Lake of the Ozarks Page 4

  “You prob’ly oughta put up some sort of sign to let people know what they’re lookin’ at,” a fellow tourist trapper suggested helpfully. Noted.

  Al confessed that he was still about twenty-two states short. “Do you think anyone would notice if you put a bunch more Missouri dirt on the bottom?” another trapper asked.

  The flower box dirt medley was just for openers. Al had a million of ’em. “I’m gonna take frozen pies and put ’em in the oven about four in the morning, see, and take ’em out and sniff ’em like they’re real home-baked pies.” Pete and I nodded our approval.

  Al had noticed there was no beach at the lake, since creating sand required eons of pounding surf, not thirty years of gently lapping lake water. So he trucked in a couple tons, dumped it on shore, and voilà! Al Huber’s Play-a-Day Beach. “And that’s not all! I’m gonna row children out in the cove in the afternoon,” he explained enthusiastically, “and read them fairy tales.”

  Play-a-Day hung on for about ten years, not a bad run in the mercurial tourism trade.

  Al Lechner owned the most popular attraction on the strip: The Mystery Spot (or Phantom Acres). You know, the place where, inexplicably, gravity was reversed. Science held no answers. Al explained that a meteorite plummeted to earth, landing on the amusement strip, a mile south of the dam, next door to Dogpatch, reversing gravity and leaving just enough room for parking. No one was injured. I don’t know if this was the same meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs or not.

  Al and a partner, Lee Mace, originator of the popular Ozark Opry show, leased Indian Burial Cave where business picked up when Lee touted the cave to his sold-out audiences. And even more so when Indian bones began poking out of the ground near the cave’s ticket booth.

  An idea was floated for an underwater mermaid show, which, lo and behold, actually happened. Mermaids in the Ozarks! Attractive young women in mermaid suits swam underwater in a huge aquarium, taking hits of oxygen from a hookah to avoid drowning.

  A few wheeler-dealers had bigger ideas. They bought cheap land on uninhabited Shawnee Bend directly across the lake from the lodge. Shawnee was only about a mile by boat but eighty miles or more by car and no roads to get there. The property was almost worthless…unless…a bridge was built. And of course it was.

  Tex Varner and his wife, Hope, were virtuosos. Didn’t see much of Tex after his murder conviction. He and Hope had opened the Ozark Stampede, aka the Western Fun Rodeo, featuring bull riding, bareback bronco riding, calf roping, and steer wrestling.

  Hope kept things going while Tex was “away” with all-girl rodeos that included bullwhip demonstrations where the whippers cut a newspaper down to postage stamp–sized pieces; guest appearances by the likes of country star Porter Wagoner; and dog shows with a dozen or more at a time doing tricks. Posters also promised bear wrestling and mule diving but I never witnessed those. I still consider that a gaping void in my life, along with seeing the head-on locomotive wrecks they used to have at state fairs.

  “How’s it going, Mrs. Varner?” I’d ask when Hope walked in the front door.

  “Same ol’ same ol’,” she’d reply.

  Hope Varner was later inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. I had a crush on her. But I was born too late. I’m sorry now I never asked for an autographed picture.

  * * *

  Larry Albright said some of his greatest ideas, indeed one of the greatest concepts in tourist attractions since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, never reached fruition.

  He had his eye on an old wooden tourist boat, which he would rename the Oz-Ark and conduct fanciful tours unlike any before. He had in mind cutting a large hole in the center and covering it with Plexiglas.

  He looked up, closed his eyes, and began reciting the spiel he would have delivered to a packed boat at five bucks a head: “We are now passing over the lost city of Linn Creek, submersed in almost biblical fashion by the coming of these waters…Glimpses of this modern-day Atlantis can be captured through Aqua-Scope, the space-age window installed in the hull of this vessel.”

  He paused to gauge my reaction. I was spellbound. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “these fathoms are sometimes murky and Linn Creek cannot be seen. But postcards with drawings of the submerged buildings are available in our Neptune’s Corral gift shop as you debark.” The postcards would be free with the purchase of a box of Ozark pralines.

  He paused again before reciting the denouement, one that would have had all of central Missouri talking.

  “As we enter the next cove, keep your eyes peeled,” he said, “for that rarest of all breeds…the freshwater Ozark seal!”

  With that, Larry broke from his script, then let forth a long, loud belly laugh.

  “You’ve never seen an Ozark seal?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered. “What do they look like?’

  “It would have looked a lot like a kid like you swimming around with a brown hood over his face,” he said, “for a dollar an hour.”

  Chapter Four

  Uncle Ed

  Uncle Ed was in charge. No doubt about it. He was a colonel in World War II and never quite stopped being one. When he walked into a room you half expected everyone to snap to attention and salute. And so, I suspect, did he. He didn’t speak so much as he barked.

  He served in the Signal Corps as head of the army pictorial service in Europe. You’ve probably seen his work. It carried the History Channel for years and years. He had a library of film canisters full of priceless footage in his basement

  Famous Hollywood directors like Frank Capra, John Huston, and John Ford were actually under his command—at least on the organizational chart—making documentary, propaganda, and training films that were far more artistic than they needed to be: Capra’s Why We Fight; Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro; and Ford’s less heralded Sex Hygiene.

  “Really, Uncle Ed? You could give orders to Hollywood big shots? Oscar winners?”

  “Hellll yes,” he answered in a low-key, understated way he saved for dismissing obvious questions.

  One of my basement favorites was a reel of outtakes of Ronald Reagan giving a class to soldiers on some boring, pedestrian topic or other—the kind that put soldiers to sleep, causing them to fall out of the bleachers. Each time Ronnie tried to pull down a movie screen over a blackboard, the screen snapped back up and spun like a propeller. As gentlemanly as Reagan was said to be, on his third attempt he appeared to be saying “Son-of-a-bitch!” the flapping screen drowning out the audio. “Great guy…” Ed commented. Reagan had been to the lake, gone out on Ed’s boat, the Arrowhead, and signed the logbook. “…for a Republican,” Ed added.

  Uncle Ed’s war was longer than most. He had hotel suites in London and Paris, “stocked with scotch and Red Cross girls.” There are photos—not really incriminating, but they do show Red Cross girls and soldiers in dress uniforms drinking from highball glasses. Doubt you’ll ever see Uncle Ed’s war photos in a Ken Burns documentary.

  The story goes that he didn’t return stateside to his wife, Aunt Janet (my father’s younger sister), and his two stepsons, Art and Charlie (one from each of her previous marriages), until a year after VE Day.

  His war stories were different from most too. For example: “We were in a café in a small town in France drinking French 75s [gin, sugar, lemon, champagne]. The Germans were closing in. When the bartender stopped shaking the cocktail shaker we could hear their tanks rumbling toward the edge of town. As we ran for the door, I brushed by a girl on a barstool, who turned to me and said, ‘Kiss me, I’m comin’.’ So I did. And I’m pretty sure she did too.” Big laughs.

  The thing was, he first told me this one when I was fourteen or fifteen and I had no idea what he was talking about. Did “comin’” mean she was leaving with them, or what?

  “Those were different times,” he mused, reflecting on the psycho-sexual effects of the war on the local citizenry, one of the few experts on this particular subject I’ve encountered.

  “
In London and Paris the girls would go to bed with guys—hell, they’d suggest it!—because they weren’t sure they’d be alive the next day.

  “We weren’t either. In the Pigalle, the professional girls would tell us, ‘It’s only money, honey, and you can’t take it with you.’”

  On his triumphant, belated return stateside he led a convoy of trucks carrying French champagne and other spoils of war down Fifth Avenue in New York to the posh Pierre Hotel, where he set up a command post before eventually returning home to Illinois.

  His father, Pappy, owned the Dairyman’s Journal and a small resort hotel at Lake of the Ozarks, wherever the hell that was. I recall being at his home in East St. Louis when he told of the resort going to hell—bottle caps and cigarette butts around the pool—and in need of someone to run the place right.

  I don’t know what convinced Ed and Janet to go down there “amongst the brush apes,” as she jokingly referred to the local folks. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad alternative to traveling from farm to farm, small town to small town, selling ad space to teet squeezers.

  * * *

  Ed made a big splash in the small pond, living the life of a wealthy big shot while he was actually the owner-manager of a modest forty-one-room hotel in the Ozarks. Only a man like Ed could pull it off. And did he ever.

  He drove Cadillacs, two a year, a new convertible in summer, which he traded in for a new hardtop each fall, “when the ashtrays got full.” No one knew exactly what the deal was, but Billy Pearl, the Caddy dealer in Mexico, Missouri, came to the lodge a lot, staying in one of the best rooms, perhaps at a favorable rate.

  Ed bragged about writing off his clothing expenses on his tax returns, not to mention his thirty-four-foot cabin cruiser, on which he entertained “clients.” (And who among us is not a potential client of a hotel?) His yacht was not all that big by today’s standards, but bigger than most on the lake back then—and that’s what mattered.

  His payroll was seasonal, and possibly in violation of minimum wage laws. He hired college students each summer and paid them a pittance. In the lengthy off season, Ed and Janet traveled widely and extravagantly “around the world,” writing off their trips to Arrowhead’s ’Round the World Gift Shop, a ten-by-fifteen-foot shop on the front porch, possibly named by his tax consultant.

  Customers paid cash for rooms and meals; we didn’t really have credit cards yet. Leastwise, not down in those parts.

  Ed made a practice of taking a wad of the larger bills from the cash register and stuffing it into his front pants pocket (apart from the other proceeds, which were in a deposit pouch) before driving down to make his regular bank deposit. He often asked me to tag along.

  I remember thinking on those blissful rides that this must be what it’s like getting from place to place in heaven, sitting in the overstuffed red leather passenger seat of Uncle Ed’s big white boat of a car, a Caddy convertible, cruising smoothly and quietly on fat whitewall tires, the gently passing breeze barely detectable on those warm, sunny summer mornings.

  Ed wore sunglasses—back when only movie stars and Ed wore sunglasses—and silk floral shirts—way, way back before Jimmy Buffett. He wore Bermuda shorts and expensive leather sandals purchased in London. No other male in the Ozarks wore sandals. Well, one.

  Two fingers of his left hand rested lightly on the bottom of the steering wheel. Two fingers of his right cradled a cigar, as naturally as if he’d been born with it there.

  His hair was slicked straight back, reddish, like his thin mustache. The backs of his hands bore a few flaky red spots from too much sun, as mine do now, fifty years down the road. Back then there was no such thing as too much sun, even for us redheads.

  (We didn’t have SPF. Sun was good! Essential to life. Ancient cultures worshipped the sun. Who are these ingrates who would block the sun? One day, too much sunblock may be blamed for skin disease. But I digress.)

  A weighted cup holder straddled the center hump, holding an insulated plastic highball glass, filled—at 11:30 a.m.—with three fingers of Ballantine’s scotch and water.

  The top was down and the factory air conditioner on low, because Pierre, Ed’s miniature black poodle, liked it that way (Pierre dined on prime rib au jus for dinner). He had his rear paws on the back seat and his front paws on the center console. His ears were flapping gently in the artificial breeze. He seemed to be smiling.

  He went everywhere with Ed: in the car, on his cruiser, even perched, almost impossibly, on the slick, varnished bow of his speedboat.

  Once, when Ed was frantically trying to figure out who had driven off with his car from a party, someone suggested: “Maybe Pierre took it.” To which Ed replied: “No, he’s right here with me.”

  Ed turned into the unpaved parking lot at Bank of Lake of the Ozarks, kicking up dust. He flicked a switch beneath the steering wheel that triggered the sound of a cow loudly “mooing” (not standard equipment) under the hood.

  Colonel G. Edwin Popkess (“Popkess,” an English name) had arrived.

  He grabbed his money pouch and pushed open the hefty, vault-like Caddy door, whipped off his sunglasses, took the cigar from his mouth, and it was showtime! We burst into the bank with all the subtlety of Bonnie and Clyde.

  “Hello, Jimmy!” he bellowed at the bank president.

  “Morning, Colonel!” Jim shot back.

  There was a line at the teller’s window. For the other people. Ed handed the bank president his deposit pouch.

  “You bein’ a good boy?” Ed boomed.

  “Tryin’,” Jim said.

  “We had a helluva weekend,” Ed said. “Full up and two hundred and fifty people in the dining room Saturday night. Gonna be a helluva summer.”

  “Hope so,” Jim said, a bit sheepishly.

  “Hope so!?” Ed shot back “Hell, it gets bigger and better every summer. No hopin’ about it.”

  Jimmy counted out what money was in the pouch, and handed Ed a receipt.

  “Take care, old buddy!” Ed blared.

  “Hello, beautiful!” he shouted at a plain, middle-aged, chunky female teller.

  “Mornin’, Mr. Popkess,” was all the teller could muster. That and a full blush.

  “Hello, Johnny Boy,” Ed said, greeting Johnny Boy from the Sunoco station. Ed never forgot a name or a face. And treated everyone, from the bank president to a gas station attendant, the same. That’s something I picked up from him.

  In parting, Ed shouted to one and all: “You all stay out of trouble now!” And exited stage right.

  Other customers looked at us and each other, wondering just who in the hell were these guys anyhow?

  Darting out like we’d robbed the place, I headed to the car, shaking my head in disbelief as I often did after playing a bit part in one of Ed’s performances. I looked back and saw the extras staring out the window. The big Caddy kicked gravel back at the bank before blasting off up the highway.

  I really didn’t belong in that car. I don’t know who did, somebody probably, but it wasn’t me.

  * * *

  In a word, Ed had it “dicked,” as folks in these parts called that blissful state of serenity and well-being that comes with having it all—and knowing it.

  A lot of guys working at the lodge wanted to grow up to have it dicked just like him. One managed to do it. Jim Chappell opened a highly successful sports bar in Kansas City, Chappell’s Restaurant and Sports Museum, where he was the boss, entertained people, and traveled the world. Just like Ed, who told Jim to call when he was a millionaire. He did.

  Others tried their own misguided ways to be like Ed, such as taking hotel management courses, where they teach things like saying “my pleasure” no matter what the request.

  Maybe you’re calling the front desk to tell them that your toilet’s overflowing and horrible wastewater is flooding your entire room and they must fix it immediately and the clerk says sweetly: “My pleasure, Mr. Geist.” They can’t teach you to be Uncle Ed.

  Ed and Janet lived in a
handsome stone and dark wood lakefront home with a spacious screened porch that jutted out into the high branches of tall, leafy trees. A four-seat rail tram transported passengers some sixty feet down to his covered dock. Seems ridiculous until you need to go up the hill after a day of cocktails aboard the Arrowhead.

  On a typical workday (half a normal person’s workday; dicked) Ed awoke in the morning and called the hotel—my cue to deliver his pot of coffee and newspapers. (I’ll take a wild guess and say he was probably the only Wall Street Journal subscriber at Lake of the Ozarks.)

  He wanted his morning delivery pronto so I drove the lodge station wagon as fast and recklessly as possible down the narrow curvy road, the coffeepot wedged tightly between my ankles to keep it upright against the g-forces on the curves. Some mornings the g-forces won and my feet were bathed in scalding coffee. “Aieeee!” I’d scream and do a one-eighty for a refill.

  Opening his porch door set an attached bell jingling, announcing visitors. And there he was, sitting at the kitchen table looking almost Hefnerian in a purple silk bathrobe. He was a little gruff in the mornings as you might expect of someone who drank as much scotch as he did, and was especially cranky on paydays.

  The kitchen was always spick-and-span. Janet never cooked. Ever. “Take a look for yourself,” she laughed, “the tags are still on the pots and pans.” She and Ed ate every meal out, usually at the hotel.

  He’d drink the entire pot of coffee and start to twitch a little. Twitching was not good. It was a warning sign that he was agitated and not to be messed with. Back away slowly. Scotch would later take the edge off.

  His commute to work was about three minutes (dicked). He had no one to answer to so he could report when he damned well pleased (dicked), although his military mind-set had him arriving within five or ten minutes of zero-eight-hundred hours most every day.

  His eagle eye never missed a blemish. He’d barge through the front door and bark: “Billy! There’s a cigarette butt under a rocking chair on the porch. And a beer bottle in the bushes. This isn’t some damned honky-tonk!”