The Skier and the Moll

By K. John Morrow, Jr.

Where I grew up, in the small mining town of Wallace in the Idaho panhandle, kids learned to ski at an early age. My instructor was an Austrian named Hans Hauser, whom I remember as a kindly, strapping Teutonic type who taught us little squirts how to ski at Lookout Pass.

On winter Saturday and Sunday afternoons, Hans would get us down the slopes with cries of, “Pud your skis togeddar!” and, “Now ve vill shooze a leetle!” At the time, the furthest thing from my mind was that Hans would court a woman who had been the moll of the notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel.

Wallace is a tidy little town in a valley surrounded by forested mountains. The town is so charming it’s been the setting for several Hollywood films, including Dante’s Peak and Heaven’s Gate. Lookout Pass sits right on the Idaho/Montana border, and during the course of a busy ski day, skiers move back and forth between the two states. In the late 1940s, when I was a kid, the lifts were crude and operated only on weekends.

We hung like desperate mice onto rope tows that hauled us up the mountain. We heard tell that chairlifts existed in exotic locales like Sun Valley, but they were just a fantasy at Lookout. Skiing was exciting, but also hard work, and at the end of the day, we were exhausted. It was quite unlike an afternoon of skiing today, when the skier can rest and relax during rides up the chairlift between runs.