Noted Flathead Valley businessman Ivan O’Neil, who founded Western Building Centers, died July 15. He was 96.

“Financially he was a wizard,” Doug Shanks said.

Shanks started working for O’Neil in 1975, as a laborer in the lumber yard. WBC at the time had stores in Evergreen, Whitefish, Eureka and Kalispell.

Shanks worked his way up the proverbial ladder under the tutelage of O’Neil and eventually would be one of five majority shareholders in the company in 1981. Today he is chair of the board. He said O’Neil could have kept the business to himself and become a billionaire, but he was generous.

“He gave several of us an opportunity we would have never been able to aspire to,” Shanks said Wednesday.

Shanks recalled when O’Neil bought the 40-plus acres that WBC’s truss and wall plant and Super 1 Foods sit on today. It was owned by Louisiana Pacific at the time and O’Neil decided to give them a lowball offer for the property.

They took it, to everyone’s surprise. It turned out, Shanks said, that the company was on the cusp of donating it to the city of Columbia Falls for a park.

Today it’s a bustling hub of commerce, to say the least.

O’Neil grew up in Kalispell and was best friends with longtime Flathead Valley radio personality G. George Ostrom. 

In their teens, they worked as lookouts in the nearby woods.

O’Neil was 15 years old in 1944, but World War II was raging and he fudged his age, so they hired him to be a fire lookout on Pioneer Ridge in the South Fork of the Flathead. He spent the summer up there, spotting fires and even putting a few out.

His best friend, Ostrom, who would go on to be the Flathead Valley’s premier radio news broadcaster, was across the way on Battery Mountain in another lookout, O’Neil recalled in a 2017 interview.

O’Neil said he considered a career with the Forest Service, even started studying forestry when he first went to college at the University of Montana. But he changed his mind and switched to business and accounting. 

After college he went into the Army. He wanted to go in sooner, but while he was gopher hunting as a young boy, someone shot him in the lung accidentally. The person was never found, and doctors couldn’t remove the bullet. So the Army wouldn’t take him, at least not for most duties.

So O’Neil got his education, was an auditor in the Army and in 1954 he purchased an interest in Western Woodwork in Kalispell, which was founded by Les Kjos in 1946.

They would add stores in Whitefish and Columbia Falls and in 1975 the name changed to Western Building Center.

In 1981 Randy Kjos, Dave Lyon, Craig Maltby, Doug Shanks, and Bill Schottelkorb bought stock in Western Building Center joining Les Kjos, Carle O’Neil, and Ivan O’Neil, the founding partners.

O’Neil would go on to start Three Rivers Bank with Jack King and a metal door manufacturing facility in Kalispell as well.

O’Neil was better known to longtime Columbia Falls readers as a founding member of the Over-the-Hill Gang, a group of businessmen that hike in Glacier National Park every Thursday. It wasn’t always called that, O’Neil recalled. Back in 1976 a group of Kalispell businessmen — attorney Ambrose Measure, theater owner Spencer Ryder, ophthalmologist Hi Gibson and O’Neil started hiking together in Glacier.

Ostrom joined in about a year later, O’Neil said. It was Ostrom, he said, who started calling the group The Over-The-Hill Gang.

“The Thursday hiking group was a little too formal for me,” Ostrom quipped at the time.

The group grew progressively larger as the years went on. Ostrom told of the group’s exploits on his radio broadcast and in columns in the Hungry Horse News. And many Hungry Horse News staffers joined them over the years. The adventures were typically a blend of on-trail and off-trail excursions.

O’Neil climbed 125 peaks over the years and almost all the trails in Glacier as well. He did one memorable trip in 2005 that was featured in the Hungry Horse News that retraced a trip up and over the Garden Wall in the park taken by his grandmother Frieda Emile Gerth O’Neil in 1903.

Despite just having a section of his colon removed, O’Neil made the 13-mile 5,000-plus foot elevation gain journey with no problems.

He stayed active up until the end, Shanks said, skiing with help, even though he was legally blind.