Dick Dailey

Memories of Dick Dailey

Skiing is a huge piece of my childhood memories with my Dad. We spent a lot of Winter weekends driving back and forth to Showdown, when it was still called Kings Hill.

Dad was born Leslie Richard Dailey to Richard and Louise Dailey on January 2, 1938, in Great Falls. He grew up in town and on a farm his father worked on near Portage. Dad’s family wasn’t wealthy and his parents didn’t ski. He just loved sports and somehow he ended up on skis. I've never known for sure who taught him but I’ve heard it was Jack Throckmorton.

He was racing at Kings Hill by fourteen and won the junior downhill in 1952. In 1955 he was second to Mike Bell in the high school race. There was a photo of the two of them in the Tribune. Two years later Dad won it.

Many people who skied had money, and Dad reminded me he had done it on his own, working hard and scraping by for his gear. He said being an excellent skier leveled the field. No one cared how much money you had, if you were a great skier. I learned how he came to that belief, when my Mom (Caroleen Willits) told me about their first Kings Hill ski date. Dad wore jeans, a work coat and skied on old scratched, wooden skis with leather straps that wrapped around his ankles. Some people teased him a bit, but Mom said when a group watched him come down the mountain, carving turns with his beautiful form and skills, some unfamiliar onlookers asked who the guy was, skiing like that on those antiquated skis. Mom said she could barely snowplow then, but she remembers, Dad always skied like a pro.

That makes me laugh, because when I was a teenager he got mad when he saw me skiing in jeans at Showdown. Dad said it looked shabby, and his daughter wasn't going to ski looking like that.

Dad started on the Great Falls Ski Patrol in the winter of 1963-64. In December 1964 he passed his senior patrol test in Missoula with Gary Ellington, Tom Cannon and Terry Greene, his best friend.

When I turned thirty, Dad wrote me a sweet letter about taking me up to Kings Hill when I was a newborn. He said he took me up to the hill to give Mom a break. He didn't have anything like a baby backpack, so he tucked me into the front of his coat and skied with me.

He taught ski school before he ever ran it, back when my parents were still married. By 1969 he and Wayne Ellington were co-directors of the Kings Hill Ski School, working out of a little A-frame the two of them built in pieces in Wayne's garage. He traveled with the instructors' association, running clinics at ski areas around the Northwest, and sometimes he brought us along. At one big hill, maybe Sun Valley, there wasn't money for lift tickets for Mom and us kids, so we sidestepped up the mountain to ski.

Dad wore Judi Ellington's knitted hats. Every one of Judi's hats had its own little touch, and Dad had several.

He tried to teach my little sister Maureen and me himself, but we cried and refused, so he signed us up with other instructors. Dad was a fierce skier, and I didn't have a competitive bone in my body. He’d ask how many runs we'd done, so sometimes we hid under the lodge, where gaps in drifts let us watch for him so he wouldn’t see us not skiing. To get out of lessons, I'd ride the rope tow on the old bunny hill, fall off, and let my skis slide down into the creek at the bottom. That meant I could be done skiing for the day, until Dad fished them out of the creek. He was not very relaxing to ski with, as his daughter, but I'd give anything to ski with him now.

I was about ten the day they filmed an ad campaign about turning Kings Hill into Showdown. They had mules and men dressed up as old-time cowboys and miners, and Dad was part of the project. racehorses. Maureen and I are in some of the pictures from that day. Dad wore a red leather hat that day. I kept it for years after he died, and then I had to let it go in a move.

Dad was a Great Falls firefighter for thirty-one years and retired as a captain in 1995. Afterward he went to New Zealand for the international firefighters' ski races. He said it was one of the most memorable trips of his life.

When teaching got to be too much on his beat up knees, Dad heard about Bill Macfadden's plan to bring Eagle Mount's adaptive skiing to Showdown, and he was all in. He went to every training. In Eagle Mount's first season at Showdown, 1991-92, he was on their volunteer list with George Willett, Ted Cogswell and Mike Bell. Dad always said everyone deserves to feel the freedom of skiing down a snow-covered mountain that he loved. My daughter Tessa and I got to do the Eagle Mount Volunteer training with him.

Tessa learned to ski from Dad at Showdown. They’d head up to ski, just the two of them and he was so proud he got to teach her. He was so different with her, or maybe she was just more gutsy than I was as a kid. She's a great skier and tries to get up to Showdown from Missoula at least once a year

Dad died in the spring of 2002. His memorials went to Eagle Mount, and the next winter Eagle Mount named its race at Showdown the Dick Dailey Memorial Cup. There was a party in Great Falls the night before and an auction up at the hill, and Maureen and I helped with all of it. After a few years the program needed to focus their time and energy on the Margarita Meltdown fundraiser for Eagle Mount and our family completely supported the decision.

Years later I stopped for gas in Neihart with Tessa, spun on old postcard rack, and there was Dad, skiing Kings Hill, on a postcard I'd never seen. Tessa has it framed. I knew it was Dad by the hat design, one Judi made for him.

When I talk about Dad it can sound like I'm whining about a childhood of skiing but these stories make me laugh and feel a bit sorry for Dad, who’d have been thrilled with a daughter who skied as well as he did. I loved him and was incredibly proud of his years promoting the freedom skiing gives outdoors on a winter day!

Leslie Dailey DeDominic, his daughter