Wayne Ellington

Before anything else, my wife asked me to make sure that if she's mentioned at all, it's as Judith Mundale Ellington. So there it is. She's Judi to everybody up there, and she'll come into this.

I started skiing up there in high school, around 1957 or '58. A couple of friends and I would put on our ski pants, which were a pair of jeans, and drive up from Great Falls in an old '39 Plymouth with no heater. If you packed the new snow with your skis for two hours, sidestepping down Bovey or wherever it was needed, you got a free ticket for the rest of the day. So that's what we did. Then we'd ski till we were soaking wet and drive home in that cold car. It was all rope tows then, and the Poma going up the Hollow.

I went off to school in Missoula, came back and student taught at the Emerson School in Great Falls, and they hired me in 1967. That's when I came back to the hill, as a ski instructor on the weekends. George Montrose was running the ski school then. I got certified, and it was hard to get certified back then. One November the Tribune ran a picture of Bill Muretta, Joe Pinski and me, three Kings Hill instructors standing in three feet of new snow. By 1969 Dick Dailey and I were running the ski school between the two of us. We built a little A-frame for it in my garage in Great Falls and put it together up on the hill, and Judi sold tickets out of it. That little building got a lot of use after we were done with it. I'd also drive over to Lewistown one day a week and teach skiing on their little rope tow. Lewistown has always been a big supporter of the hill.

In 1970 I left teaching, we moved to Neihart, and I went to work for Jim Thompson building the double chair. Fritz Schmutz came out from the Stadeli company and lived with Judi and me while we put it in. We did everything ourselves. We had a cement mixer on the back of an old army six-by-six, and I drove it. We had to build a road into every tower site, so if you look you'll see a little trail coming into each tower. I backed that truck into every one of them to pour the footings. Buzz Buskirk was the cat skinner. He built a frame about twenty feet up on the back of his cat and set the towers with it, right down over the anchor bolts, and we tightened them down. No helicopters. Those didn't come until the triple chair. Nobody carried a camera either. Fritz was probably the only one taking pictures.

I ran the ski school the last couple of years I was in it, but we got paid on commission, by the lesson, and I couldn't support Judi and our two daughters that way. When George Willett and Ted Cogswell took over the area in 1973, I went to George and said, I need a better job than this. I told him he needed a professional ski patrol, at least two people up there every day who could look after the fifty volunteers on the National Ski Patrol. Dick Mosher had just retired from the Air Force and was already patrolling, and he was interested. So the two of us went to work as the whole professional patrol. I think my title was safety supervisor and something else. I don't know what all George called me.

I helped get a program going with the College of Great Falls too. The students came up on Thursdays, had two hours of ski school and then went skiing. Then George took it and made it into a real program, with kids coming from all over the state. The hill would never have become what it is without those school programs.

George made me lift operator supervisor for a couple of years. I did the operator training in the fall, and some days I was running a lift myself because somebody didn't show. I was really glad when Jerry Solberg took that job over. When the 440 power came in, Wayne Anderson and I wired the overhead heaters in the lodge. Those things really kick out heat. And when the triple chair went in, I worked on it, mostly on the base terminal.

Judi was busy up there too. She and George got together and started the first nursery. She sold lift tickets, and she painted buildings a few summers. And she made the ski bum hats, hundreds of them, red with the yellow tassels for the ski bums and any color you wanted for everybody else. Our girls were up there with us. Jenette had her own season pass when she was about four, and somebody wrote her name on it as Scooby. By the time she was nine she was signing her own. She worked in the kitchen at eleven and then in the rental shop until she went off to college.

By the late eighties there were four of us on the pro patrol, and I was the area's safety supervisor as well. Twice a year we practiced evacuating a chairlift. In the 1986-87 season the National Ski Patrol named me its professional ski patroller of the year. I ran the patrol for sixteen years, and when I stepped down, Joe Blanchard took it over.

It's an honor to be counted with these people. I'm very proud of what the Willetts have done with that hill. Tell Margie and George hi for me.