Pinky and Vera Mathews

Pinky and Vera aren't here to tell this themselves, so I'll do it. I'm George Willett. I owned Showdown from 1973 on, and Pinky was up there before I was.

His real name was Donald, Donald R. Mathews, and I never did find out what the R stood for. Everybody just called him Pinky. Vera was his wife. Pinky was a repairman for the phone company, and just about everybody in Great Falls knew him, because sooner or later he'd been out to their place to fix their phone. He put in some years at the exchange in Fort Benton, too.

He came to skiing late. He'd been hauling his two kids up to Kings Hill and standing around at the bottom while they skied, and he was thirty-nine when he finally rented some skis and went up himself. After that there was no stopping him. That was about 1962. Five years later he was racing in the club's city championships, and he took third in the forty-to-fifty class.

In 1969 the Great Falls Ski Club made him president, and Vera did the club's publicity. He wrote the president's column in the club newsletter that winter, and he was always after people to come to the meetings and pitch in. That was Pinky. He was one of those guys who was involved in everything.

They had a blue camper, and in the winter they'd park it in the skiers' lot and stay up on the hill. Pinky said it saved him the drive. Charlie Lay's family camped up there right alongside them, before Charlie bought his cabin.

The double chair went in in 1970. Jim Thompson's crew built it, and Pinky hooked up the electronics and got the phones going. That's the first job of his up there I can put a year on. For years after that he looked after the phones on the mountain with Joe Pinski and the crew.

Charlie Lay worked at the phone company with him, and Pinky got Charlie to come up and help him with projects. Summers, the two of them went through all the wiring and the communications for the lift shacks. They liked doing it, and they did it for years. When Pinky couldn't do it anymore, Charlie kept it going, and he had his boy Bill with him.

Pinky was up there all the time, all through the seventies and the eighties. Summers, when Margie and I went on a trip, he and Vera came up and stayed at the house and took care of the dogs.

He was a Ski Bum. The Ski Bums went off for a week every winter chasing snow, as far north as Alberta and as far south as California. Pinky went along, and he always came back saying Showdown's snow was as good as any of them, day after day. He was seventy-three in 1996 and still going up twice a week, and any time it dumped. He kept at it into his late seventies.

He was a great guy, and so was Vera. Truth is, Vera was probably better than he was. She was right there with him for all of it, on the club trips and the ski club bus and at lunch in the lodge with the Ski Bums. There's a picture of the two of them on the bus with a map out.

Their son was living over in Wenatchee, Washington, and in the end he moved them over there to be near him. I don't remember just when. Margie and I went over twice to see them and took them out to lunch.

Pinky died in 2014. He was ninety-two. Vera lived a little while longer. The phones he got going up there in 1970, Charlie kept going after him, and then Bill. He was a good guy. They both were.