DREAMING of a RESORT

The story of Carl “Ed” and Marguerite Schenck runs parallel to the story of skiing on Big Mountain.

In the summer of 1947, Schenck and George Prentice were busy realizing their dream of bringing a ski resort to Whitefish. They’d sold stocks in Winter Sports, Inc. in March and were rushing toward a December opening for the burdensome project.

While that was happening, Schenck also met a girl, Marguerite MacDonald, as she celebrated her 21st birthday with her first legal drink at the Cadillac Bar.

“He was always a gentleman,” Marguerite remembers. “He was not a boisterous person, he was rather quiet.”

It didn’t matter that Ed was 12 years her senior, the two of them married the next year.

Together they’d have five kids while they watched the resort grow from humble beginnings to the high-level ski hill it is today.

The Whitefish Marguerite grew up in was a far cry from the tourist destination it is today, she said.

“It was just a little railroad town. It had lots of bars,” she said with a laugh, “and the usual things, a drugstore, a JCPenney Store. Marion Lacy was setting up his studio.”

Born in 1926, Marguerite grew up during the Great Depression. When asked what she did for fun growing up, she chuckled and said “I don’t think I had any fun.”

The oldest daughter with three brothers, Marguerite remembers things being a bit like a “boys club” in her childhood.

“I was the only girl. Always boys, on both sides. My brothers, older and younger than me, had male friends,” she said.

Unlike her children, who learned to ski at age seven and younger, Marguerite didn’t learn to ski until Ed took her out a few times after they’d met.

Instead, she grew up skating on some cleared-off patches of ice along the Whitefish River, next to her home.

When she finally did learn to ski, she remembers not knowing if she was happy with her decision.

“I remember my first trip up to what was then the top of the mountain,” she said, referring to the end of the T-Bar near what is now the top of Chair 2. “And I got up there, and I bent over to tie my boots and I looked down and there was the lodge! ‘What am I doing way up here?’”

In his time at the resort, Ed served in a variety of roles, such as office manager, snow patrolman, and for decades Big Mountain’s general manager. He retired in 1979 and stepped down as president of the Winter Sports, Inc. board a year later.

Originally from Great Falls, Ed was a veteran of the 50th Parachute Infantry during the war, a ski lift salesman for Constam Engineering Co. in Great Falls and a member of the National Ski Patrol prior to moving to Whitefish.

Ed passed away in 1982.

Once the resort got going, Ed didn’t spend much time on skis. Aside from a trip he and Marguerite took to Sun Valley, Idaho, for some skiing, she said she can’t remember him skiing after the mountain started picking up steam.

Asked how often her husband was up on Big Mountain, Marguerite laughed.

“Every darn day, even during the summer,” she said. “Every day. He really dedicated his life to that place.”

Full family dinners at the table were rare in the winter, as Ed wouldn’t get home until just before the kids were sent to bed, his oldest daughter Mary Anne Miles remembers.

“As a family, there were five kids and two parents. We tried to eat dinner together as often as we could, but Dad was never home for dinner in the winter. He usually got home before we went to bed,” she said.

He would bring a hot dinner home down to his wife, but as soon as the snow started to fall and the roads needed plowing, Ed would be off again.

“That mountain was always the most important thing in Ed’s life,” Marguerite said. “I can remember him getting up in the middle of the night and plowing snow, they had that old Dodge Powerwagon. I remember one night he went off the road. We had a little cocker spaniel, and he took the dog with him. The dog would not get back in that Powerwagon the rest of his life.”

“It scared him to death, I guess.”

Mary Anne learned to ski at 7-years-old on a tiny pair of skis that, as they continued to be passed down to the next child, became a sort of running joke in the household.

“They were the little pair that you go out in the yard in,” she said. “When I had them, they were like varnished wood. And my sister got them, and they were red — I don’t know if we got them for Christmas and our parents wanted to make it look like a brand new pair of skis — and then when my brother got them they were blue.”

The mountain still had yet to open to the summit, as Chair 1 wouldn’t open for a few years yet, but Mary Anne remembers long days at the rope tow with her siblings.

“We’d all pile in the car on Saturday morning, everybody that was old enough to ski of the kids. We’d get up and get into the bag that had all the mittens and hats and things in it and grab our stuff. We’d ride up with Dad, and he’d pull over where the rope tow was and we’d all get out,” she said.

“We taught ourselves how to ski. I never skied with my dad. He never skied. By then, especially on weekends, when we were up there, he was in the office or fixing a chairlift,” she added.

A lot has happened in the resort’s 70 years.

In January 1947, Ed and four other men from Whitefish headed up the mountain to scout its potential for a resort, and a few months later he and Prentice brought in an initial investment of $20,000. The Whitefish Chamber, led by president Brad Seely, raised $40,000, and shares sold for $100 and $200 apiece when the resort went public in March.

A total of 6,900 visited Big Mountain that year, and WSI lost $3,600.

Fast forward to today.

On March 26 this year, Whitefish Mountain Resort set a new total skier visit record with 346,860 visitors with two weeks left to go in the season.

Chair 5 got a new home on the East Rim this season too, and with less than a week remaining in the season the snowpack total is inching toward 400 inches.

While Ed had high hopes for the humble ski hill, Mary Anne said the mountain has grown beyond what her father could have dreamed.

“When he was retiring in the late 1970s, he probably could not even imagine [the mountain today], and not only the resort itself but how skiing has evolved — the grooming equipment they have now, and little short skis, the high tech aspect of chair lifts.”

“It isn’t just the local ski hill, and that’s how it’s thrived.”