were now the only four active members of the newly awakened Secret Order of Disgruntled Employees.

We never discussed any of our activities outside of the car we traveled in. This assured no else knew or overheard. We decided that we did not want to go the path of cartoons and that like a sword, the written word, if carefully wielded could be more effective. A newspaper, written and copied offsite for security reasons, and distributed in the same fashion would be most impactful. The only change is that we would not put the name SODE` on the work. We didn’t want to associate the new campaign with the former campaign at all.

We talked of content, length and format of the newspaper. But what most of the discussion involved was the title. Since Mammoth Mountain’s mascot was a woolly mammoth it made sense that we choose a mouse, a nemesis to the elephant, as our mascot. We hoped that our printed voice would be loud and clear so we named our newspaper “The Mouse That Roared”, or TMTR as we referred to it.

We worked on the first issue of our rag for weeks. There were first efforts and group revisions all done within the drive to and from work. In our first anonymous printing we included some humorous things but we also took some pretty direct editorial shots at departments and at department managers. We were careful not mention anyone by name but our efforts were so clear that it was easy to know who we were targeting. The first edition of TMTR grew from the initial 10 copies until we noticed them on nearly every desk. It was a huge response as far as distribution went.

About a week after the first issue was released there was a normally scheduled department manager’s meeting in the ivory tower. I heard this story from my manager who was in attendance. Normal matters of business were discussed and then towards the end, Gary McCoy, son of Dave McCoy (brother to Kandi), and President of Mammoth Mountain stood. He slow held up a copy of TMTR and said something like, “I don’t know where this came from, (pause) I don’t know who is behind this, (longer pause) but this is some of the best damn writing I’ve seen in a long time. I want more of it. It’s efforts like this that keep us thinking and keeps us on our toes.”

This proclamation didn’t take long to reach the members of SODE` and in our subsequent drives we talked of what our next step would be.

Within a matter of a few weeks we gave Gary McCoy exactly what he asked for. The question is, “Did he get more than he bargained for?”.

To Be Continued. “The Next Issues and Period”