Love in a Club.
Kiwi club fields have been expertly matching couples since the first pullies started turning decades ago.
From Issue 103 2021
Words Anna Frances Pearson | Images Supplied by Families.
In 1965 Fred McKee first laid eyes on dental nurse Pamela Shepherd in a Lake Tekapo Hotel. Pam was a friend of his sister’s and they planned to ski at Roundhill Ski Area the next day. Having frequented New Zealand’s larger ski fields already, Fred found Roundhill “tame, but great for girl watching”. One girl in particular.
“Pam hadn’t skied before, so I spent most of the weekend picking her up out of the snow,” Fred says. “On the way back to Christchurch I asked Pam for her phone number in Ashburton where we stopped for coffee.”
They married a year later, raised two sons, and “have an amazing life together”—proof, Fred says, that skiing is “a good filter for nice girls”.
“I’ve just met this guy, he’s got long hair and really thick glasses and looks like John Denver.“
At about the same time, Roundhill brought Fred and Pam together, Jan Kelman had just come off a night shift at Christchurch Hospital and was late for the shared Broken River Ski Area minibus—much to driver David ‘Dawgie’ Rogers’ annoyance. Off they went, rambling their way up to the Craigieburns, where Jan—like Pam—spent the day with soggy woollen mittens in the snow rather than on it.
“Several people came and asked if I needed any help. When (Dawgie) came over I just said, ‘bugger off’. But he was club captain and felt he was doing his job.”
At the end of the weekend, Dawgie kept the passenger seat free for Jan in the minibus. They’ve now been married 53 years and still ski at Broken River. At a recent club reunion, members counted at least 40 couples whose match could be linked to the mountain, where it’s common to stay for several days or a week.
“I think one of the secrets to the marriages is that you see what everyone looks like in the morning,” Jan says.
In the mid 70s, when ski fashion was tight and bright, Graham ‘Dudge’ McDougall was an engineering student at the University of Canterbury. One morning he drove his fawn-coloured VW to Porter Heights with some new acquaintances from Temple Basin Ski Area, and nursing student Jenni Galloway.
Dudge and Jenni shared T-bars throughout the day and at some point the zip broke on Jenni’s puffer jacket. Dudge did a MacGyver with a matchstick and “as he zipped it up to the top my heart started pounding”, Jenni recalls. “I went back to my flat and said, ‘I’ve just met this guy, he’s got long hair, really thick glasses and he looks like John Denver’. I think I fell in love with him straight away.”
Dudge invited Jenni to a Canterbury University Ski Club (CUSC) wine and cheese evening a week later—“cubes of cheddar cheese, toothpicks and cask wine”—and they’ve now been married for 44 years. Jenni says Temple Basin featured strongly in their story; first as students building bunks and necking “gut-wrenching” Velluto Rosso wine at work parties, and later as parents of Erin, Kate, Hamish and Fraser, with fellow CUSC couples and their families.
“It was really fun with all the kids. Every night we’d celebrate if one of them had made it up the rope tow.”
Jenni would 100 per cent recommend finding a mate at the clubbies. “You know that at least you’re starting with similar passions of skiing and being in the mountains.”
Crap, he thought. “At that stage, I was only a keen intermediate skier.”
Jenni’s daughter, Kate, took that advice on board during a massive September storm in 2011.
“My flatmate and I were watching the weather and we were like, ‘oh man, it’s going to be an epic storm, let’s get snowed in at Olympus’. We were driving up and it started dumping.”
They got to Mt Olympus and the road closed behind them, remaining shut until the next weekend after the field was heli-bombed.
“It was funny because at a party, months prior, my friend Greg and I were having a heart-to-heart and he said, ‘you know, you should meet my friend Daryl (Warnock)’ and Daryl was up there,” Kate describes. “We were stuck in the hut for most of the storm and not allowed outside. Daryl was really good at making pancakes and coffee.”
Daryl remembers Kate talking about the kind of guy that she’d like to meet and “he had to at least be a better skier”.
Crap, he thought. “At that stage, I was only a keen intermediate skier.”
Not long after their Olympus lock-in, Kate and Daryl skied the Ryton with a Swiss guy. Kate went first, while the lads admired her form.
“(The Swiss guy) was like, ‘is that your girl?’. I was like, ‘oh, nah’. In my head I wished she was, though,” Daryl says.
But it didn’t take too long before Daryl got the girl and the next season they clocked up something like 50 days on the slopes. Daryl proposed to Kate on a chairlift in Japan several years later, they married in 2016, and their son, Jasper, was born four years ago. Daryl swears by the clubbies for meeting authentic folk, and in his case, a life partner.
“There are no princesses. You either like it (up there) or you don’t.”