According to Mont Chilly’s current owner and operator Rick Hernberger, the event’s purpose was to bring family members and friends together to commemorate the lives of his parents, Larry and Rita Hernberger, who passed away on April 29, 2019 and Dec. 16, 2016 respectively.

Since the two were attached at the hip for as long as they were together, it only made sense to commemorate their lives collectively, Rick said.

“They were a team,” he said. “It wasn’t like one had friends or whatever. Everybody knew them equally.”

The celebration started at 2 p.m. with around an hour of mingling in the resort’s dining hall. Throughout the room, a number of old pictures and newspaper articles about Larry and Rita were displayed for people to reminisce.

Although it was a rainy day, the hall was still packed to the gills, with around 225 people seated around a collection of narrow tables. While many weren’t able to make it because of Thanksgiving, Rick understood and noted that it was probably for the best.

“If any more people would’ve come, we would’ve definitely been overwhelmed,” he said.

After the socializing period, a close friend of Larry and Rita’s, and the event’s emcee, Fran Rabb Hahn, gave a short speech and read a eulogy on behalf of one of Larry’s siblings. Others gave a few words as well, including family friend Charlie Van Duren who travelled all the way from Truro, NS. to attend, and John Evans, a farmer from Waltham.

After the speeches, volunteers paid homage to Rita by serving hamburgers and Oktoberfest sausages from Ullrich’s deli in Pembroke along with an assortment of salads and desserts and refreshments.

Having both ran the facility for around 50 years after building it from the ground up, Larry and Rita made a lot of friends and were very familiar faces in the community.

“A lot of people got to know our family quite well,” Rick said.

Although he immigrated from Germany, Larry was actually Russian. In 1944, after World War II (WWII), Larry fled to Germany from his hometown in Russia with his parents and his younger sister at age 14. In 1951, he arrived in Pembroke.

Rita grew up in Berlin before she immigrated to Pembroke in 1953.

In 1954, the two met each other and got married two years later.

Growing up, Rick remembers his father as a very hard-working man with many great stories to tell.

Living during World War II in German-occupied Russia, Larry had vivid memories of things that most children don’t get exposed to, which played a major factor in his qualities of resourcefulness and determination.

“I think his ingenuity comes from that,” Rick said. “It was through necessity. There were lots of people that he learned from as well. He’s not an original thinker or designer of things.”

When he first arrived in Canada, Larry spent a lot of time hitting the slopes around Ottawa with a group of avid skiers who also migrated from Germany around the same time he did. On their drives home, the guys often fantasized about having a ski hill close to where they lived in Pembroke.

Larry started searching for land in the early 1960s and as soon as he bought their property, he began constructing the facility.

While he also enjoyed participating in the sport, Larry was most enthralled with the mechanics of the ski equipment and machinery, Rick said.

In 1964, Larry and Rita purchased their lot of land on chemin de-la-Truite in Mansfield et Pontefract with the purpose of farming beef cattle and building a ski hill.

“It just happened that the property had a mountain on it and some farm land,” he said.

In 1964, Larry fabricated the resort’s lone ski-lift by hand. While it’s currently on its second motor and isn’t gas-powered anymore, the apparatus remains largely the same despite being built over 50 years ago. For more than a decade, it has stood as the last home-built lift in the province and still runs smoothly, Rick said.

After a few years of toiling away at the property, Mont Chilly opened its first public ski season in 1967.

While the operation also consisted of a beef cattle farm until around five years ago, now the farming aspect of the business largely consists of growing, cutting and selling hay, Rick said.

“We want to keep the land clear in case I decide to have some cattle again or whatever,” he said.

In its early years, Mont Chilly was booming with business and was the place where he and his parents made most of their friends and where plenty of locals learned the fundamentals of the sport.

Consistently drawing in large crowds of skiers from all over the Pontiac, Mont Chilly was the place to be for skiers from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Every Saturday night, the resort hosted a familiar group of skiers for a potluck supper.

But with Sunday shopping coming into existence along with other ski resorts establishing themselves in the Valley, business has died down significantly at Mont Chilly in the last couple of decades and has become much more of a local ski hill.

“We’ve been hanging on by a thread for 20 years,” he said.

However, judging from the touching words written on numerous postcards thanking Larry and Rita for their hard work to the hundreds of people reminiscing their childhood memories at the hill, Rick is conscious that his parent’s impact in the community certainly didn’t go unnoticed.

“When I interact with people who have skied here, whether it was kids who have vivid memories of childhood skiing, they have all these memories and experiences here,” he said. “That opportunity was given through having a ski hill that was local and affordable.”

Whether it was helping someone fix a mechanical issue on their tractor, Larry was always willing to give his friends a hand or some consultation, which made him a very likeable character in the community.

Along with taking charge of office-related duties like printing tickets, which is still done the same way as when the resort first opened, Rita specialized in the kitchen where she established a glowing reputation for her generosity and her mouth-watering hamburgers.

Larry was the business’ jack-of-all-trades. An engineering genius with an affordable solution to every problem, Larry had a knack for fixing what was seemingly unfixable and making something out of very little.

“When you had a mechanical device that’s bound to break – and with one lift you’re very vulnerable, and you have to do it quickly – he fabricated everything,” he said. “He was a very quick and very smart fixer.”

“There’s a number of people around the world that are those key people that you call and things get corrected,” he added. “My dad was always doing it way under budget.”

Deeply entrenched in the family operation, Rick recalls taking over rental duties growing up, as well as snow plowing and grooming equipment with his two brothers Ken and Thomas.

But now, filling his father’s shoes as the facility’s main overseer, he finds himself in awe thinking about everything his parents had accomplished with hard work and dedication.

“Even though I was his assistant essentially with a lot of stuff, I’m amazed by what he did and in what a short time-frame that he did it,” he said.

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