Lake of the Ozarks Read online

  This must have come from having an older sister who was salutatorian of a university class of thousands, a talented athlete and violinist, a CPA, and a pilot, among her other accomplishments. I always say, “Aunt Betty received only one B the whole time she was in college…and so did I.”

  My older brother, David, who gave a commencement address on stage between two beautiful palms, played the coronet in dance band, won several music awards, was a mainstay of various student groups, and even had his own local radio show, somehow absorbed Mom’s message. Later he would say he always suffered a feeling of inferiority because his friends belonged to the country club.

  But during night ceremonies at Boy Scout camp he was the guy in full Indian regalia standing on a burning platform high in the treetops. “That’s my big brother!” I was the second-class Scout afraid to jump in the swimming pool.

  I dealt with the inferiority thing by hanging out with kids who didn’t belong to the country club and would have been kicked out if they had. They were lots more fun. I’m a sucker for fun. They were not your tiptop students. A couple of them were greasers who drove hot rods. Some siphoned gas from cars on the street. One was elected to high office in our class. Another grew up to be far and away the wealthiest person in town. My father frequently cautioned: “If you keep hanging around with those guys you’ll wind up in jail.” I did, too, charged with underage drinking (beer).

  We didn’t have money. My dad was a high school shop teacher, who taught printing and photography. He always had a little black ink under his fingernails. He wore inexpensive rubber-soled shoes because he was on his feet all day.

  Dad commuted one mile to and from work in an old but low-mileage green Chevrolet that he’d inherited from his dad, who purchased it, became ill, and put it in the garage. Better that than our hulking, black ’49 Buick Roadmaster. Riding in that, if I saw a cute girl, I’d slide down in the passenger seat until my head was below window level. You just could not have a big, old black car in your driveway in the fifties.

  Thanks to Mom’s budgeting acumen, we had a nice house, nice clothes, and even a nice car once we traded in the ’49 Buick for a ’59 with long fins I feared would impale gas station attendants. (FYI, a gas station attendant was a guy who filled your gas tank, checked your oil, coolant and battery fluids, and tire pressure.) But those old gas stations did not sell hats and T-shirts, sixty-two different candy bars, and fifty-seven kinds of refrigerated beverages, including twenty brands of bottled water. There were no “brands” of water, only God’s. It was free. I know. Sounds crazy.

  I didn’t really notice that we never took vacations. In summers, to supplement his teacher’s salary, Dad operated a Linotype machine, which turned molten metal into headlines, at the Alton, Illinois, Telegraph newspaper. We stayed in the searing attic of my grandparents’ brick bungalow in Belleville, Illinois, where they kept the thermostat on “Bake.”

  Janet and Ed lived in nearby East St. Louis, in what was then, believe it or not, a ritzy neighborhood. Uncle Ed was a big shot in the Shriners. He took me to the Shrine Circus where we had VIP seats. The star of the show was a cowpoke named Red Ryder, who I later met in person back at Ed’s house. My uncle Ed knew Red Ryder, who never achieved the status of Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, but was big back then, he and his sidekick, Little Beaver.

  In Belleville, I was the lone kid in the neighborhood and out of necessity became inventive at creating solitaire sports. I played baseball like other kids do, except I was the only player on both teams. I’d fire a tennis ball off the foundation of the house, chase the ball, and make the throw to first base—a large tree. I was usually Stan “The Man” Musial while at the same time Cardinals sportscaster Harry Caray.

  “Who are you talking to out there?” my grandmother would yell from the kitchen window.

  I would go on to invent Garage Ball, which involved a garage (a precursor to the domed stadium), a bat, and a tennis ball and a lot of tricky ricocheting.

  I learned to entertain myself. Ofttimes these days I’ll be walking with someone and start chuckling. “What’s funny?” they’ll ask. “Oh, nothing,” I’ll reply, smiling.

  In Vietnam I invented Fan Ball in which a small group of soldiers stands in a circle beneath a high-speed ceiling fan. A wet, muddy tennis ball (not easy to find in the remote jungles of Southeast Asia) is tossed into the swirling blades and our men in uniform try to catch it. This resulted in bloody noses—one treated by army medics—and reprimands from the sergeant. Tricky, since I outranked him.

  Dad never talked much. I figured he’d had enough interaction with kids (much of it unpleasant) during the day. He once asked me at the dinner table: “Do you say everything that comes to your mind?” I was just trying to liven up this taciturn bunch.

  Mom talked incessantly—making an effort to fill the unnatural void. She ended all her sentences with an “and a” or a “but a,” thereby holding the floor.

  My parents graduated college with degrees in journalism and bought a small country newspaper, the Fisher Reporter. Those were Depression times. Mom traded newspaper ads for groceries, and Dad spent much of his time under the press with wrenches, trying to make it run.

  They eventually gave up on that and moved to Champaign, where they opened Campus Printers. When it burned to the ground, he became a schoolteacher.

  He had few pleasures. He gave up smoking and drinking before my time, plus one of his great loves, flying. Too expensive. Dad would take me to a small local airport and we’d taxi around on the ground in a little yellow Piper J-3 Cub with the doors open.

  I think my mother feared he’d crash. His younger brother, Bill, died at age twenty in a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber in World War II, just ten days before the end of the war and two weeks before I was born and named after him: William Everett Geist. I don’t think anyone in the family was ever quite the same. No one ever talked about him. Too painful. I got to know a little about him when I was given a small suitcase of his things, including a diary and some yearbooks signed by many friends who said they always had fun when he was around. There was also a photograph of my grandparents receiving some sort of Gold Star certificate as they looked away with thousand-mile stares.

  He seemed a lot like me except he was a really good tennis player. He wrote witty articles for the college newspaper. At times, I feel like I’m carrying the flag for Uncle Bill. Or trying.

  My mother’s reaction to most everything was to warn of its inherent dangers. I think that may be a reason I grew up to become a professional observer. No matter what the activity you could usually find me on the sidelines…making observations.

  Although our first house was tiny and our second one small, there was Dad’s piano in the corner of the living room. He played almost every evening after dinner, much of the time with his eyes closed, off in his own world. So glad he still had that. (He could play by heart any song anyone could think of, which put him at the center of party sing-alongs.)

  Then he’d head downstairs to his darkroom, where he shut the door so light couldn’t get in to ruin his film and his prints. Of course, we couldn’t get in either. But when we passed the door we could hear jazz on his radio. I can still hear strains of Fats Waller singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

  * * *

  The nice thing about growing up in Champaign was that the rest of the world was so fascinating. There was no ocean for at least a thousand miles. No mountains, no hills, even. I didn’t see the ocean until I was twenty, on my first trip out of the country, to Acapulco, with Janet and Ed as a matter of fact. There was no airport in Acapulco then. They met me in Mexico City in a gold Cadillac, where we were accosted by street urchins asking for handouts. Ed pointed at me and said: “Mucho dinero!” and they rushed me.

  There were no real highways either. We drove on narrow roads up and down the steep hills with no guardrails, Ed making stops so kids could stick large iguanas in the window and ask if I’d like to buy one.

  We arrived at Acapulco a
t night. “What’s that sound?” I asked.

  “Waves,” they explained.

  We went deep-sea fishing and caught eight-foot sailfish that leaped high in the air, twisting and turning dramatically before splashdowns.

  Back home we didn’t even have lakes. My first fishing trip was to a pond created when dirt was scooped out to build an overpass. It was stocked with that least desirable and totally-not-a-real-game-fish: carp. Some enterprising fellows charged a couple of bucks to fish there and although we didn’t catch anything they gave us a stringer of big ugly ones for photographs, taken before my dad buried them in the garden as fertilizer.

  Didn’t have a passport until I was forty. Hadn’t seen a mountain yet.

  Champaign was provincial. How provincial? Well, our high school foreign exchange student was from America. Hawaii. Who knew?

  To me, Lake of the Ozarks seemed like an exotic locale. Although “exotic” may be a stretch. Angkor Wat is exotic.

  * * *

  Back in the sixties this stretch from Jeff City to the lake wasn’t so quick and easy. No microwaving an instant vacation back then. Tourists found themselves trying to navigate an unwelcoming, winding, two-lane road, with double-yellow, no-passing center stripes nearly all the way to the lake, as it leaped and twisted this way and that through the Ozark hills, like a bull at the Camdenton Rodeo trying to buck a cowpoke. It was almost as if they didn’t really want people to come.

  Tires picked up rocks that click-clack-clickity-clacked for many a mile before kicking back into the grills and windshields of cars behind. We didn’t have rocks and hills back home in central Illinois, just flat, black soil laid out in neat, one-mile squares.

  Their white knuckles gripping the steering wheels, newcomers drove slowly, trailing caravans of cars behind them. Despite the double yellow lines, some frustrated drivers took their chances at Miller’s Flats, causing many a shit-your-pants near misses and the occasional head-on. Officials put the twisted wreckages in front of the local high school as a warning to teens, but stopped when the grounds took on the look of a salvage yard.

  No airbags back then and people complained that those new seat belts were uncomfortable to sit on. (I considered wearing seat belts an insult to the driver.) There’s a sharp, twenty-five-mile-per-hour curve where I rolled my VW Beetle with no seat belts and no injuries. (Note to motorists: When signs in Missouri say it’s a twenty-five-mile-per-hour curve they mean it.) My four passengers were crammed so tightly into my small car there was no space for them to be thrown. Built of heavier gauge steel in those days, the car kept its shape.

  You’d go by unpainted barns with rusty corrugated tin roofs and billboards for fertilizer next to those for small resort motels and beauty shops (Kathy’s Kut-n-Kurl).

  Finally, the old road passed the El-Donna Motel in Eldon, Missouri, then by a roadside monument that bore this encouraging message carved in stone: “Gateway—Lake of the Ozarks.”

  Indeed it was. There were harbingers of what was to come in the family vacationland ahead. If you were thinking Cape Cod you’d come to the wrong place. If, however, you enjoyed watching monkeys drive small cars—and who doesn’t?—this was the place for you.

  Monkeys driving little cars! Right here at Tom’s Monkey Jungle. And so much more!

  Would you ever have imagined when you woke up that morning you’d see a coatimundi? Me neither. How about a herd of white deer from India or China or someplace like that? Or pygmy skunks and guinea pigs?

  You could pet the monkeys, hold them, and, if you got completely carried away, buy one. The ASPCA didn’t really have a strong foothold in the area. Tom said he didn’t aggressively push monkey sales. They were more of an impulse purchase.

  Monkeys in Eldon! You had to hand it to Tom. Way out there on a two-lane road in rural Missouri, he probably could have gotten away with a raccoon and two spray-painted squirrels.

  Next stop: Max Allen’s Reptile Gardens, exhibiting poisonous reptiles, Oh, goody. Gila monsters, and George, a 250-pound tortoise from the Galápagos. (Is that down by Cape Girardeau?) “Honey, get a picture of little Jimmy riding the big turtle.” If you’re of a certain age, you probably have just such a photograph (black and white or yellowed) showing an unsmiling you with something along the lines of a really big turtle.

  Max had monkeys and apes too. And gators and seals—in Eldon! Awesome, Max! (Make that “Good going, Max!” We weren’t using “awesome” yet.)

  Driving ever dam-ward, intrepid vacationers next pulled off the road at the Ozark Deer Farm, which was pretty nice but lacked that certain…je ne sais quoi…of the Monkey Jungle and the Reptile Gardens. Although, the five-legged deer was nothing to sneeze at.

  After Indian Burial Cave lay Guns and Ammo, my last landmark before the dam, where we used to buy .22 longs to sink beer cans in a pond behind the lodge.

  Just beyond it, you could catch that first exhilarating glimpse—There! Through those trees!—of the sparkling blue lake, the goal of this long, winding, twisting, turning journey. Lake of the Ozarks—Midwestern Shangri-la—where I learned to be a man, a certain kind of man.

  Chapter Two

  The Strip

  Excitement mounted as vacationers coasted downhill between a tall rock cut-through, then rolled right across the very top of mighty Bagnell Dam.

  Nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to encounter on the other side, a raucous carnival midway, an ambush of gaudy signs and loudspeakers and young girls passing out flyers hawking “Helicopter Tours!,” “Seaplane Rides!,” “50 mph Speedboat Thrill Rides!,” “Spectacular Sightseeing Tours,” and ersatz Mississippi River–style paddleboat rides offering “the finest tours—guaranteed.”

  Adult male tourists looked the part, morphing from the office stage to vacation stage, yet to shed their shiny black leather shoes and ankle-length black socks, but donning shorts, short-sleeved shirts (tucked in), and maybe a souvenir straw hat with tiny beer cans attached. And, of course, Instamatics around their necks.

  They never knew what hit them. The barkers did everything but shoot out their tires. “Daddy! Stop! Stop! Can we go on a boat ride? Can we? Can we? Pleeease?!”

  Most of the families were frugal, middle-class Midwesterners, the parents having grown up in the Depression, wearing hand-me-downs, dining on beanie-weenie casseroles and “meat” loaf that was 90 percent oatmeal. The parents played cards (0 dollars) and ate popcorn (25 cents for four) for entertainment on Saturday nights (add 40 cents for four Cokes, 20 cents for Pepsis). They rarely or never went out to restaurants. They lived in small homes, two kids to a bedroom, one bath, and drove used cars. Take my family, for example.

  But the kids didn’t really want a grim history lesson or an economic feasibility study at the moment. And up against this army of barkers, what chance did Mom and Dad really have? Okay, Dad rented the goddamned speedboat—at fifty dollars an hour!—piloting the vessel over the bounding waves as the kids shrieked with joy and Mom grimaced at the image in her head: standing in a grocery store checkout lane pushing an empty shopping cart.

  Souvenir shops drew them in with a dazzling array of “Lake of the Ozarks” shot glasses, salt-and-pepper shakers, coffee mugs, ashtrays, decorative wall plates, and black velvet pillowcases festooned with neon-colored likenesses of Bagnell Dam. There were miniature license plates with a variety of first names stamped on them. If your name was Bob or John, you were in good shape. Conversely, if it was, say, something like Verlin, it would be a long day of spinning the little racks.

  There were wallets with likenesses of the dam or Fabian glued on, foot-long “hillbilly” cigars, rubber bloody severed hands, and plastic vomit. A classic. And a sign that read “Electric Toilet Tissue” but provided no further product information.

  Here in the land of the Osage, there were scads of Native American–related (if distantly) novelties: rubber tomahawks, spears, tom-toms, felt moccasins, and belts with “Lake of the Ozarks” emblazoned in colorful plastic beads an
d “Made in Japan” stamped on the back. I imagined bewildered assembly line workers in Yokohama shaking their heads in wonder at all this.

  Fireworks. I always loaded up with cherry bombs at five cents a pop then sold them back home for a quarter.

  Watching over it all was a thirty-foot-tall fiberglass individual dressed like a hillbilly but with the face of Alfred E. Neuman

  There were bumper cars, of course, and one of my favorites, Skee-Ball, where the skillful roller could “Win Valuable Prizes,” some more than others. If you spent ten dollars playing the game, you’d almost certainly have enough prize points to walk away a winner with, say, a small plastic pocket comb. The prize counter prominently displayed the good stuff, like life-sized stuffed panda bears, which, if you were a decent player, would probably wind up costing you…oh…around two hundred dollars.

  Seeing as how this was the Ozarks and all, there was Hillbilly Golf and lots of hillbilly-themed souvenirs, too, like corncob pipes and floppy, cone-shaped hillbilly hats—and rare mementos I’ve never seen anywhere else. Take, for example, a cedar plaque to hang outside your bathroom door that poses the question: “Who’s on the Pot?” If it was Dad, he’d hang “Pa” on the plaque. There were also tags for “Sis,” “Brother,” and “Ma.” I would have liked more information.

  Vacation apparel shops sold T-shirts with amusing messages like “I’m with Stupid” (rather than today’s snappy “F-You” tees that discriminating shoppers can find on, say, the Jersey Shore).

  There was a “ski” lift to the top of a small hill—and back. It would have been more exciting if hillbillies were mountain-billies. But, alas, absent mountains and skiing, this attraction didn’t last long.

  Dogpatch was something of a theme park all its own, a big souvenir store with a re-creation of a hillbilly town in back, plus Old Bob’s Cabin, a hillbilly jail, an animated graveyard with protruding, wiggling toes, and an outhouse occupied by a seated mechanical man who yelled when someone opened the door: “Hey, get outta here! Can’t you see I’m on the pot?” Ha! Out front was a mule the kids could ride and a real, live caged lion! The lion wasn’t really in keeping with the overall theme but was a helluva stand-alone attraction.