Lake of the Ozarks

by Bill Geist

  My favorite was the completely mystifying Mystery Spot, also known as Phantom Acres, where—don’t ask me how—water appeared to flow uphill—up! hill—and people stood at forty-five-degree angles to the floor.

  * * *

  I fell in love with all this and over time became something of a connoisseur, an aficionado of the tacky and outrageous, i.e., my America. Ultimately this became my beat as a newspaper reporter and TV correspondent. I wrote about a boom in plastic pink flamingos and how the fancier could tell a Chicago plastic flamingo from the species manufactured in Massachusetts. I identified the inventor of Twinkies who not even the Hostess corporation knew about. I had an exclusive on a suspected terrorist attack at McDonald’s corporate headquarters. A leather case left momentarily in the lobby was robotically removed by an overeager suburban bomb squad and exploded in a nearby field. It was Ronald McDonald’s makeup kit.

  I covered the Caesars Palace twenty-fifth anniversary gala in Vegas for the Tribune. Liberace and Donald Trump for the Times, Graceland and sofa-sized art for CBS.

  I mean, I was there…at WrestleMania I. And I’m not saying this makes me better than you, but I know, personally, Ron Popeil, inventor of the Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman. I interviewed him at his home in the Hollywood Hills for CBS. I own his Egg Scrambler, which scrambles eggs inside their shells. (Why ask why?) I have in my office the Popeil’s Sit-On Trash Compactor (in avocado, so it goes with everything): Remove top. Place trash in masher. Sit on top. Trash is mashed.

  At first, I was astonished that visitors to Lake of the Ozarks were actually purchasing Bagnell Dam salt-and-peppers and toothpick holders.

  But I found myself collecting such items, thinking (thinking?) that Americans would one day become too sophisticated for such tacky mementos and that such things would disappear altogether.

  I had this crazy idea, see, that mankind was evolving. That the human race was becoming better educated, more intelligent, more sophisticated. And get this! That television would play a key role in the process, by exposing the masses to culture: opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, theater, classic films, fine art exhibits, and the like.

  Has anyone ever been so terribly, terribly wrong?

  There’s a lot of money to be made betting against me. I advised the author of Chaos that I wasn’t at all sure there was a mass audience for a physics book. It was atop the bestseller lists for a year.

  An executive at CBS told me about the network’s idea for a new reality show called Survivor. After he explained it to me I told him I thought it was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever heard. It’s heading into its thirty-eighth season.

  Chapter Three

  The Tourist Trappers

  Who dreamed up all this stuff anyhow? No one completely normal. Not that I’ve come across.

  Larry Albright was one. He and other great minds of the midway met for coffee at the lodge—irregularly, as befitted this group of irregulars; these were gatherings of local entrepreneurs who wanted to keep abreast of the latest developments in the burgeoning tourist trap industry—and, when possible, steal each other’s ideas.

  When Uncle Ed somehow managed to procure a liquor license, the get-togethers moved downstairs to the new Pow Wow Pub, with Bloody Marys subbing for coffee. It became something of a Rotary Club for the functioning alcoholic.

  Several of these men were World War II veterans who’d returned home and found themselves ill suited for corporate desk jobs: “Paper pushing and kissing ass,” as one put it. Lake of the Ozarks was about as far from that as they could get; about as far from anything, come to think of it. In that time of conformity and the Organization Man, these guys were having none of it.

  They were people who lived by their own rules. They may very well have been some rare undiscovered strain of do-your-own-thing rural beatniks or hippies and not known it. A couple of them probably had PTSD but that hadn’t been invented yet. They were old school and probably wouldn’t have sought treatment for anything less than a missing arm.

  Living by your own rules can make life more interesting and more fun, but at times way more difficult than going with the soothing flow.

  I was already showing signs of a predisposition toward their philosophy of life when I met them.

  As an elementary school student, I sat in the hall a lot. Or the principal’s office. I was made to stay after school to clean erasers with the janitor. (Is it too late for me to sue the school district or the chalk industry for exposing me to Hazardous Dust Inhalation [HDI]?) In junior high, after-school detention became a regular part of my school day. There I hobnobbed with Edison Junior High’s all-stars of disruption.

  I recently found one of those wallet-sized photos, the ones we used to trade in school, of my homeroom teacher in ninth grade, Barbara Lee Schemmel. She wrote on the back: “To the most amusing troublemaker in 9-3.”

  She called me a “disrupter.” These days, start-ups in Silicon Valley proudly call themselves “disrupters” and make billions of dollars disrupting. It’s become a good thing, a questioning of the old, rusty, worn-out, and outdated ways of thinking about and doing things. It’s taken decades but I’m finally flattered.

  * * *

  Larry Albright was the acknowledged “Souvenir King” of the Lake of the Ozarks. And that was saying a mouthful.

  Next to him at one morning get-together was a lesser light, Al Huber, who had a myriad of micro-marketing schemes but none that were going to vault him into the Forbes 500. Still, the group gave him his due. He was trying.

  Conversely, there was Walt Tietmeyer, the mastermind of Dogpatch, that Ozark village replicated on the strip.

  Al Lechner was much admired by the others for having “a true gift” for attracting vacationers. Al brought the popular Phantom Acres to the strip, later renaming it the Mystery Spot, where gravity was reversed and water flowed uphill.

  Most people, including me, thought these guys were all nuts. The difference was, I liked them that way. And have never stopped. It took years—until quite recently, actually—for me to recognize the impact those summers at Lake of the Ozarks had on me. I can now trace the focus of practically my entire career back to this brand of characters and to my admittedly odd attraction to them.

  I later sought them out in the bland beige-ness of the suburbs as a columnist for the Chicago Tribune—and found them too: nonconforming misfits who refused to mow their lawns to the required length, rebels who flagrantly left their garage doors open in violation of local ordinances, painted their houses in unapproved hues; or placed illicit pink plastic flamingos in their front yards, not only because they were attractive, but sometimes just to flaunt their independence, to let their freak flamingos fly.

  Give me a renegade eccentric over a drab, rule-abiding conformist every time. I liked one-of-a-kind people who thought for themselves, sometimes inspired by genius, at other times by clinical insanity. At least they were alive. It made me think I was too.

  I discovered the inventor of Twinkies. Okay, he wasn’t Dr. Jonas Salk, but had it not been for my reportage, James Dewar would never have had an obituary in the New York Times.

  I wrote about a man who claimed alien beings were going to land in a spaceship (with a Dewar’s scotch ad painted on its side) in a remote suburban field to deliver the formula for powdered gasoline. Hundreds of people showed up, although the spaceship did not. The U.S. attorney’s office charged the man with running a scam; I charged the U.S. attorney with trying to protect the essentially unprotectable stupid idiots among us.

  I figured if these unique human specimens could be found in the suburbs they could be found anywhere.

  In New York if I didn’t have an aberrant subject for a column, I could just take a walk around the block. At CBS I followed their trails to the ends of the earth: Maine to California, Washington to Florida, Japan, Korea, France, Norway, Great Britain, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, Canada.

  In Bithlo, Florida, it was Robert Hart, who invented figure-eight school-bu
s racing. What a concept! “I won’t brake ’til I see God,” one driver told me. Hart’s only bow to sanity: no students on the buses during races. Yet.

  In Colorado, it was a couple of hard-luck entrepreneurs who finally hit it big by sucking unwanted prairie dogs out of their holes with an old sewer vacuum truck, then selling them through some sort of prairie dog broker to pet shops in Tokyo, which charged as much as $900 per pair.

  In Whalan, Minnesota (population: 62), local folk had always wanted to have a parade but couldn’t figure out a way to do it in a town less than two blocks long. It would be over before it began. David Harrenstein moved to the little town with a big idea: the “stand-still parade,” wherein the color guard, the grand marshal waving from a red convertible, marching bands, floats, horseback riders, and fire trucks (from other towns since Whalan didn’t have any) stood still when the parade started and the crowd walked around the parade.

  Hanlontown, Iowa, celebrated the day the sun set in the middle of the railroad tracks. (That was a close one. I’d flown halfway across the country and the clouds didn’t lift ’til ten minutes before sunset.)

  Nederland, Colorado, held Frozen Dead Guy Days. Thousands show up every year now to celebrate a young man from Norway who kept his deceased grandfather, Bredo, packed in dry ice in a backyard shed. Visitors pay to see the burial spot if not Grandpa Bredo himself-—too much ice piled on him. He’s still there, although one neighbor says Bredo may have experienced some freezer burn over the years.

  I profiled Judge Roy Hofheinz, a larger-than-life Texan who owned the Colt .45s (now the Astros) baseball team. He became so annoyed at the steam-bath climate and the large attack mosquitoes at the games, that he enclosed and air-conditioned a vast expanse of the Texas plains, the Houston Astrodome, the world’s first domed stadium. Outrageous idea back then.

  And Edward Bernays, “the Father of Public Relations.” You know how ophthalmologists said you were supposed to have a light on in the room when you watched TV? Well, it wasn’t ophthalmologists who said it. It was Bernays, who made that up when TVs hit the market and he was working for GE lightbulbs. Bernays was a pioneer of professional prevarication, there at the birth of this era of high-grade premium, professional, pervasive bullshit we now find ourselves buried in.

  Suffice it to say, then, that I had Donald Trump pegged from the moment we met when I was writing a New York Times Magazine cover story on him way back in 1984. Back then I found him most amusing. “Oh, Donald lies a great deal,” said world-renowned architect Philip Johnson, who was designing a castle (with a moat and a drawbridge) for Trump, “but usually it’s not about anything terribly important.”

  Alas!

  For me, it was something as goofy as the pro wrestling boom in the seventies that made me see just how far along we’d sped down bullshit highway. How had wrestling become so hugely popular when it was so obviously fake? People didn’t care. (Donald is a member of the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame and president of the United States.)

  Uncle Ed was considered something of a blowhard in his day but that was back when there was still shame, embarrassment, and the like. These days he’d be small potatoes, but he taught me by example the ways of the new world.

  I gave the commencement address a few years ago at the University of Illinois, where students knew the aroma of actual bullshit as it occasionally wafted through campus from nearby farms. But I sounded the alarm for them to be aware of virulent new strains of odious but odorless bullshit and to watch for it everywhere they stepped.

  Sophisticated bullshit, based on neuroscience and algorithms. Advertising and marketing campaigns that know what you want before you do. Dangerous military bullshit that convinces you war is exciting and will make a hero out of you. Costly bullshit that parts you with your money, while promising to “get the IRS off your back.” Fearmongering political bullshit. Pill pushers on TV (“may cause internal bleeding or death” but it might not) and personal injury lawyers, formerly known as ambulance chasers: “Have you been head-on’d, T-boned, rear-ended? Or maybe you’ve tripped on someone’s sidewalk?” Talk radio and TV bullshitters who tell you that their fake news is the real news and that the real news is fake news…and so on.

  To ward off today’s torrential bullshit you need the premium bullshit protection package. Earplugs to keep it out of your head and a Slomin’s security alarm system to keep it out of your home.

  The summer I was Arrowhead’s pool attendant I received my first lesson in commercial embellishment.

  Ours was the oldest swimming pool on the lake—circa 1948—with an antiquated filter system that required the continual adding of fresh water. There was no heater. The water came from a four-hundred-foot well; those of you who’ve tiptoed into Lake Superior have a good idea of just how cold the pool water was. The sound of a guest diving in went something like this:

  Splash!

  “Aieeeeeeee!!! Jesus Christ! Did some jackass turn off the heater?”

  “It’s solar heated,” I’d reply, which made it sound like we had some advanced enviro-friendly eco-heating system. Except we didn’t have enviro or eco anything back then.

  We had the sun, which did warm the water a few degrees in the days and weeks after the icy water was added.

  “Give it a few minutes,” I’d say, lying. Make that “fibbing.”

  I vacuumed the bottom of the pool, then skimmed the surface for leaves, drowned squirrels, and the occasional baby turd. Actually, the lone “baby turd” turned out to be a Baby Ruth candy bar Pete had tossed in to startle me, and it did. You may have seen this in the movie Caddyshack, but Pete Havely, my coworker, had conceived the concept decades earlier.

  I hosed down the concrete deck around the pool every morning and picked up empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. And every day I raked the three-foot-wide strip of sand around two sides of the pool, referred to as a “sand beach” in our brochure.

  “This is what you call a sand beach?” disgruntled guests would yell at me.

  If guests complained too much or too loudly within earshot of Aunt Janet, she became very defensive, getting up in their faces.

  The colorful brochure touted other imagined amenities such as “water-skiing instructor,” which always created a moment of panic when someone asked for a lesson, because there were no skis, no boat, and no instructor. If things got ugly, we’d use Ed’s speedboat and, although I was a piss-poor once-a-year skier who had never stayed up on one ski, I instructed on a couple of occasions. “Keep the tips up…tips together…don’t stand up…let the boat pull you up…bend your knees…don’t lean too far forward…or backward…let go of the rope when you fall…let go of the rope…for chrissake let go of the rope!”

  * * *

  Larry Albright was considered something of a genius amongst tourist trappers. Indeed, he wore his hair in an explosive Einstein cut. He was, if I may say so, on the rather dumpy and disheveled side in terms of physique and apparel choices. Not to mention said apparel was always covered with cat hair. He drove a very used (cars were yet to be “pre-owned”), golden-ish Cadillac with a leatherette “Landau” top, once part of the luxury package but was now peeling in an unsightly manner.

  Larry lived beneath his souvenir empire in two rooms he shared with his fifty cats. Five-oh. He built them an outdoor playground where they could snooze, climb carpeted poles, swat cat toys, and snooze. They lived on prime lakefront property but never swam. When he held them they ungratefully peed on his shirt. This did not stop him from wearing the shirt time and again.

  I loved hearing Larry’s tales, frequently tall, and he loved telling them, never quite the same way twice. Many tired of this. Not me, which was probably why it was me he invited for dinner. He plucked an orange-and-white long-haired feline from a pot and began to cook. When I told Aunt Janet about Larry’s dinner invitation, she remarked, “Eat first.”

  Larry told of his career in the restaurant business. His first two forays ended somewhat tragically, som
ewhat not, both restaurants burning to the ground, fully insured, after they’d closed for the season.

  “Thank God,” Larry said, “no one was killed.”

  “It’s a miracle,” I replied.

  His third culinary venture went belly up amidst scurrilous, unsubstantiated rumors started by a competitor that Larry was using roadkill in his entrées. Another competitor was said to have gone so far as to charge that he had seen traces of the Goodyear imprint on Larry’s “flank steak.” Larry recalled sitting on the floor in the middle of the empty restaurant taking long swigs from a bottle of cheap bourbon, throwing bottles of French dressing against the walls, and muttering repeatedly, “This has got to stop.”

  “But I couldn’t trust myself to stop,” he explained. “I wound up taking the drastic measure of sawing one leg off of each table in the restaurant, so I could never open another one.”

  A big question remains open to this day.

  Larry has a peg leg.

  Did he…by any chance…you know?

  Al Huber had big ideas for pulling customers off the highway to his small restaurant on the strip.

  “What I’m gonna do,” he whispered confidentially, “is put dirt from every state in the union in the flower box outside the front door.”

  His eyes widened and he nodded as if to say, “Is that great or what?”

  “That ought to really bring ’em in, Al,” Pete commented.