Bethel was five decades ahead of its time, for all the wrong reasons.

Local production industries were shrinking. The community was an ideal place to hike or fish during the summer, or hunt and admire the foliage in fall.

Then, nothing. From November to April, a ghost town.

When others probably saw the ideal scenery for a shoot-’em-up Western, Murray “Mike” Thurston looked out his window at the barren, winter wilderness and saw potential. But a multi-million-dollar, four-seasons resort?

“Oh, God, no,” said Thurston’s son, David. “He had no idea. His goal was to create a little ski area where he could ski with his old college buddies when they came up from Boston.”

That modest hill developed by Thurston and a small group of trailblazing investors grew into Sunday River, one of the two household names in Maine’s modern ski industry.

While others have harvested, multiplied and spent the fruit of Thurston’s labor, the founder will achieve a hint of immortality this Friday night. Thurston, 86, headlines the fifth class to be inducted into the Maine Ski Hall of Fame in the annual banquet at Lost Valley in Auburn.

Thurston now lives at the Maine Veterans’ Home in South Paris and is not expected to attend the dinner. His wife, Connie, and three children will accept the adulation on his behalf.

“There were people in Bethel who never skied before or ever thought they would,” David Thurston said. “It has been fun and interesting for our family to watch it grow. It’s been quite a ride.”

A small group of local businessmen, Thurston included, tried to maintain a small, rope tow ski hill on Vernon Street in Bethel in the early 1950s.

Operating on borrowed land and kept alive largely by volunteer work, it was doomed from the start.

“The daily and nightly fee was 50 cents, so it was a break-even operation,” Thurston wrote in a 2005 essay for the Bethel Historical Journal. “But in fact I think Howard Cole, the last volunteer president, had to pay a dollar or so to close the books.”

Envious of the thriving winter scene at the nearby resorts in Franconia, N.H., and Stowe, Vt., Thurston approached the Chamber of Commerce with a different daydream.

By June 1959, young David Thurston and his dad were hiking Barker Mountain, unknowingly planting the seeds of an empire along the then-invisible Bethel/Newry town line by the soles of their sneakers and the seat of their pants.

“We parked where the Jack Frost Ski Shop is now, because that’s where the road ended,” David Thurston said. “We had to hike from where Jack Frost is now to where the Barker Mountain Lodge is now, through the woods, laying out the first T-bar line with a compass. By December, we had a lodge, two trails and a rope tow.”

The thought gives the younger Thurston pause, in part because it is so laughable by today’s stringent legal standards and jammed personal calendars.

“If you had to do that kind of thing today, with all the regulations and permits? There would be no chance. It’s a great example of what perseverance and not a lot of money can do,” he said. “This was a pure, community effort. Families would come in on Saturday and Sunday and help clean and burn brush.”

What Sunday River’s founders enjoyed in team spirit, they lacked in financing. The group sold lifetime and five-year passes in an effort to raise $90,000.

Calling itself the Bethel Area Development Corporation, Thurston’s gang sought to finish the job by applying for a $40,000 loan to the Small Business Administration. The end result is the stuff of urban legend.

“The first and probably only SBA loan to start a ski area was given to Sunday River,” David Thurston said. “One of the first big investors, which means he probably had $250 in it, hid a bottle of Scotch next to a brook on the way up the mountain. He poured the SBA guy three glasses, and that’s how they got the loan. That’s fact.”

Sunday River opened for business on Dec. 19, 1959, getting a head start on a decade that was anything but a cash cow.

“We struggled along for a few years with the directors doing much of the work,” Thurston recalled in 2005. “Even the wives took turns sleeping at the lodge (because) the furnace was not completely dependable.”

“It was pretty tough sledding in those years. On a really good year, they might have broken even,” David Thurston said. “You had Cannon. You had North Conway. It was hard to get people’s attention diverted to some s—ball area like Sunday River was at the time.”

Killington Ski Area of Vermont purchased the moribund mountain in the early 1970s, seemingly regretting the decision from the moment the ink on the contract was dry. One of Killington’s young managers – Les Otten – was a mite more optimistic and purchased the plant shortly thereafter.

Mike Thurston never imagined the magic that would follow, with countless trails, hotels and even a championship golf course developing out of thin air. It was his vision, however, that gave Otten a venue to wave the wand.

“We had a rope tow that was 400 feet long. Anybody who wanted to spend 75 cents, I believe it was, could ski for the day,” David Thurston reflected. “There was no reason to believe there would ever be anything more than that. There was never any sort of grand scheme.”