Johnny and Renee Kowalski

I never skied in high school or college. I learned the winter I was teaching school in Libby, up at Turner Mountain. The next year I was teaching in Helena, and in March of 1970 I went up to Showdown for a day of spring skiing and froze my butt off. I was still pretty new at it and didn't know the first thing about how to dress, and I didn't take enough clothes.

Renee and I met at Helena High. We were both teachers there. She only taught three years, and then she had her own dance studio in Helena.

By 1974 I'd quit teaching. An old buddy of mine from college, Phil Kiser, got hold of me and asked if I wanted to run the food service at Showdown. I told him I knew nothing about the food business. He said we'd have a good time. I didn't have anything else going on, so we went up, met George Willett and did a deal with him. It was George's second year owning the place.

The food up there was pretty basic, and we didn't change a whole lot right away. It was gradual. We added tacos and pizza and whatnot, and we always tried to put out a good product and be consistent. Phil's dad had started the Taco Treats in Great Falls, back in the sixties or maybe the late fifties, so that was the connection. I don't know that we had the tacos the first year, but we had them by the second.

Tillie Giles came with the deal. She'd been cooking up there since 1962, and she was already a legend by the time we showed up. That first year I shared a house with Steve "Cobweb" Theisen, and one of the first things Steve asked us was whether we were keeping Tillie. Phil pulled his leg a little. Of course we kept her.

Wayne Ellington was there that first year, and Joe Pinski. Chris Quinn was a fry cook for me for a little while.

Tillie and her husband Clyde had come out from Minnesota to work in the woods. Clyde was a logger, a sawyer in the summers, and he worked at the ski area too. Oh God, they were quite a pair. Clyde was maybe five foot on a tall day, and Tillie was smaller than that. She didn't weigh a hundred pounds, and she may have been the toughest person I've ever met. She made the chili and the pizza.

In the early years a lot of mornings it was just Tillie and me up there first thing. And if there was powder, George and I were going skiing. That was a given. I don't know how many times I came in at 10:30 or 11 and she was the only one working, cooking and running the till, with a line backed up to the bar. She never missed a day of work. She was as loyal to me as anybody could hope for, and just a wonderful woman.

Phil and I were partners at the start. After three or four years he got into a lot of other things, and I just took it over. I'm guessing that's about when it became Johnny K's Cook Shack.

In 1977 Renee and I went to Switzerland with George and Joe Pinski to buy the triple chair.

I taught some skiing too. In April 1983 I took the downhill leg of the Belt Creek Headwaters Relay for the Big Horn Wilderness team, and that made five wins in a row for them. That same month a TV crew from CFAC in Lethbridge came down and filmed a few of us instructors for a show called Ski West. The next spring the Cook Shack put in its own team, and we won the relay, with me on the downhill again.

In April 1990 the Johnny K Cook Shack team won the Corporate Cup, a few seconds ahead of George's Showdown team. That next winter Pepsi of Great Falls gave us a new awning, and I'd be out under it cooking hamburgers.

George brought two cats up to the lodge and named them Archie and Roy, after two old lift operators, Roy Steele and Archie Gunderson. Those two were a couple of characters. Archie was married to Tillie's daughter. The cats were outside cats. They came and went, and they'd come out at night and scrounge. We brought them both home to Helena while we were still at Showdown. Maybe the health inspector told us to get them out of there, I can't remember. They were real old by then. One of them, Roy I think, took off early on.

Our old dog used to sleep at the back door of the kitchen. He'd be out all night and then come sleep right there. One time the health inspector showed up. He always came in that back door, and he opened it, walked in and stumbled right over the dog. He couldn't write me up fast enough.

We helped with the marketing too. I'm in a few of the old brochures, and I worked the ski shows. One year I went to North Dakota for a Montana ski promotion. There were other groups from Montana, but I was the only one from Showdown. I'd set up a table and hand out brochures. A lot of tire kickers. I left one show, Bismarck I think, around midnight and drove to Dickinson or someplace, listening to a book on tape. It was the only thing keeping me awake. I went to put the last tape in to finish the book, and it wouldn't play. I about went crazy out there in the middle of nowhere.

Tillie worked beside me until she retired in 1998, at 81. Renee and I ran the place until 2002 or 2003, and she was there with me the whole time, back and forth from her studio. We helped out wherever we could. It was a group thing up there.