Dr. Earl Hall

The main run down the front of this mountain is the Hall-O, and it's called that because of him. The club named it at its banquet on May 11, 1957, kept it a secret from him until that night, and gave him a plaque for getting the new lift built.

Earl Hall was a railroad conductor's son from Detroit. He finished Western High School with honors at sixteen, got through the University of Michigan in three years and through its medical school by twenty-three. On New Year's Eve 1933, while he was still a student, he and Marianne Kruke ran off and got married. Neither family liked it. She taught at a country school to keep them going, and their first boy, Ron, rode in a basket on the back window ledge of her red Chevy coupe. He spent four more years at the university hospital in Ann Arbor, learning obstetrics and then teaching it. In 1941 the Halls settled in Great Falls, where he had joined the Great Falls Clinic.

Then came the war. He tried to join up, and they wouldn't take him. He was the only obstetrician left in north-central Montana, and in one year of the war he delivered more than six hundred babies. On December 8, 1943, he delivered the Deaconess Hospital's 12,000th, and the head of the hospital said "this one is on the house."

He'd heard about a ski hill south of town that was sitting idle because its men were away at the war. So he drove up with the manager of the Clinic to have a look. They walked in from the highway to the tow shack, and in the basement they found a Buick engine that started with a hand crank. They figured it out, and after that the two of them came up and cranked it for anybody who wanted to ski. Some days it took two hours to catch. One day in 1942 there were four of them on the whole hill, two grown-ups and two boys, Ron and a boy named Roger.

When the men came home he took on just about every job the club had. In January 1946 he joined the new ski patrol and was made vice-president. He went on the board in 1947, ran the finance committee in 1951, signed up to teach lessons in 1953-54, and was elected president in April 1955. At Old Fogey Day in March 1953, with more than five hundred people on the hill, he was the master of ceremonies and told the crowd the whole story "from its beginning in 1937."

In the summer of 1956 the skiers formed a company, Ski Lift, Inc., to take the mountain over from the club, and he was its president. He announced an $18,000 Poma lift from France, and in January 1957 more than four hundred skiers came up to ride it. Within five years the Poma couldn't keep up. At a meeting at the O'Haire Manor in April 1962 he gave the room three choices. Keep going the way they were, raise about $60,000 in a month for a T-Bar to the top of Porphyry, or sell to some people from Colorado. They kept it local. On December 15, 1963, he and Governor Tim Babcock took the first ride up the new T-Bar together. In November 1970 he and the manager, Jim Thompson, were the first two up the new double chair, him bare-headed with his pipe in his teeth. In October 1971 he told the Tribune that no member of Ski Lift, Inc. had ever made any money on his investment. He was still running the company's board meetings in May 1972, and when the shareholders sold the mountain to Ted Cogswell and George Willett in April 1973, he was one of the larger stockholders.

He took the pictures, too. A lot of the photographs from those years came out of his camera. In November 1960 the Tribune ran a full page of Kings Hill pictures and said he'd made a special trip up to take most of them. On January 14, 1962, his photograph of the Hall-O ran on the front page, captioned as the run named for him.

In town he was president of the Cascade County Medical Society and of the Downtown Quarterbacks, a school trustee from 1948 and the board's chairman from 1960, and a member of the State Board of Education from 1957 to 1963. He left the school board in 1962, when Ron was hired to teach in the district.

His family remembers a shirt and tie nearly every day, the pipe, no ski gloves, and a big voice you could hear from one end of the hospital to the other. In the photographs he never has a hat on. A local artist, Bev Tietjen, painted him skiing just like that, bare-handed, with the pipe. The grandchildren who knew him while he was still practicing were a little afraid of him. The ones who came along later got hugs and rides in the golf cart, and one of them says he got softer as he got older.

He delivered his own future daughter-in-law in 1944 and her daughter twenty years later. He retired in 1982 and died on June 15, 1991, at seventy-eight. In 2022 Showdown put his name back on the run, the Hall-O, for him and his sons Ron and Dick.