Scott Mellecker keeps them laughing while racing at Wachusett Mountain

Scott Mellecker is one of Wachusett Mountain's most dedicated skiers. He's also the ski area's unofficial in-house comedian.

He's been entertaining regulars for decades with irreverent, and at times, off-color, humor that pokes fun at the aging amateur ski racers who spend weekday nights shivering in tight speed suits trying to shave seconds off their time on the Princeton ski area's Night League race course.

At 65, the Princeton resident is one of those senior racers and one of the longest tenured ones at that.

"One of my favorite crowds is the older people who I've been friends with for 30, 40, I don't want to say 50 years," Mellecker said. "It's so easy to pick on older athletes. They have such an ego that they believe they are just one good wax job away from winning, and they're never going to win. I love being the guy that points that out."

Over the years, he's been a fixture at the mountain, ad libbing dry, hilarious commentary after the races when raffled prizes are given out, and as master of ceremonies at any number of fundraisers and other events at the ski area and in the community.

"Being asked to be funny at a cancer fundraiser is very, very difficult," he said.

The heyday of Wachusett radio

During a great eight-year run that I consider the golden age of Wachusett humor, Mellecker served as the on-air sidekick to former Wachusett general manager David Crowley — who has a devilish sense of humor in his own right — on Crowley's weekly radio variety show on Worcester AM station WCRN.

Longtime close friends, Crowley and Mellecker started out doing the show just inside the front entrance to the Wachusett base lodge, but after a couple of years of their irreverent antics, they found themselves exiled to an obscure corner in the back of the lodge.

No topic was off limits, including the ski area itself. Crowley, who had to step back from his general manager job running the ski area with siblings Jeff Crowley and Carolyn Stimpson Crowley a few years ago due to a degenerative neurological disease, referred to himself sometimes as "the Rev. David Crowley" and the Sunday morning show as "the Church of Skiing."

Sacrilegious? You be the judge.

(More about the awareness campaign about Crowley's disease, PSP, and the "Ski With David" event at Wachusett on Feb. 12 in an upcoming column.)

I was a guest on the show a number of times — as was my late brother, Adam Sutner, calling in from his then perch as Vail marketing director — both in person and on the road. It was tough to answer questions when I was laughing so hard.

It was a decent early winter out West the year Adam called in. He rounded up his numbers, claiming Vail had 1,000 acres open for skiing. Mellecker, suffering like the rest of us during a dry spell for snow, responded: "So what? We have 1,000 open spots in our parking lot."

"That was a 50,000-watt station," Mellecker recalled. "I am very surprised that we got away with it, it was probably because it was only eight o'clock on Sunday morning and they wanted our $300 per show really bad. David gave me the ability to be free, and I could say things David couldn't."

Prepares like standup

Mellecker, who has never done actual standup though he has worked at making people laugh his whole life, nevertheless gets ready for his volunteer gigs as if he were a pro standup comic.

"I have edgy stuff, which I decide on the fly whether or not I'm going to do it, but there's no doubt that I go in prepared for the crowd," he said.

While his day job is as a senior manager for an audiovisual company, Mellecker spent some 18 years in the snow sports business in various capacities include manager of Killington's cross-country complex Mountain Meadows, Vail ski bum, ski instructor and cross-country and Alpine ski gear rep. Until a recent bout of injuries, Mellecker competed at a high level in triathlon.

Unlike many of the Wachusett regulars who hang out in the lodge's Coppertop Lounge trading ski stories, Mellecker came up skiing Nordic, a sport he still loves.

Telemarker and liftie

Also, for a long time, and still to some extent, Mellecker was known as "Telemark Scotty" for his passion for telemark, or free-heel Alpine skiing. The dean of Wachusett telemark skiing, our mutual friend Mark Rocheford of Worcester, gets credit for turning Mellecker on to telemark.

"We were on a ski lift looking down and I see this guy making pretty good telemark turns on cross-country skis," Rocheford said. "We were on shaped skis and were totally bored, and I told him about telemark, and he said, 'I'm going to try that.' For a while, he was the only other guy at Wachusett doing telemark."

Mellecker's latest project is working a shift a week a loading lifts at Wachusett.

I haven't come across him in that role yet, but what a venue for his one-liners that must be.

"I absolutely love it. I'm interacting with the public," Mellecker said.

Oh, the yucky weather

OK, I've got to vent here.

Broad swaths of Western ski country, in particular the resorts in Utah's Wasatch range, are enjoying what is likely an all-time record snow year, with endless weeks and days of deep, dry powder skiing.

As for New England, we are suffering through perhaps our least snowy, warmest and rainiest early winter in memory with some of the scratchiest skiing anyone can recall.

Utah skiers tout massive snowfall

To make it feel even worse, our Utah brethren, in particular, crow, loudly, every day on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram about how incredible it is in their alpine playground, yet they express no empathy for our situation. What especially galls me is just the gross disparity in the snow totals: barely 40 inches here and more than 400 there.

I recently expressed my frustration with all this to Tim Kelley, of Weymouth, the "surf-ski-weather" guy, consulting meteorologist, resident meteorologist for Jay Peak and former longtime TV weatherman.

Kelley was sympathetic, but only to a point. While he's a committed skier with a place in Stowe, Kelley doesn't see the weather as good or bad. It just is. And it will change.

"We'd be doing the same if we were the ones with the snow," he said, referring to the social media boasting.

Our horrible low natural snow year and freakishly warm temperatures can largely be traced to this winter being the third La Nina winter in a row when temperatures above the Pacific Ocean are warmer than usual, Kelley said.

Also, waves of cold air coming here from the West have shot northwest of New England instead of settling here, he noted.

Kelley also reminded me what great late season we had in the Northeast last year after a bad start, and how during the winter of 2014-15, we had near record snowfall out East while ski areas were closing in California because it hadn't rained or snowed in nearly a year.

"People think a pattern is never going to end, like the housing bubble," he said. "But it doesn't last. Everything goes the other way. Eventually the wave is going to move."

So I asked Kelley that if we stay patient if we'll be rewarded with some good cold snowy weather ahead.

"Absolutely," he said sardonically. "Patient as in next year, not next month. The weather guidance is not looking good for the next month."

Wachusett ranger situation

We've reached nearly the half-way mark of the season and still the busy slopes at Wachusett are devoid of the yellow-jacketed rangers who were the eyes and ears of the ski patrol for many years.

Rangers, who numbered about 50, were considered volunteers who were compensated with up to two season passes — valued at about $800 each — for their work.

But Wachusett was forced to suspend the program before the season started after a former ranger, a lawyer, complained to the state attorney general's office that the ranger system violated state labor laws by acting as a private business using unpaid workers and calling them volunteers.

The AG's office declined to confirm or deny that it is investigating the matter.

However, under state law, most people who work are considered employees and must be paid at minimum wage or higher for all the time that they work. And according to the state Department of Labor Standards website, volunteers provide services for nonprofit or charitable organizations.

While the state's Fair Labor Division is responsible for enforcing labor laws, the DLS is charged with interpreting who may be properly classified and work as an unpaid volunteer.

To determine whether volunteers must be paid minimum wage under state law, the DLS considers various factors, including: the nature of the entity receiving the services; benefits received by the workers, whether the activity is less than full time; whether regular employees are displaced by volunteers; whether the volunteers offer the service freely without pressure or coercion; and whether the services are typically associated with volunteer work.

Meanwhile, Wachusett has said it would take steps to maintain safety on the slopes in the absence of the rangers.

"We are working with ski patrol to maintain our consistent level of safety on the mountain as we wait for this legal issue to be resolved," Wachusett spokesman Chris Stimpson said earlier this week.

—Contact Shaun Sutner by e-mail at s_sutner@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Scott Mellecker keeps them laughing while racing at Wachusett Mountain