How one man nearly brought Many Glacier back to the Rockies

I worked in Glacier Park for about seven years, mostly over at Many Glacier Hotel. Many Glacier is a 210-room hotel built in 100 days in 1914 by the Great Northern bridge crew. They shipped in enormous logs and built a majestic lobby soaring up four stories on these huge columns, which continue down into the basement, or lake level.

The motif of the hotel is “The Switzerland of America.” There are a lot of flags of Swiss cantons. Every room has a little plaque on the door with the room number. The little plaque is the Swiss flag, big white cross on red background, shaped like a shield. This has always galled me how we have to pretend to be the Swiss Alps. We have woollier mountains, way more critters, and way less pollution and people. Originally it was an advertising slogan for the Great Northern to get people to come out on the train. I guess they thought the Rocky Mountains weren’t a big enough draw and they needed to ape Europe.

I stewed about this for a year or so and one day we heard that John Teats was coming to Many Glacier. Teats was the president of Greyhound Corporation, which owned Glacier Park Incorporated and had the concession on all the hotels in the park. He was thus everybody’s boss and I resolved to pitch him.

The thing about that job was that I was dead tired about three to four days a week. With the long days painting and the tortuous road trip home and back on the one-day weekend, I was toast after a few months. Nevertheless, after work I went out in the covered front porch of the chalet and took a room shield that I had liberated from the hotel and repainted it all red. Then I drew a profile of a full curl ram and painted it in white with the door number below. There are lots of bighorns around Many Glacier and they will come right into the chalet to bum crackers when the tourists are gone.

So I got my mock-up done the day before Teats’ visit. I was working up in the hotel when I heard that Teats had arrived. I ran over to the chalet and grabbed up the bighorn shield and hurried back to the hotel to try to find this guy. I catch up to him in the big hotel kitchen where he’s surrounded by my boss, his boss, and his boss, along with assorted suits.

John Teats is a tall, handsome man who looks like central casting sent him over to play a big corporation president. We had never met.

With my bosses looking on aghast, I somehow butt into the conversation and show the new room plaque to Teats, saying something like “Screw the Swiss, this is America.”

Shockingly Teats looks at the plaque and says, “Do it!” My bosses are all big guys and the veins in their necks are standing out like ropes. Their eyes are bugged out, but they couldn’t say anything with the big boss being so decisive. I now had to paint all 300 signs in and around Many Glacier Hotel, changing the Swiss flag to an American bighorn; all the while neglecting my maintenance duties as the only painter at Many Glacier. I was not the most popular with management, but everyone else thought it was a hoot.

Teats left and the bosses didn’t dare do anything, so I went right to work. I pulled every room plaque and every sign with a Swiss cross from all five floors of the hotel, annex, and grounds. I wheeled them all over to a big maintenance shop at Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier and set up a spray room and a silkscreen press.

Over the next three weeks I re-sprayed all 300 signs and silkscreened on the numbers and the new logo. The only change was that the big GPI Park boss, Marty, wanted a mountain goat instead of a sheep, so I went along and changed it to a white goat, reminiscent of the Great Northern.

I can still remember the eerie red haze in the drying room with the racks full of shields in various stages of production. The screen lettering didn’t have a sharp edge so I hand-numbered a couple hundred. At the end of this marathon I’m just packing up to return them to Many Glacier and my No. 2 boss shows up. Larry was tall and gray haired with a big handlebar mustache and looked like an old Western sheriff.

“Change ’em back,” he says.

The implication was clear that my job was on the line if I asked any questions or made any calls to Phoenix. I quickly realized that I was not prepared to lose my job. I never did find out who ordered it.

To this day if you look closely at the damned Swiss crosses, you can still see the imprint of a Rocky Mountain goat.

Ron Carter is a resident of Libby.