Flathead grads spruce up landmark letter

For as long as anyone can remember, a large white “F” has beamed down on Kalispell’s west side from Foy’s Hill, a proud representation of what was the city’s only high school for a century.

For decades, Flathead High School students made annual pilgrimages up the hill, armed with buckets of paint, determined to keep the F gleaming white for another year.

Sometimes the job was a privilege saved for upperclassmen; sometimes freshmen were forced to do the work by seniors wielding brooms.

But in recent years, trees, shrubs and weeds have obscured the F from view and fewer classes have made the yearly trek up the hill. Newcomers to Kalispell might not even realize there is a large letter on the hillside flanking the city’s southwest side.

So when A.J. King suggested members of Flathead’s class of ’81 repaint the F as a project for their upcoming 30-year reunion, his fellow alumni jumped on the suggestion.

“Everybody liked it,” said King, chairman of the reunion committee. “I don’t know if anybody has done anything with it in a long time.”

There have been a few trips up Foy’s Hill in recent years. Flathead students painted the F two years ago. About four years ago, they had to rearrange the rocks that make up the F; students from the newly opened rival high school had transformed the letter into a “G” for Glacier High.

But until June, no one had done anything about the F’s lack of visibility from town.

The class of ’81 received permission from Carol Bibler and Jim Watson, who own the land the F sits on, to clear trees and brush and spray weeds around the white rocks. Wendy Lalum, a class of ’81 alumna, was part of the group that worked to clear some space around the F in June.

“I hadn’t been up there since high school,” she said, adding that she hadn’t remembered the F being so far off the road.

“I thought it was off Bibler’s driveway. It was a 10-minute hike; it was a big job just getting to it,” Lalum said. “The forest has grown up between the road and the F, and it was way steeper than anybody remembered. It got steeper.”

A crew of alumni dropped about six trees and sprayed the weeds around the F with weed killer donated by CHS. Two hours later, it poured; the workers wondered whether they would have to spray again after the rain.

Luckily, Lalum said, the weed killer took, and on another evening, the group made its way back up the hill. Nine people helped replace rocks that had shifted over the years and spray-painted the F with concrete primer and latex paint donated by Sherwin-Williams.

“Hopefully it will stick well,” Lalum said.

The June trek was a very different trip than the one she had made up Foy’s Hill as a high school senior.

“There were about 50 of us that year,” she recalled. “We used highway paint so it would stick to the rocks longer.”

The paint stuck to more than just the rocks, Lalum added.

“The homecoming queen had gray hair because we couldn’t get the paint out of her hair. The paint didn’t come out of our clothes,” she said.

Painting the F was a privilege reserved for upperclassmen by the time Lalum was in high school, but that wasn’t always the case. At least into the early 1970s, painting the F was a rite for incoming freshmen or sophomores.

Lalum said her husband, Mark, who graduated from Flathead High in 1972, was one of the unlucky underclassmen forced to march up the hill in front of seniors armed with broomsticks.

The task may have become a privilege by the mid-1970s.

Marsha Wilson, the activities director assistant at Flathead High, said there is a photo of her painting the F in her senior yearbook from 1976. But Gene Boyle said he thought painting the F was still a hazing ritual when he started teaching at Flathead High School in fall 1976.

“We had to be careful when we were supervising, because those kids, we couldn’t let them get too wild. We had to be careful to make sure they weren’t overdoing it,” said Boyle, who worked at Flathead High for 20 years as a teacher, coach and administrator.

While Boyle said he couldn’t remember a time when students “overdid” the hazing, trips to the F weren’t without hazards. Students in the back of the line had to watch for rocks rolling down on them during the hike up the hill, and one year the paint students used sent a girl to the hospital with burns, he said.

One thing no one seems to know is when the F was constructed. King said his parents, who graduated from Flathead in the mid-1940s, can remember the F when they were growing up in Kalispell in the 1930s.

“I would love to know if anyone knows when it started,” Lalum said.

Lalum also hopes the valley’s newest high school will find a hill of its own.

“I live in Glacier country now, but I don’t know where to put a G,” she said. “It would be nice to see a G.”

Class of 1981

The Flathead High School Class of 1981 30th reunion starts Friday with a social at 6 p.m. at Vista Linda. On Saturday, there will be a dinner and music at 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn. Call Andrea Conn Baumgardner, 751-5131.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.