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WEST FALMOUTH — In the three decades following World War II, the sport and business of skiing mushroomed in popularity in the U.S. and Maine. Millions of American men, women and children took up the exhilarating sport, and hundreds of ski areas were developed to serve them.
But by the end of the 1980s most of the smaller ski hills were closed; only the biggest, best-located and most prosperous remained in business.
Among the dozens of smaller areas that were developed in Maine and New England during that boom-and-bust era, Hurricane Ski Slope was one of the first to open. Due to its proximity to Portland, Hurricane soon became one of the most popular places to ski in southern Maine.
Although it too eventually closed, Hurricane remains one of the most fondly remembered among Maine’s long-gone community ski hills.
The Ski Museum of Maine, which is based in Kingfield, is currently researching several of these long-gone community slopes. By gathering photos and interviewing key people, the Museum intends to collect and document the stories of the men and women who developed these small hills, owned them, operated them and skied them. The result will enormously enhance our understanding and appreciation of Maine’s rich skiing heritage, especially at the grassroots level.
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 | This gathering process runs parallel to the Museum’s oral history program, which aims to preserve the stories of people who were intimately involved with skiing by recording their memories in their own words and voices.
This article is the result of the first stage of research into the stories of Hurricane Ski Slope. Three key people have been interviewed for the Museum’s oral history program, with each contributing photos:
(1) Charlene Manchester Barton is the daughter of one of the original two developers, and she skied Hurricane when she was in grade school. (2) Ruth Norton was an owner-operator of the ski area for a quarter century. (3) Lloyd Ranger learned to ski at Hurricane and later worked there.
BRIDGING TWO ERAS
The story of Hurricane Ski Slope spans two eras in which skiing enjoyed phenomenal growth: the decade preceding World War II and the decade following. The idea for Hurricane Mountain was conceived in the mind of an enthusiast who was swept up in the skiing boom of the late 1930s.
Charles Nahum Manchester was a slightly dapper, middle-aged businessman who worked in the wholesale meat trade. The best photo of Manchester enjoying his favorite sport was taken in the 1930s at New England’s most famous mecca for skiers, Tuckerman Ravine on the eastern slope of Mount Washington.
The tiresome three-hour drive to Mount Washington sparked the idea of creating a place to ski close to his home in Falmouth Foreside. Manchester and business partner Al Ervin, a banker, scouted out several possible locations. They settled on Norton Farm, located in West Falmouth on the eastern side of Hurricane Ridge.
Owner Harold Norton readily assented when Manchester and Ervin requested a lease and permission to operate as ski area. A single open slope was cleared in the summer and fall of 1946 and Hurricane opened to the public for the winter of 1947.
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Centerpiece of the project was a rope tow powered by a 10-horsepower gasoline engine. The dimensions were typical of the era. The linear distance of the lift was approximately 1,000 feet with a vertical rise of 180 feet. The tow ran up the southern (left when looking up the hill) extremity of the cleared area. (Years later, another trail was cut through the woods somewhat south of the lift.)
Tickets were sold from a tiny red shack by the road. There was no base lodge. Instead, skiers were welcome to walk across the street and use the Nortons’ farmhouse as a warming hut and snack bar. People could also warm their hands by a bonfire blazing in a barrel at the foot of the hill.
Hurricane’s first customers were just like Manchester: people from greater Portland who had been swept up in the enthusiasm for skiing in the 1930s. They wanted to enjoy their sport as often as possible and wanted a place close to home. H. Merrill Luthe and wife Jane plus Avon Hilton and wife Vi were early patrons. Both couples were prominent in Maine skiing circles and helped spread the word.
Skiers flocked to West Falmouth, and the resulting traffic jams were one of Hurricane’s first and biggest headaches. Blackstrap Road was clogged with cars on weekends and local residents complained. Some of the cars carried the skiers, of course, but just as many belonged to non-skiing gawkers who crawled along the narrow road at a snail’s pace. Manchester and Ervin spent much of their time directing traffic.
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| The Manchester-Ervin tenure was brief; the partners left Hurricane after running it for three winters. Manchester’s reason for quitting was the same as his reason for beginning: He wanted to ski. Manchester had discovered the sad fact that many other small ski area operators were learning around the same time: You can’t run a ski slope and do much skiing. The ski business is simply too demanding.
“He came home quite discouraged and disgusted quite a few days,” recalls his daughter. “It wasn’t doing what he hoped it would do and it got to be not fun any more -- just a lot of work.”
Emblematic of Manchester’s frustrations is the fact that there are no photos of him skiing at his own slope.
Barton recalls that the winter of 1949, when she was a fifth grader, was her father’s last season as the operator of Hurricane Ski Slope. She never returned after her dad left the business.
After more than 60 years, Barton’s fondest Hurricane memory is not the action on the ski slope itself, but the animated, spirited scene in the Nortons’ farmhouse kitchen, which doubled as a base lodge.
“It was an environment where people were welcome to come tromping in with their wet ski boots and wet mittens and plop them by the woodstove,” she wistfully recalls. “There was always all of the Norton kids and other kids -- and cats and dogs and hubbub. And that just seemed to be fun and energetic and exciting.”
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| NORTON YEARS
The Nortons — Harold plus son Loring and daughter-in-law Ruth -- took over where Manchester and Ervin left off. Fortunately for them, the Nortons were not skiers, and running the slope was strictly a business. It was a small operation, a family business, a winter sideline to their main occupation of raising chickens. In a good year the ski slope would net $1,000 -- enough to pay the taxes on the farm. That was the Nortons’ goal.
Ninety-year-old Ruth Norton paints a vivid picture of Hurricane Ski Slope in its heyday. With good weather, 150 skiers would show up on a Saturday. Husband Loring Norton supervised the outside operation while she ran the inside -- mostly serving hot dogs, hamburgers, hot chocolate and soda. Her top-selling dessert was a baked nut bar that sold for a dime. In 1952 a separate snack bar was built to accommodate the expanding crowds. Two other employees (some employees were paid and some were family members) sold tickets and ran the rope tow.
Between four and six high school boys comprised the ski patrol. None had any first aid training. The patrollers packed the slope after storms by side-stepping and the boys took turns standing at the top of the lift to help people unload. And of course they handled whatever emergencies happened on the hill.
Ski patrol was unpaid. The boys worked in exchange for free skiing and meals. Sometimes they stayed overnight at the farm, sleeping on the floor of the Nortons’ living room.
“It was a good group of boys, and I’m still in contact with one of them,” Ruth Norton recalls. “They got free food. That was their reward -- getting all they wanted to eat.”
Hurricane Ski Slope operated Saturdays and Sundays, and daily during school vacations. Night skiing was tried for a couple of seasons, but it wasn’t successful.
Business began to fall away in the mid-1970s as Hurricane’s customers were lured to competitors offering bigger slopes and better lifts. But the end of the operation came when insurance rates skyrocketed in the fall of 1977.
“The insurance went up so high there was no point of us running,” recalls Norton. “So we just decided to close in 1977.”
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| LLOYD RANGER RECALLS
During Hurricane Ski Slope’s heyday, Lloyd Ranger was one of the regular skiers and he often worked on the hill. He started skiing there as a teenager in high school. In 1956 Ranger married one of Harold Norton’s daughters.
Ranger built a house on Norton farm, only a few hundred feet from the ski slope. He still lives there today on the farm, which is now in the business of raising trotting horses.
Ranger remembers many details of skiing and working at Hurricane.
Ski teams, especially North Yarmouth Academy and Portland’s Deering High School, trained at Hurricane. At one point, North Yarmouth Academy wanted a Nordic ski jump. With the Nortons’ assent, a National Guard engineering battalion camped out for a few days on the farm and built a jump as a military training exercise.
Ranger notes that children were key to sustaining Hurricane’s business, especially after much larger ski areas -- such as Pleasant Mountain, Sugarloaf and Sunday River -- expanded in the 1950s and 1960s and started attracting the most skilled and dedicated adults. |  |
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Hurricane was the close-by alternative to bigger ski areas. “It was a good place to take the kids,” says Ranger. “You didn’t have to truck them 30, 40, 50 miles, and you could entertain them all day for not very much money.”
One of Ranger’s recollections concerns the younger children coping with the rope tow in a difficult situation. When the moving rope dragged through wet snow and puddles in springtime, it would absorb water and become extremely heavy -- far too heavy for the pint-sized skiers who comprised much of Hurricane’s clientele. But Ranger recalls that the small fry figured a way around this problem.
“The little kids smartened up after a few trips,” he says. “They couldn’t hold the rope up -- even two or three of them couldn’t hold it up very good -- so they’d always wait for one of the bigger kids or adults and they’d shoot right in tight behind him so he’d hold up the rope. And if they’d smartened up enough, they’d jump off before the big guy got off -- because once he let the rope go, it would knock them right down on the ground.”
Ranger has skied most of Maine’s bigger mountains, and even ventured as far afield as Wildcat in New Hampshire and Smuggler’s Notch in Vermont.
But he still fondly remembers the happy days spent at Hurricane, both in his high school years and later as an adult: “It was just a nice slope and everybody had a good time.”
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