Look ma, no hands!

When I (verbally) present my Mountain Equipment Co-op member number at the outdoor megastore, cashiers unfailingly question its authenticity. I joined long before membership climbed into the millions.

Just before MEC (the acronym, not the silly “meck”) turned 10, I was hired on to run its ski department at the rickety old building at 1820 Fir Street (near Granville Island). What a great time we had there, hanging from the rafters in big wall climbers’ bat tents and generally seeing ourselves as gear testers rather than retail clerks. Soon after, we moved the store to a concrete warehouse at 428 W. 8th (one block east of Cambie). That’s when things got weird.

Suffice to say that, in the view of long-time employees and supporters, the Co-op began to diverge from its original founding principles — to provide quality gear at affordable prices for climbing, hiking, ski mountaineering and other human-powered outdoor pursuits. I’ve mentioned the events surrounding my departure elsewhere, so I won’t belabour the details here, but the decision to bring in outside management (after advertising the position to existing employees) set in motion a minor insurrection and firing of the ringleaders (guilty as charged), including the radical Barb Turner, right above. This led to the 1983 Separation Pay Traverse of the Spearhead Range.

I first met Steve Grant, top left, in 1978 during my time at Nippon Cycle/The Great Escape, a nice little outdoor store that died chasing running fashions. He’d just broken a bicycle frame during a traverse of the then-unpaved Duffy Lake Road (which I repeated 5-years-later). Steve epitomized the kind of adventurer MEC was established by and for. His ski-mountaineering traverses still stand as pioneering, especially in light of the fact that they were accomplished in the days before cell phones and watch-sized satellite navigation devices. Steve stayed on at the Co-op long after my departure, getting himself elected to the governing board, where he made valiant and futile attempts to remind management of its founding ideals. As recently as 2004 (by my research) he resisted imposition of rules that potentially interfered with free elections.

Around the time I left to seek my fortunes in Toronto’s catalogue houses (1987), the inside joke, at least among insurgents, was to speculate on when we might expect to see a Ford Bronco MEC Edition. And we now know how that worked out for Eddie Bauer.*

Late last year MEC posted losses of $11M, citing competition from “traditional big box players and emerging e-commerce players,” slow sales, inventory sclerosis and supply chain problems. The new CEO, former CFO at Best Buy, aims to right the ship, while at least one current board member has publicly voiced concern over the loss of (original) purpose, “aggressive expansion, ” and bloated executive salaries. It’s 1984 all over again.

The photo above was a last minute commission to illustrate the “Tucker Jones” headlamp (L) and the revolutionary “Hands Free” light, which ran on a single lithium C-cell battery (I still had mine until the last move). Around the same time, I negotiated a buyout of the MEC negative files, settling for a whopping $100.00, a dollar over my bus ticket to Toronto.

I’m indebted to the Co-op for the chance to develop my skills as a commercial photographer. It was all a bit of a lark, as you can see from the photo above. Before management decided, wisely perhaps, to consolidate everything at one big studio, a small coterie of climber/photographers produced all the biannual catalogue images, while mountaineer graphic designers took everything, via cut and paste, to the printing stage. Among printing staff, another elite Vancouver climber prepared the colour separations and black-and-white halftones. Models were drawn not from Richard’s or Charles Stuart Agencies, but also from among MEC staff and friends. As a result, all of my roommates, Co-op employees or not, enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame. 🙂

*Eddie Bauer also developed from a commitment to quality outdoor gear. In the 1950s, the company sponsored expeditions and tested gear on mountains from America to the Himalayas. In 1984, following acquisition by General Mills (Eddie Bauer Edition Wheaties?), they partnered with Ford Motor Company to lend brand cachet to SUVs. Spiegel, Inc. took the company on a massive expansion ride through the 90s, filing for Chapter 11 protection in 2009. It’s hard to decipher what the brand now represents. In 2018, the company collaborated with PetRageous Designs to showcase the Eddie Bauer PET collection in the Global Pet Expo. Can MEC catnip be far behind?