Ski Jumper, Coach, Mentor and Storyteller
They called themselves “Frank’s Kids,” and they became Olympians, entrepreneurs, company presidents, civic leaders, publishers and coaches. So who is the coach Frank Cammack? The simple answer is, a guy who lives in Bend, not far from the mountains, streams and forests that give him meaning, happiness and a lifelong commitment to serve his community.
Cammack didn’t start as a coach, he began as an athlete. In 1958, he had a chance to soar into the world record books of skiing. Instead, he broke his neck while trying a new technique off a 90-meter ski jump in Sweden as part of the U.S. Ski Team participating in the Federation of International Skiing World Championships.
On a practice run, he’d decided to loosen his bindings when inspired by what he’d seen a top Swedish jumper do. Instead of testing the technique on a smaller jump, he chose the highest. “My skis came up so quick…I turned upside down and landed on the back of my head.” The accident was reported by the Associated Press, which cited his mother, Loretta Cammack, as saying, “He’s always had a tendency to fall on his head.”
Cammack’s Early Start
Cammack was born in 1936 and raised in Wenatchee, Washington. In 1948, the town’s first ski lift was built from a jacked-up Jeep with a rope wrapped around a wheel and connected to a pulley on top. Young Frank could ski there or travel 21 miles to Leavenworth. At 16, Frank and a buddy, finding themselves alone at Leavenworth one morning, seized the opportunity to take on the hill’s 90-meter jump. “I pondered it quite a bit, then jumped on the track,” he said. “You accelerate pretty fast…take-off speed reaches about 60 miles per hour.” He landed the jump and repeated the feat hundreds of times in the coming years.
His success on his high school ski team earned him an athletic scholarship to the University of Idaho in Moscow. In his junior year, he won the national Nordic combined cross-country skiing and jumping event, which led to his selection as one of two athletes to represent the United States in Finland at the FIS World Championships.
Although his broken neck eliminated him from the competition, he healed well enough to be named to the training team for the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. Unfortunately, a tree fell on him during a summer job at a logging camp, cracking his skull and crushing his Olympic dreams.
A Ski Coach and Mentor’s Lasting Legacy
In 1960, with a degree in forestry, he took a job with a glulam beam company in Portland. On Memorial Day in 1962, he traveled to Bend looking for a place to fly fish. He got lost trying to find Fall River and ended up at Mt. Bachelor. In one of life’s epiphanies, he saw 100 inches of snow, found his way to the river, caught several big trout and thought, “My God, there’s skiing on the 30th day of May, there’s trout in the rivers, and I’m surrounded by forests.” To top it all off, he encountered a recruiter from Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company who offered him a job.
He arrived in Bend just as Skyliners Ski Club was trying to raise money to hire an Austrian skier to coach young racers. While the club continued to fundraise, Cammack volunteered to start the program. The club soon realized it had no need to look farther than Cammack, who brought his love of skiing and expertise from the world stage to Bend. In 1962, on the first day of practice, 14 kids showed up. “I was so enamored with their enthusiasm,” Cammack recalled.
When the club won the bid to host the 1965 Junior National Ski Championships, it tapped Coach Cammack to oversee the construction of a 50-meter ski jump on Pilot Butte. When snow-making equipment failed, Ford dealer Gordy Robberson rounded up every truck he could find in Deschutes County to haul snow from the old Skyliners hill. “The trucks started rolling at 5 p.m. all night for three days. The whole town got involved in shoveling,” Cammack said. “The snow held, but there was a little problem. Some of the kids weren’t too proficient, and stopping required sliding through straw into bales of hay.”
Robberson’s son, Jeff, was one of Frank’s kids. “The life stories he taught me were incredible. He led by example and was the ultimate hero for us as teenagers, plus we all wanted to ride in the car with him because he could tell stories to and from races,” Robberson said as he laughed.
As Head Alpine Coach for a decade, Cammack nurtured a generation of skiers who won scholarships to Western universities, raced in national and Canadian championships and two, Kiki Cutter and Mike Lafferty, went to the Olympics and competed on the World Cup circuit. In 1986, Skyliners Ski Club transitioned into the Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation. The nonprofit asked the community for support to build a permanent home and training center, and Frank’s Kids opened their wallets. When the idea came up to name the Alpine Program Office after Cammack, Robberson said, “It was an easy decision. We wanted to honor and thank him for all he did for us.”
Read more about Bend’s Original Ski Bums, and/or more about the legacy of Bend’s Skyliners Ski Club.