Growing up in Dunedin, a young John Davies visited Queenstown during school holidays with his parents, who built one of the first houses at Lake Hayes, to ski at Coronet Peak, which then only had a single-person rope tow.
"So it was an experience ... You didn’t ski down the hill because you had to wait in a queue for 50 minutes again, so you skied as far as you could, going across, and traversing, and turning, and crossing backwards and forwards," Sir John said.
Fast forward almost 70 years, and it could be said Coronet Peak, New Zealand’s first commercial skifield, under Sir John’s leadership has been one of the key driving forces for Queenstown’s winter tourism and economy.
In those early days, Coronet was busy, but a "basic operation", Sir John said.
Mr Hamilton spliced about 915m of rope to give skiers an uphill ride of about 450m.
Cruising at a speed of about 17kmh, it took one minute and 40 seconds to get from the bottom to the top.
It changed not only Queenstown’s tourism landscape, but New Zealand’s.
Sir John said the base building — known as "the pie palace" — sat 50 people, who dined on meat pies, made by Rees St baker Bob Robins, and "a great big pot of tomato soup".
Sir John initially chased a farming career, working on properties in Southland and Central Otago before moving with his wife, Trish, to the Wakatipu in the early ’60s, looking to buy a farm there.
But life took a different turn when, while fielding for the Wakatipu Cricket Club in 1964, he caught wind from Warren Cooper, who was keeping wicket, a 40% stake in Wakatipu Transport was up for sale.
"I said to the guy that was selling it, ‘could I have a go at buying it?’," he said.
"I went to the bank on Monday morning to see if I could get some money and they asked me ‘what assets have you got?’ and I said ‘a Volkswagen and six dogs’."
The loan was approved and, over the next decade, Sir John built up Wakatipu Transport before merging it into Northern Southland Transport, formed Queenstown Concrete and bought Southland Bin Services.
He went on to become a Queenstown borough councillor and then, in 1983, mayor, a position he held for six years. He was voted out but that led to his move into tourism.
"If you go back 40 years, very few people came to Queenstown — it was a different era," he said.
But as improvements in the aviation sector and increased international services resulted in visitation starting to grow, the resort begin to transition into a year-round destination.
"It was certainly led in the early days by Coronet, and then Cardrona, and then The Remarkables and Treble Cone — those four skifields have changed the whole aspect of tourism in Queenstown and Wanaka."
In the early 2000s, Air New Zealand put Coronet, The Remarkables and Mount Hutt skifields up for sale and NZSki manager Duncan Smith approached Sir John to buy them.
Despite hesitations about the future of skiing with global warming, he bought NZSki with local investors, recognising solid investment would unlock the skifields’ full potential.
"[Coronet] was declining at that stage, the numbers were coming but ... generally speaking, the whole operation right from the snow side of it, to the transport side of it, the ticketing, the food and beverage, the rentals — everything was just limping along.
At Coronet, that meant introducing the southern hemisphere’s biggest snow-making system, improving the quality and grooming of the snow, installing faster and more efficient chairlifts and constructing a new $22 million base building.
He said it took two decades of spending enough "to make your eyes water" to get the field in shape with the new infrastructure.
"I’m not a marketing person ... I’m not really an in-depth financial person, I just have the ability to look at and improve the product and see what people want."
As Coronet Peak marks its 75th year, Sir John is amazed at its evolution into a world-renowned destination.
"It’s got a wonderful number of local people that learnt to ski there and it’s their favourite skifield.
"They saw it go into decline, and they’ve seen us, as a family, come along and resurrect it and turn it into what it is.
"You can, for sure, see exactly what effect skiing has on the town with everybody here enjoying it, and I think it only enhances the reputation of Queenstown."
