As trailblazing female athletes, Marce Herz and Dodie Post Gann were shining examples of excellence on and off the slopes

Of all the talented and influential women skiers from the Reno-Tahoe area, Dodie Post Gann and Marcelle “Marce” Barkley Herz share space on the short list of all-time greats.

Close friends despite an 11-year age difference, the pair stood out as the region’s most skilled and best known female skiers of their era. Dodie became Nevada’s first Olympian in 1948, and Marce, a remarkable athlete and record-setting runner, earned state titles in multiple skiing events through the 1940s.

Dodie Post Gann was Nevada’s first Olympian, photo courtesy SNOW Sports Museum

My mother Frances was one of Marce’s 10 siblings, and my aunt was among my favorite relatives and one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known. In the late 1940s, her exceptional athleticism allowed her to win many ski races in the Tahoe area, and as an aspiring young ski racer from Tahoe, I took great pride and inspiration from being the nephew of a champion.

We talked about ski racing whenever we were together, a formative dynamic in my life perhaps best summed up in one of Marce’s quotes: “Never be afraid of dying. Only be afraid of not living.”

Outside of their skiing ability, both Marce and Dodie were also forward-thinking women who in many ways were years ahead of their time.

Dodie was one of the first female ski instructors in the country and later, along with her famous husband, became an accomplished pilot and conservationist. After (and during) her competitive career, Marce became both a ski coach and schoolteacher, as well as a respected ski journalist who covered the 1960 Winter Olympics.

I feel fortunate to have known them both, and for the opportunity to honor their legacies.

The Dodie Post Gann Influence

Doris Barbara Post was born in Kansas in 1922 and attended schools in Reno from kindergarten on. She was an accomplished musician (her father was a music professor at the University of Nevada, Reno) and was highly involved in cultural and social activities throughout her life.

Dodie began training with the Reno Ski Club in 1938 and by 1940 was the Far West Ski Association’s top junior ski racer. She spent the winters of 1941, 1942 and 1947 training in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Marce was among her coaches during this time, which is how their friendship began.)

After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1947, Dodie was named captain of the 1948 U.S. Women’s Olympic Team, giving her the distinction as the first Nevada Olympian in history. On a training run shortly before the Olympics, however, she broke her ankle and had to sit out as her teammate Gretchen Fraser won the gold medal in slalom.

Dodie Post with her future husband, Ernest Gann, after sailing from New York to London in 1958. Longtime friends in adventure, the two married in 1966 and bought an 800-acre cattle ranch on Washington’s San Juan Island, photo from Keystone Pictures USA / ZUMAPRESS

In 1950, Dodie was appointed captain of the U.S. women’s team at the FIS World Championships in Aspen, and in 1952 she competed in the Olympics in Oslo, Norway. She was described by ex-Olympic skier Elizabeth Woolsey as “the nation’s most graceful female skier.”

Dodie taught skiing at several resorts, including Mt. Rose, Palisades Tahoe (then under its original name), Sun Valley, Jackson Hole and Portillo, Chile. At Palisades Tahoe and Portillo, she worked for Émile Allais, the French world champion and noted World War II resistance fighter, who was the ski school director at both resorts and a huge influence on Dodie’s life.

In 1956, Dodie retired from ski instruction and became the private secretary to acclaimed author/aviator/sailor Ernest Gann, whose books include Fate is the Hunter, The High and the Mighty and Island in the Sky. They met through skiing and in 1966 married and bought an 800-acre cattle ranch on San Juan Island, Washington, where they lived the rest of their lives.

Gann taught her how to fly in his Cessna 310 (nicknamed the “noon balloon” for its usually late takeoff times), and she soon became a licensed pilot with her own Cessna 172. She took up air racing, and in 1979 she and co-pilot Phyllis Baer entered The Air Race Classic, a four-day, 2,400-mile cross-county airplane race consisting of at least two female pilots from 17 to 90 years old. In 1984, Dodie and her teammate won the race.

The Ganns donated 38 acres of eagle habitat to the San Juan Preservation Trust in 1980, and in 1990 they gave the Trust 780 acres. Dodie explained, “We’re only the stewards of the land. We want to pass it on unscathed and save the San Juan Valley for generations to come.”

Dodie was among the founders of the San Juan Animal Protection Society of Friday Harbor and is honored at the annual San Juan Dodie Gann Memorial Dog Walk. The first woman to be inducted into the Nevada Athletics Hall of Fame (part of the inaugural class in 1973), Dodie was inducted into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2001. She died on Christmas Eve in 2012 at age 90.

An Aunt Who Was Easy to Admire

Marcelle Herz, or Marce, as she was known, was one of the best athletes in the world. She set a world record in the 440-yard run as a 15-year-old in May 1927, then three months later set a U.S. record in the 800-meter run. In 1928, at age 16, she traveled to New Jersey to try out for the Olympic track and field team but did not qualify.

Born in Madras, Oregon, in 1911 to Reverend James Hickman Barkley (Barkley Creek in Oregon’s Lincoln County is named after him), she was one of 11 children, and the third of his second wife, Viola Fenn.

Marce graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno, in December 1933 with a Bachelor of Science degree and a teacher’s diploma. She taught in several rural towns in Nevada and California, including Stillwater, Hawthorne, Yerington, St. Claire (now part of Fallon) and a one-room school in South Lake Tahoe.

Marcelle “Marce” Herz was a standout skier despite not picking up the sport until she was in college, courtesy photo

Toward the end of World War II she started the Fennway School, a private school in Reno named for her mother. She believed that all children, regardless of race, economic status, gender, sexual orientation or religion, should have the opportunity to learn about sports and outdoor recreation as well as classroom education integral to childhood development.

She expanded the boundaries of all aspects of her own life and of those who encountered her, and she created athletic possibilities for young women in Reno decades before Title IX made that the law in America.

Marce didn’t learn to ski until college, but she quickly became accomplished in her lifelong passions of both backcountry and lift-served skiing. In 1938 she and her future husband helped raise the $300 necessary to finance her good friend and Olympic ski team hopeful Marti Arrouge’s trip to the Pan American Ski Championship in Chile.

To reduce lift prices for children, Marce and Hal Codding—a member of the 1940 Olympic Ski Team (the 1940 Olympics were not held because of Adolph Hitler) and an accomplished ski instructor—co-founded the Sky Tavern Junior Ski Program in 1948. The program began with only six students, including Marce’s son Howard “Howdy” Herz, all riding to the resort in her old “Woody” station wagon suitable for less developed roads of the time.

While it started small, the program, which became the Reno Junior Ski Program, quickly evolved into one of the largest of its kind in the country. 

Soon she had convinced Jim Wood, who ran a local bus company, to provide affordable transportation from Reno. Codding and Jerry Wetzel, who owned Codding and Wetzel Ski Center, and Chet and Link Piazzo of The Sportsman provided new and used ski gear at affordable prices. With such community support, the program grew rapidly through the 1950s and ’60s, and by the mid-’70s more than 30 buses transported kids from Reno to Sky Tavern. To date, more than 100,000 kids have learned to ski and snowboard at Sky Tavern. 

Marce was also a sportswriter and ski editor for the Reno Evening Gazette, publishing her first “Slalom Column,” as it was called, on December 1, 1945. The column ran until 1951 and then continued without the masthead. 

“One thing she used to do to supplement what I’d call her skiing money is she would write for the local newspaper,” Howdy recalls. “I remember her having a rather memorable argument with Alex Cushing because lift tickets had gone up to $5.50, which she thought was outrageous at the time.”

Marce argued with Cushing for a while and finally convinced him that she could write stories about skiing that would benefit the resort. That is how she would wrangle tickets—“based on how the news stories would come out,” Howdy says. 

Reflecting on his mother’s competitive nature, her son recounts a story about her participating in a race at what is now Palisades Tahoe when he was young. As he rode up the chairlift with his mom and a friend who was there to look after him, the race announcer called Marce’s name just as they were nearing the start. 

As Howdy tells it: “All of her friends said, ‘She’s on the chairlift!’ The starter says, ‘She’s not here. She’s a scratch.’ And she threw up the bar on the chair, threw down her poles and jumped out of the chair! And the guy was just mortified. The only choice he had was to let her run, because first of all, he wasn’t going to take on a lady that would jump out of a chairlift, and he sure as heck wasn’t gonna take on all the ladies that were telling him she was gonna run. So she ran the race!”

In 1963, just before leaving for Portillo with the goal of setting a new speed skiing world record, I visited Marce at her Reno home. We had a fine talk, and she encouraged me and expressed confidence in my ability to succeed. That was the last time I saw Marce. 

She knew it but did not tell me that she would soon die of cancer. She lived long enough to learn I had set the speed record, and Dodie later told me that Marce was pleased that I had not been afraid of dying, only afraid of not living.

After his Tahoe upbringing, Dick Dorworth went on to a successful skiing and writing career, setting a world speed skiing record of 106 miles per hour, publishing seven books and writing for dozens of publications. Now a resident of Bozeman, Montana, he was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2011. Find more of his work at dickdorworth.com.