Oral history interview with Dorothy “Dot” Kimura, 2004

0:01 · Ellen Marsh

This is Ellen Marsh for the Tin Cup Mountain Oral History Project. It's February 11, 2004, and I'm at the Harlow Public Library with Dorothy Kimura. Dot, thank you for doing this.

0:15 · Dot Kimura

Well, you asked so nicely. And you brought cookies, which helps.

0:20 · Ellen Marsh

Let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

0:23 · Dot Kimura

Right here in Harlow. Second Street, behind the laundry. My folks ran the Harlow laundry for 30-some years, so my whole childhood smelled like starch and steam. In the winter, that steam froze on the windows, and my brother and I would draw mountains in the frost.

0:43 · Ellen Marsh

When did you first ski?

0:45 · Dot Kimura

The winter of 1940. I was nine. My uncle bought me a pair of hickory skis at Peterson's Hardware, and they were about a foot too long for me, so I fell down a lot. I mean a lot.

1:00 · Ellen Marsh

What do you remember about the rope tow?

1:02 · Dot Kimura

That it ate mittens. You held on with both hands, and it chewed right through the wool. My mother sewed leather onto the palms of my mittens, and I was the envy of the whole hill. The tow ran off an old Model A engine, and Mr. Lindquist would stand next to it with a coffee can of gasoline, and when it coughed, he'd swear at it in Swedish.

1:25 · Ellen Marsh

So how did you go from falling down to teaching?

1:30 · Dot Kimura

Well, after the war, a lot of the boys came home who'd trained with the ski troops, and they started a real ski school. Not just somebody yelling, “Bend your knees.” I was 19. I'd been skiing ten winters by then, and one of them, Walt Ostrander, said, “Dot, you're patient. You want to teach the little ones?” So I did. That was 1950.

1:55 · Ellen Marsh

What was it like back then?

1:58 · Dot Kimura

Cold. We taught out of the warming hut. One stove, one coffee pot, and about 40 wet mittens hanging on a wire over the stove. The whole place smelled like wool and wood smoke. The kids would come in crying with snow down their necks, and we'd thaw them out and send them back up.

2:16 · Ellen Marsh

You've said the ski school had one rule.

2:20 · Dot Kimura

Oh, that. We had six instructors and one rule, which was that nobody went home crying. Some days we broke it, but most days they went home asking when they could come back. And that's the whole job, really. If they want to come back, you've done it.

2:38 · Ellen Marsh

You became the director in 1962.

2:42 · Dot Kimura

I did. They were building the Silver Spoon that summer, the chairlift, and everybody knew the hill was about to get a lot bigger. More people, more kids, families driving up from Boise. The lodge company asked me to run the school, and I said yes before I'd thought about it, which is how I've done most things.

3:04 · Ellen Marsh

What did you change?

3:05 · Dot Kimura

I made everybody take a test. That was not popular. In 1966, we started certifying our instructors. You had to show you could teach a wedge turn and a parallel turn, and how to get a child out of a tree well without panicking. If you passed, you got the patch, the orange one with the crossed skis. Grown men wanted that patch very badly.

3:31 · Ellen Marsh

And the Thursday night lessons?

3:33 · Dot Kimura

That's the thing I'm proudest of, honestly. The mill ran shifts, and the men coming off the swing shift never got to ski because the lessons were all on weekends. So once we had the lights, I started a Thursday night class just for them. They'd come straight from the mill with sawdust in their hair. Some of them had lived under that mountain their whole lives and never been up it.

4:00 · Ellen Marsh

What did the hill mean to Harlow?

4:03 · Dot Kimura

It was where everybody saw everybody. In the winter, there wasn't much else to do. The banker skied, and the mill hand skied, and the kids from the farm skied. And on the hill, nobody could tell who was who under all those hats. I met my husband in the line for the rope tow. He cut in front of me. I married him anyway.

4:28 · Ellen Marsh

Do you remember the last day?

4:30 · Dot Kimura

Of course. March 27, 1994. I wasn't teaching anymore. I'd retired in '89. But I went up. Everybody went up. Ray Albright was loading the Silver Spoon the way he had for 30 years, and he knew every single person by name. At 4 o'clock, he sent the last chair up empty, and we all just stood at the bottom and watched it go.

4:58 · Ellen Marsh

What were you thinking about, watching it?

5:02 · Dot Kimura

That rope tow. Those two long skis. How I'd spent my whole life on that mountain, and how lucky I was to spend it giving other people the same thing.

5:15 · Ellen Marsh

Is there anything you'd want people to know, people who never got to ski there?

5:20 · Dot Kimura

That it was small. It was a small hill in a small town, and that was the best thing about it. You didn't have to be rich, and you didn't have to be good. You just had to show up, and somebody would be there to help you up when you fell.

5:38 · Ellen Marsh

Thank you, Dot.

5:40 · Dot Kimura

Thank you, Ellen. Now, are there any more of those cookies?

5:45 · Ellen Marsh

This concludes the interview with Dorothy Kimura.