Ted Cogswell

Ted Cogswell had just started skiing, and he and George Willett had been up a few times together, when one day early in 1973 he said it, kind of out of the blue. Why don't we buy that place? George laughed. About a week later Ted asked if he'd thought any more about it. So George got the numbers from Ski Lift, Inc., the company that had run Kings Hill since 1956, and they put an offer together.

It went to the stockholders that March, and it only counted if the owners of at least seventy percent of the stock signed on. By Tuesday, April 3, they had eighty-three percent, and by May more than ninety. That October the two of them gave the hill a new name, Showdown. George ran the mountain. Ted kept his job in town and came up to ski.

His family had been up Belt Creek long before there was a ski hill. His mother, Eloise Barker, was born in Neihart in April 1907, and her parents, Tekla and David Barker, were pioneer silver miners there. Ted was born in Great Falls on September 21, 1933. He played fullback for the Great Falls High Bison, studied business at the university in Missoula, and married Ann Kovatch of Conrad in the summer of 1955. The Air Force taught him to fly in Texas and kept him on as an instructor at Lubbock until the spring of 1958, when he came home to his father's insurance agency. He flew fighters with the Montana Air National Guard for twenty-two years and retired a lieutenant colonel in 1980. In 1981 he took over the Cogswell Agency, and for a time it was the biggest privately owned insurance agency in Montana. In town he took his turn at the head of the Symphony Association and the Airport Authority.

He was never far from the hill's business. When Showdown sold ten-year season passes in the fall of 1978 to help pay for the new triple chair, the ads said to ask for Ted Cogswell Jr. or George Willett. In November 1979 he went with George and Tom Sparby to the Great Falls school trustees to ask for a day of skiing in sixth-grade P.E., and the board said yes, four votes to two. In 1997 he was an owner and vice president of Showdown, and in 2014 the two of them still owned it together, forty-one years on. George said Ted never had a hand in the day-to-day running of the place, but he gave a lot of good advice.

For years he spent his winter weekends skiing at Showdown with his friends and family. He died in 2019. When Showdown renamed a run for him in 2022, on the hill's 85th birthday, it said there would be no Showdown without Ted's encouragement, his money and his friendship. If you've skied Ted's Tumble, you've skied his favorite run. It used to be called The North Goose.