Dan Moran

Danny Moran was born in 1919 at St. Peter's Mission, near Cascade, and grew up in Great Falls, one of six children of Joe and Mabel Moran. Four of them skied, Danny, Nancy, Merrill and Bob, and they were among the first skiers to find Kings Hill. By February 1939 Danny was on the club's lift committee. In January 1940 the club announced that he would teach anyone who wanted to learn, free, every Sunday at Kings Hill, and he was named to the Great Falls team for the Sun Valley tryouts at Anaconda. He made the squad again in January 1941.

Then came four years in the Army, with a field artillery unit, in Australia and New Guinea. He married Kay O'Connor in 1944. In December 1945 the club elected him a director, and in February 1946 he and Cliff Rumford were named to head the committee that planned the lodge. In the summer of 1947 his father, Joe, a Great Falls builder, held the contract, and his brother Bob worked on it with him every day. The lodge opened that December.

On the snow, he won the club's combined title in March 1947, in a heavy snowstorm, and again in 1949. In August 1948 he headed the crew that started the new lift up Porphyry. In November 1950 he was one of six patrolmen who went out with the air base after two lost airmen, and in March 1951 he was second on the Funnel the first day it was raced. In 1956 he led one of the seven teams that sold shares in the hill to Great Falls. He was a watchmaker and jeweler in Great Falls for close to sixty years, and he died in 2005.