Concession contract will 'pull apart the lodges'

Sixty-three years after he first came to Glacier National Park to work in its historic lodges, Ian Tippet says he’s not ready to retire — but he’s sorely disappointed the company he’s so loyal to didn’t win the concession contract.

“I had expected Glacier Park Inc. to get the contract,” he said recently. “I’m horrified that these glorious hotels and lodges are getting pulled away from each other. History shouldn’t allow these things.”

The native Englishman came to the U.S. to work for Conrad Hilton’s hotels in Chicago after graduating cum laude from a hotel management school in London. After meeting with Hilton and receiving some sage advice, Tippet traveled to Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier in 1950. His plan was to stay just one summer.

Instead, he stayed one more summer, then another, first managing the Great Northern Railroad’s smaller Park lodges and then taking over management of the Many Glacier Hotel from 1961 through 1982. After that, Tippet moved to Glacier Park Lodge, where he ran GPI’s human resources department before settling down at his latest job in the lodge’s mail room.

“I married GPI instead of a beautiful woman,” he said, adding that he never took a day off. “The work ethic has changed — managers today are not willing to put their lives into their job as in the past.”

Lodge staff had their work ethic tested in 1961, when Tucson, Ariz. mayor Don Hummel bought the Park concession in 1961 and promptly laid off 400 workers, Tippet said.

“We were expected to work our butts off,” he said. “Great Northern didn’t make a profit, where Hummel had to.”

Tippet is perhaps best known for staging Broadway musicals at the Many Glacier Hotel. He explained that the building’s deficiencies had made it difficult to keep his guests happy.

“The walls were thin, the rooms were cold and only half the windows faced Swiftcurrent Lake,” he said. “So I turned to musicals.”

Tippet said he looked for college students with music majors when selecting workers for the next tourist season.

“I got literally 25,000 applicants each year, thanks to the Mel Ruder aerial photos promoting the Park,” he said. “Today, eight human resource people do the job I did alone.”

Tippet said GPI chairman Joseph Fassler had told him about plans to bring the musicals back to the Many Glacier Hotel next year.

“But they lost the bid,” he said.

Besides his concern that Xanterra won the contract for lodging inside the Park’s boundaries and the red bus fleet, while GPI will continue to run the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton along with its properties in East Glacier, St. Mary and Whitefish — thereby splitting the facilities into two entities — Tippet also wants to know where Xanterra will do laundry and garage the red buses now that the East Glacier facility is separated from the Park lodges.

“The men who built Glacier Park Lodge a hundred years ago would be turning over in their graves,” he said.

Tippet said he’s writing a book about his experiences in the Park and wants to keep many of his secrets to himself. He planned to depart from his little cottage across from the Glacier Park Lodge on Oct. 12 and return to England to work on the manuscript. He said he’s inherited numerous historic photos of the Park and its lodges that most people have never seen, which could go in the book.

As for 2014?

“There could be lovely surprises next year, I’m not sure,” he said.