C. O. McCafferty

Clarence Otis McCafferty, known as Mac, was born in Belt in 1913. He grew up on the family ranch north of town on Belt Creek, one of eleven children of William and Adeline McCafferty, who had homesteaded in Ming Coulee in 1903. He worked for J. C. Penney, joined the Navy in February 1942 and spent twenty months in the South Pacific as a storekeeper. On Christmas Eve 1942, in San Francisco, he married Marjorie Christopherson, Christie, who was born in East Helena and raised in Salt Lake City. They came to Great Falls in 1946 and Mac went into insurance. In 1955 he opened his own agency in the First National Bank Building and ran it for more than twenty years.

That first spring home he chaired the ski club's first race since the war and timed it himself, and Christie skied the women's downhill. In March 1948 the club made him president. That summer he was up on the hill with the Forest Service working on new runs, and in the fall he wrote to the members and friends of the club for help raising the $3,800 it would take to finish the new run and the lodge. His name is on the club's loan certificates. On opening day that December, with 150 skiers on the hill, you'd have found him in the lodge tying his shoelace and talking with Jack Throckmorton and the forest supervisor. That same month he was at the lodge piano, singing along while Vivian Blumfield played. He kept timing races into the 1950s and bought a share of Ski Tow Incorporated in 1956. Mac died in Great Falls in May 1977. Christie lived until 2001.