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Carolina Mountain life Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 —
17
Bill Thalheimer
Southern Skiing’s
Forgotten Man
By Tom McAuliffe
Fifty years ago snow skiing made its
formal debut at the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge.
Today, AppSkiMtn is the embodiment of success
under the direction of the Moretz family, who, back
in 1968, picked up the pieces of one man’s shattered
THALHEIM ER
dream and preserved his deserving legacy.
N
ineteen Sixty was a seminal year for winter sport
in America. Squaw Valley,
California was the unlikely host of the Winter
Olympics, having upset a surefire bid by
sponsors from Innsbruck, Austria. It was
a first for America and the first winter
games covered extensively by television.
A national audience watched the snow
fall so heavily that February the alpine
ski events were delayed for three days. In
the end, American Penny Pitou won silver medals in women’s downhill and giant slalom, while teammate Betty Snite
captured silver in the slalom. And in
what has become known as the “forgotten miracle,” the U.S. mens’ ice hockey
team beat heavily favored Canada in the
final to win their first ever gold medal.
While those games were a triumph
for America, folks in the High Country
watched and wondered if it was going to
stop snowing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. That winter, each Wednesday
brought another delivery of fresh snow.
By March, National Guard helicopters
were dropping hay bales into the fields
to feed stranded livestock as most farm
roads were impassable for trucks and
even tractors.
In the eyes of Boone attorney and
civic leader Wade Brown, however, the
apocalyptic winter presented opportunity. With snowfall at record levels, the
14 — Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 Carolina Mountain life
Bill Thalheimer in his signature ascot
irrepressible Brown made his way to
Miller Brothers Army--Navy Store on
Depot Street, bought a pair of wooden
skis, boots and poles, called a photographer from the Watauga Democrat
and told him to grab his camera. The
pair climbed a snow covered hill at the
Boone Golf Club as Brown posed atop
his skis--poles in hand--for a picture
that the Democrat would run front page
and share over the newswires. The photo
went viral, appearing in hundreds of
newspapers in the southeast. Wouldn’t it
be something, Brown wondered, if one
day winter proved as attractive to visitors
as the mountain summer had been since
the days of the horseless carriage.
Little did he know know at the time,
but a singularly rare entrepreneur, living in Charlotte at the time of his photo
shoot, was poised to do just that. And
while his trail blazing vision thrives fifty
years later at Appalachian Ski Mtn., Bill
Thalheimer’s personal victory, in a fate
similar to that of the 1960 U.S. Hockey
team, was destined to become another
forgotten miracle.
Marcus Edwin Thalheimer was born
in Selma, Alabama in 1908. He would
graduate from the University of Alabama and navigate a winding trail that
would lead him to West Virginia, Charlotte, and ultimately the North Carolina
High Country.
By his first wife he fathered two
daughters, Lynn and Joanne, and with
his second wife fathered two sons, Marcus, Jr. and Ben. A dynamic personality, and a southern gentleman by all
accounts, Thalheimer was known to his
friends and family as ‘Bill’.
He found success and fulfillment operating a chain of movie houses in West
Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky at a
time when the local theater was the entertainment core of every small town in
America.
“That was his first love,” remembered
son Ben. “He loved the entertainment
business and he loved people. Remember, back then, movie stars didn’t go on
the Tonight Show to promote upcoming
movies, they’d make personal appearances in your town on the theater stage. Roy
Rogers appeared at one of Dad’s movie
theaters.”
As the movie industry changed, Bill
changed too and moved to Charlotte
where he opened a general wholesale
supply house where he ran a vending
machine business on the side. But things
just weren’t the same.
“He didn’t have the same interaction
with people that he enjoyed in West Virginia,” Ben said of his father in his new
role. “He missed that most of all and he
wanted to get back in the entertainment
business.”
He found that enterprise, his return
to the Big Top, on a mountain just outside of Blowing Rock, the quiet resort
TH A L H EI MER
L to R: New T-Bar up and running, 1962 / Tony Krasovic at one of the Larchmont snow guns / By 1968 Grady Moretz would find himself in charge at the newly christened Appalachian Ski Mtn.
town that attracted thousands of visitors
and vacation homeowners every summer. No stranger to mountain winters,
Thalheimer set out to bring skiing to
the High Country. Of his choice of locations, Thalheimer said that Blowing
Rock had cachet. “It’s the most famous
town between Newport, Rhode Island
and Palm Beach, Florida,” he said, a prescient observation that still rings true
today.
He secured 43 acres from Grover
Robbins, Jr. who along with brothers
Harry and Spencer had built the Tweetsie Railroad and would later develop
Hound Ears, Beech Mountain and Linville Land Harbor. Located at the end of
Edmisten Road off Hwy. 321 the tract
was just a spit from the Blue Ridge
Parkway. A newspaper man would later
describe the two mile entrance road to
the ski lodge as “a snaky dirt road.”
“And that was on a good day,” recalled one old timer of the roadway better suited to cattle.
Thalheimer planned to capitalize the
venture with an initial stock offering
of 375,000 shares at $10 per share. He
went to the office of the North Carolina
Secretary of State in Raleigh to find out
what permits he would need to build a
ski resort in Blowing Rock to which the
clerk replied, “What for, the boats?”
In time, 305,000 shares for the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge were sold, but not
at the $10 price per share originally in-
tended. The Secretary of State Thad Eure
ordered they be sold at $1, reflecting in
his view, a more realistic value. Eure also
required that the stock offering state
“This Issue is Strictly a Speculation.”
But Thalheimer was undaunted. He
had his teeth into the project now and
he was determined. In his signature ascot and fedora, he cut a dashing figure,
tempered by his southern upbringing.
“My father was always such a dynamic
businessman. It was what he did,” Ben
explained. He was sharp and intelligent,
and a southern gentleman. In all my life
I never heard an unkind word said about
my dad.”
Thalheimer hired local builder Lloyd
Robbins to oversee construction of the
lodge. L.A. Reynolds Company of Winston-Salem was hired to do the initial
grading and site work, build the holding pond for snowmaking, and carve out
the slopes. (Four years later the Reynolds
group would take this experience and
build the four-season resort on Seven
Devils). Jim and Bill Winkler installed
the plumbing and heating, and Ira Ayers installed the electrical service. Abb
Hayes, Butch Triplett, and Anne Buxton
were among the first local employees
hired during construction. The Hayes
family were stone masons and just returning to Blowing Rock after several
years building on the campus of Duke
University. For the small summer resort
town, the building of the Blowing Rock
Ski Lodge proved a boon to the local
winter economy.
In 1960 Blowing Rock there was
only one hotel, the Appalachian Motel, that remained opened in the winter.
All the other housing was closed-up
until spring, or inhabited by local folks.
Thalheimer’s most pressing problem was
finding any place to rent for his family
that was properly insulated for winter.
Spencer Robbins had a home near the
Mayview Manor and they settled in.
“Back then you could fire a cannon
down mainstreet after Labor Day and
not hit a thing,” remembered Anne Buxton Jones, then a twenty year-old Blowing Rock native who left her job at the
phone company to work for Thalheimer.
“It was wonderful and brought lots of
activity to town …jobs were scarce and
you worked hard to keep one, so I felt
fortunate to be in at the beginning. It
was like a family.”
But not even Thalheimer’s winning
way could overcome every skeptic in the
community. When it came time to build,
he was having trouble striking a deal
among the building supply businesses in
Boone.
Lloyd Robbins brought Thalheimer
to the V.L. Moretz & Son building supply in Deep Gap where they met with
Grady Moretz, Jr., the grandson of company founder Virgil Lafayette Moretz.
Continued on next page ...
Carolina Mountain life Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 —
15
THALHEIMER from previous page ...
T HA L HE I M E R
Dining Room at the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge
“He was building a ski resort and it
seemed the folks in Boone weren’t interested,” Moretz remembered. “I was
in the lumber business so I told him I’d
hear what he had to say.”
Thalheimer wanted to use roughhewn pine or wavy board for the lodge
exterior. Robbins had used it extensively
in the past, so much so, it had become
known as Blowing Rock siding, a look
still prevalent fifty years later.
“Some called it rind board, but whatever you called it, you needed big logs
and I had a sawmill cutting some right
then,” the younger Moretz said.
Bill Farthing of Beaver Dam provided rough-hewn, adze finished beams.
The pine flooring, siding, and beams endure to this day.
The 12 thousand square foot building was uncomplicated in its shape and
designed for utility. “This was a huge
building for the time,” Grady’s daughter
Brenda exclaimed fifty years later. “What
a dream he had…what an investment he
made.”
It was so cold the day they poured
the building’s foundation the men built
fires to help the concrete cure. When the
truck from Hickory Steel arrived in a
blinding snowstorm they had to ask for
help locating the job site. “If you’d gone
another ten feet you would have hit it,”
Hayes told a bewildered driver.
Right away the Thalheimer family
went on the offensive to let the world
know what was going on at the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge. “My mother wrote
most of the press releases and my brother
and I stuffed a lot of envelopes,” Ben said.
16 — Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 Carolina Mountain life
“My dad was a new idea kind of guy, and
a bottom line kind of guy. He did things
right, but he could pinch a penny.”
Young Ben and his older brother
Marc split time between Blowing Rock
and their Charlotte home. At first they’d
catch the bus, which after a serpentine
route through the Carolina Piedmont,
would roll into the hardware store/bus
station on Main Street. Once nearby
Tweetsie Railroad opened for the summer, the boys hitched a ride with Charlotte TV personality Fred Kirby, the
singing cowboy, who played to large
crowds weekends at the new and successful amusement park. Kirby’s big Cadillac beat the bus by a mile.
Meanwhile, Thalheimer and his team
raced toward a December, 1962 opening
having missed a target date a year earlier.
Three enormous piston-type air compressors, sold second hand from an ice
plant in Chicago, would drive the Larchmont snow guns. Two rope tows and a
T-bar were yet to be completed. Austrian Toni Krasovic was hired to head
the ski school, but Thalheimer was just
as keen on his snowmaking experience
at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs.
Rental inventory was on the way. A cafeteria was built and dances were planned
to deliver the total après ski experience.
Money was tight.
“They got into debt faster than they
could sell stock,” Moretz said. “I didn’t
know it but I was financing it by providing the building materials. Stock sales
were slow and all the sub-contractors
were taking stock in partial payment.
They asked us if we would, too. I figured
it was better than nothing. We could,
and would, and did.”
Thalheimer’s grand opening was a
festive affair even as the last details were
completed behind the scenes. Frank
Coffey hung the last T-bar seat fifteen
minutes before Miss Watauga County,
Pat Pittman, cut the ceremonial ribbon. Local dignitaries and media types
joined the genuinely curious at the High
Country’s first ski resort--the only resort
publicly traded at the time. More than
900 stockholders of the Blowing Rock
Ski Lodge assured plenty of interested
bystanders. Cars lined up all the way to
Hwy 321.
“Opening day was very hectic,” Buxton-Jones recalled. “Everyone was telling
everyone else what to do with no one really knowing what to do. I don’t remember anyone who lived here who had ever
skied before.”
For ten year-old Ben, who was on
crutches from a football injury, his role
was clearly defined. “My job was to stay
as invisible as possible,” he said, management having determined that the sight
of Bill Thalheimer’s son on crutches
wouldn’t be very good for business.
The same month, half-way across
the country in Colorado, Vail ski resort
opened for the first time.
Under sunny skies the first southern
skiers navigated the new slopes on wooden skis, cable bindings, leather boots, and
bamboo poles. They had absolutely no
idea what they were getting into. A reporter from the Charlotte News would
write, “Bill Thalheimer graciously rents
out all necessary paraphanalia except
heat pads and seat cushions.”
And they had the time of their life.
“Most of the crowds were on weekends,” Jones observed, “but the crowds
were tremendous.” A veritable Who’s
Who’ came to bear witness that auspicious opening weekend. Thalheimer’s
guests included retailer John Belk, future Governor Terry Sanford, and Miss
North Carolina.
The sudden success illustrated the
acute shortage of winter accommodations in town. Visitors had three dining choices; the ski lodge, Aunt Emma’s
Luncheonette in the building, now home
to Woodland’s Bar-B-Cue, and Sonny’s
Grill on Main Street. Only Emma’s
served an evening meal, and all but the
ski lodge are gone, but Blowing Rock
has since grown into a world-class dining destination. In time, more and more
motel and vacation properties would remain open during the winter and cater
to skiers. In fact, following the success
of the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge, a new
High Country ski resort would open every two years for the next decade. Today,
the total economic impact generated by
North Carolina ski resorts is more than
$145 million.*
Even for a big dreamer, success like
that would have been hard to imagine.
Because of Bill Thalheimer’s vision,
southern skiing’s forgotten man, winter
in these mountains would never be the
same.
*NCSki Areas Assoc. Economic Value Analysis 2009-10