Larry Ginnaty

I was born in 1937 and grew up in Great Falls, and I'd never been on a pair of skis until Ron Hall asked me. We were in school together, and one day he offered to take me skiing. That was in the early fifties. Ron's the one who took me up Kings Hill the first time, and I kept going back for the next seventy years.

In those days the doctors drove us. Ron's dad, Dr. Earl Hall, usually had the car, and Dr. Bob Addison and Dr. Lester Howard took us up too. They were good to us, a bunch of high school kids who needed a ride.

On the way up we'd stop at the store below the hill and put our ski boots on in there. Of course that meant we bought something, to pay for it. One guy kept his shoes on, because you can't drive in ski boots, and he took the car the last stretch up. We parked in the top lot, the first one there was, and skied from the top down. At the end of the day you walked back up to the car.

Getting up the hill was work. The rope tow had a half clamp you flipped under the rope and hung onto, and you had to let go of it before the wheel or you went over with it. That rope ran down in the snow, so your skis were pulling it up out of the snow the whole way. You had to be pretty strong.

Mike Bell had a convertible, an old '49 Ford, and we'd go up the pass in the middle of winter with the car full of skiers. One time somebody asked Mike to haul a couch home in the back seat, and a cigarette blew back into it, and there were flames shooting out the back of the car. Those old cars had the gas tank up front, so if you got low you turned around and went up the steep parts backwards. If the road was bad, everybody took a turn shoveling. That was life.

I graduated from Great Falls High in 1955, and I never really quit skiing. Gary Olds was a year behind me in school. Somebody had an old pair of wooden skis, and Gary and I fixed them up. We cut and fitted metal edges on them, P-Texed the bottoms and painted them green. Fast skis. If you look up on the wall in the Showdown bar, there's a pair of old wooden skis hanging up there. Those are mine.

I've still got my season passes from 2000 on, lined up on a shelf in the garage, number 1025 for most of them. On one of them I'm wearing a green wig. When Eagle Mount ran the Dick Dailey Memorial Cup races at Showdown, I helped out, and the poster from 2005 is still up at the house.

Bill Roberts got the Great Falls Ski Bums going back in the sixties, seven guys in two cars. I wasn't one of those. I joined in the nineties, about the time I retired at sixty. You know why we wore that red hat? To keep the language down. To wear a hat like that, you had to keep your language down, because everybody could see the red hat. We're all nice guys. There were three kinds of hat, a tall one, a short one with flaps, and the beret. The one in the case up at the lodge, Bill Roberts put that together, and I think he just got an extra hat for it.

The old Bums had a game on the bus. Everybody put a mark on one of the tires, and when the bus pulled into the ski area everybody put in a buck, and whoever's mark ended up at the bottom of the wheel took the pot. That could be fifteen bucks, and in those days fifteen bucks was a lot of money. I've got a board covered in pins from the places we skied, Sun Valley, Alta, Squaw Valley, Banff, Big Sky, and a Kings Hill pin right up there with them.

Carter Williams was a lawyer in town, a good man, and he'd been president of the ski club back in 1950. In his later years I'd put on an orange vest and go down the hill ahead of him, and Carter just followed the orange all the way down. I drove him down to Vail to ski for years.

When Gary and I rode the chair, we always had a bottle of wine stashed in the snow below it, for a little shot on the way up. Eddie Noble had them all over the mountain. Fast Eddie, that was his nickname.

One day I was riding up the chair and here comes a Ski Bum hat, rolling down through the snow. I said, that hat's still got some life in it. It was my grandson's. He'd borrowed mine, and I didn't even know it was gone.

In the later years it was Bob Thompson and John and me, the three of us going up together.

What did Showdown mean to me? Everything. Everybody up there was a buddy. If you got stuck up on the hill, they'd come hunting for you, because everybody kept track of everybody. It was a close family up there.