Growing up in Chestnut Hill, David B. Arnold Jr. would travel north in search of the region’s most challenging skiing at a time when getting to a mountain top required a lot more effort than buying a chairlift ticket.
“From a very early age Dad was skiing, before they had lifts,” said his son, David of Boston. “He had older friends who would climb Mount Washington and ski down.”
When Mr. Arnold helped launch the Third Army Ski School in Germany at the end of World War II, he used the same approach while training GIs to ski. Atop Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, “we skied on a glacier without benefit of a lift, using a single ski wax that was good for both climbing and running downhill,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “We climbed the glacier, skied five turns at most, and climbed again.”
In subsequent decades, skiing became more complex and expensive. As a trustee of the US Ski and Snowboard Foundation, Mr. Arnold came up with an idea for the Gold Pass, a program that raised tens of millions for the nonprofit arm of the US Ski Team, US Snowboarding, and US Freeskiing. “He created what is now our biggest, most consistent fund-raising program,” said Trisha Worthington, executive vice president and chief development officer of the foundation.
Mr. Arnold, who also helped create the nonprofit Beacon Hill Village and was a top executive at Shipley chemical company, died of aortic stenosis Sept. 25 in Emerson Hospital. He was 93 and lived in Concord.
Participants in the Gold Pass program, run in cooperation with the National Ski Areas Association, donate $10,000 to the US Ski and Snowboard Foundation. In return they get unlimited access to more than 250 resorts across the country for a season, along with other perks.
“That was David’s baby, that was his idea,” Worthington said. “He created it in the early ’80s and it’s still in place today, and it raises more than $4 million a year for all of our snowboarders, our skiers, and our freeskiers.”
The total raised by the program is “at least $50 million since the inception,” she added. Mr. Arnold also pushed the foundation to set up a planned giving program. “He was a big thinker,” Worthington said. “He was very innovative.”
While Mr. Arnold was a Beacon Hill resident, he and a few others came up with the idea for Beacon Hill Village. Neighborhood residents who don’t want to leave their homes pay an annual fee to get, among other things, information and discounts from service providers and access to everything from social activities to volunteers who can help with day-to-day tasks such as errands and picking up prescriptions.
The nonprofit began about 13 years ago and was featured in a 2006 New York Times article that included a photo of Mr. Arnold, then 83, exercising in his Beacon Hill home. The article spurred widespread interest and Beacon Hill Village became a model for about 190 organizations across the country and around the world.
“It was his passion and his generosity – not only with his financial resources, but with his connections in the community and his expertise – that helped propel this older group of Beacon Hill residents to create something that never had been done before,” said Laura Connors, executive director of Beacon Hill Village. “This was a man who lived life fully, but so much of who he was was what he gave to others.”
David Bullard Arnold Jr. was the oldest of three children born to David Sr., who was in the insurance business, and the former Virginia Baker, who was from Indiana.
In 1940, Mr. Arnold graduated from Noble and Greenough School in Dedham. At Harvard College, he graduated with the class of 1944, finishing his studies a year early in order to serve in the Army during World War II.
A first lieutenant, Mr. Arnold flew Piper Cubs in Europe with the Third Army as an artillery spotter. He had wanted to fly when he joined the Army and didn’t mind cutting corners to make that happen. “Dad had no problem admitting he cheated with the depth perception test to be a pilot,” his son said.
Flying lower than the bombers, Mr. Arnold checked to see which targets were hit and radioed to pilots above to change their bombing coordinates when necessary. Being closer to the ground meant he sometimes returned from his flights “with bullet holes in his wings,” said his son, a former longtime reporter at the Globe.
“The war was an adventure; he admitted that to the end,” his son said. Once fighting ceased, Mr. Arnold “would strap skis to the struts of his airplane and fly through the Alps, skiing at various places.”
Just before leaving for Europe, Mr. Arnold married Dorothy Quincy Warren, who is known as Doffie, in December 1943. They met at a social gathering while he was at Harvard. “Mom kept prolific diaries,” their son said, “and her diary just gushes about this guy she met at a dance.”
After the war, he graduated from Harvard Business School in 1947 and began working in New York State for Dewey & Almy, a chemical company. He returned to Boston to join American Research and Development, a venture capital firm. Mr. Arnold moved to Concord Management Co., a research and investment firm, and then became a senior vice president at Shipley Co., which supplied specialty chemical products for the electronics industry.
In the late 1950s, he was a founder of Boston Hill Ski Area in Andover. Though it was a pioneer in artificial snow-making in Massachusetts, “our glamorous ski hill idea turned out to have all the problems of a metropolitan transit system,” he joked in the 25th anniversary report of his Harvard class.
In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Arnold leaves two daughters, Dorrie of North Granby, Conn., and Wendy of Los Angeles; and three grandchildren.
A gathering to celebrate Mr. Arnold’s life will be held at 2 p.m. Oct. 31 in Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord.
At an age when most have long put away their skis, Mr. Arnold was still heading down slopes. “I have a photo of him racing at 80,” his son said.
Mr. Arnold didn’t shy from challenging trails in his later years and often skied at western resorts. “He would beat me down the hill and I’m a lot younger,” Worthington said. “He was just so passionate about our sport and so giving, and such an amazing person to be around.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.