Long-serving supervisor to leave Mt Hutt

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 13

Long-serving supervisor to leave Mt Hutt

Mount Hutt will have a new ski-school director next winter after 10 years with Tony Graham at the helm.

Graham says that it had reached the point where there was no further place for him to go at Mount Hutt.

“The new ownership (Leisureland Corporation) has its own ideas of how to do things,” he said.

The slopes of Mount Hutt won’t seem quite the same without Graham supervising the ski instructors. He said he had “really enjoyed” his decade there.

Graham was previously assistant director of the ski school at Mount Ruapehu. At that time he thought there was no way he could spend a week at Mount Hutt. But he discovered that it was indeed an interesting mountain, worked there for 10 years and “loved every minute of it.” “In that time I’ve seen the ski school go from 15 instructors up to 60 and the income has probably increased 10 times,” he said.

Graham, a former New Zealand ski-ing representative, has also worked as a ski instructor in Austria, the United States and in Australia. In 1977 he was the first executive officer of the New . Zealand Ski Association.

On February 1 he will begin a new job as general manager of

Snoworld, a Christ-church-based importer and wholesaler of ski equipment, owned by Werner Hanni. “It will be pretty exciting working with one of the most switched-on people in the ski industry,” Graham said. To some sports-minded New Zealanders Graham, the skier, might be better known as H. W. (Hamilton) Graham, the swimmer who collected a haul of two silver medals and one bronze at the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica.

After providing regular ski reports on commercial radio from Mount Hutt over the winter months, Tony Graham has changed his emphasis to the sea for the summer and has been reporting on the surf conditions at the beaches for C93FM.

He has been filling in time during the summer doing an educational programme for the Canterbury Surf Life Saving Association and the Water Safety Council.