Gloria McKeich - Souvenir Sites to Netball Whites

City-raised Gloria McKeich arrived in Queenstown in 1967 – a young mum with a two-year-old and a baby, to discover “one doctor, one hospital, one newspaper outlet and no public transport”.

Gloria, then 26, and builder husband Gordon McKeich had little time to adjust, the couple thrown into managing Mountain View Lodge for one of Queenstown’s founding developers Hylton Hensman, based out of his famous ‘Bottle House’, along Frankton Road.

A few decades later the pair had become renowned Queenstown tourism retailers, Gloria, also a respected netball umpire, local swimming club administrator and Cancer Society fundraiser and volunteer. By 2007 she was instrumental in helping get the Wakatipu’s new Senior Citizens’ Rooms built as part of a commercial development in Memorial Street.

Raised in Dunedin where her family moved to from Milton after Gloria’s dad returned from WWII, Gloria loved netball and tap dancing, getting “hooked” on ballroom dancing as a teenager once the family moved to Invercargill. Gloria worked as an office clerk at the RSA and H & J Smith’s until she was 21 when she met husband of 64 years Gordon at an RSA dance.

A lull in the building industry saw them offered the management position at Mountain View. “It was a bit scary. I’d never lived in a small town, and I had a very young family. It was a pretty busy job. There was never time to think. I never got to know anybody as we worked seven days a week until late and there was no time to go out,” Gloria says. She juggled her children around running the Bottle House shop and bookings while Gordon managed the Mountain View Camping Ground, cabins and tourist flats.

“They were all built from used materials because Hylton built them. That was how he operated.”

Guests were predominantly free drive Americans and Kiwis, Gloria receiving a disapproving look from an American man requesting iced water. “We’d never heard of that.” His wife then asked to borrow a tablecloth to have people over to their motel for dinner, a much simpler request.”

Groceries were purchased from the Rees Street Dairy downtown.

Gordon then built their Larch Hill Place home, the first in the subdivision, in just six weeks and once the kids were at school in the early 1970s Gloria became office clerk for Wilkinson’s Pharmacy Gift and Book Shop. It was managed by Jim Green for Kim Wilkinson’s father, Geraldine pharmacist Stan’s family trust.

“We sold a phenomenal amount of (camera) film to visitors. It was just incredible really,” Gloria says. “November to February was the busy season. The rest of the year was quiet.” Sunblock wasn’t invented and “Shotover Jet, Kawarau Jet and Skyline were about it”.

In the mid-1970s Gloria was invited to play netball with a group of ladies forming a team to give the local high school girls some competition. “Previously to that they’d had to travel to Alexandra, so we started competing on the old Stanley Street high school courts.” By the time they’d moved to the new Fryer Street high school in 1980 numbers had grown to 150 players.

They then formed a committee to form a sub-association of Otago Netball, later switching to Southland. This allowed them to sit exams and qualify as umpires, Gloria umpiring every Saturday despite being a 7-day-a-week retailer by then. She also played for about 15 years.

Gloria and Gordon bought Fur ‘n’ Wood off Lawton and Vicki Greer - a souvenir and bike hire shop in Beach Street in 1977. They sold multiple sheepskins and traditional Māori dolls in grass skirts, which the tourists loved, along with Māori tiki souvenirs.

In 1988 they bought the very successful Tiki Corner a few doors along from early days retail legends Joan and Gordon McLaren. “The large tiki is still prominent on that building today,” Gloria says. The McLarens had owned the store for 38 years, building the retail building as it still stands today.

“Tourists were always asking what ‘Aotearoa’ meant and I‘d tell them. One American guy said: “I’ve been travelling this country for seven days and you’re the first person who’s made any sense on that,” Gloria grins.

Another American woman was looking at souvenir calendars in the store and announced in a very loud voice: “Look! They have Christmas Day the same day as we do!’ to Gloria’s amusement. “We sold every tiki imaginable, from plastic to beautiful jade, all shapes and sizes. The Americans and Japanese were fascinated as jade gifts are recognised by Māori as a good luck charm.”

They may have endured ‘The Big Snow’ of 1968 a year into their arrival, their access driveway off Frankton Road frozen sheet ice for weeks, but the 1999 100-year floods took the cake. While their insurers were great, their business was out of action for more than two months.

With her two sons swimming competitively Gloria was on the Queenstown Swimming Club Committee, always helping poolside in the early days at the unheated Ballarat Street high school pool. Training took place in everything from southwesterlies to sunshine – October to March, until the new Fryer Street high school pool opened years later.

In the 2000s she was opted onto the new Senior Citizen’s Rooms committee where she served for 12 years, heavily involved in planning that new building, and treasurer, from 2008.

Gloria had a brush with cancer in the 90s, thankfully all cleared back then, but this prompted her to want to give back as volunteer liaison officer for the local volunteers, who visited patients, cooked meals and ran overnight nursing help. “Everything was run by volunteers then,” she says.

Retired from ‘paid work’ since 2001, Gloria is fiercely defensive of Wakatipu’s “very caring community”, often the jibe of outsiders who judge it. “But we know the real heart of the town and its people.”