Lake of the Ozarks

by Bill Geist

  “Shut up, fry cook!” I shot back (not a snappy retort but the only thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment to insult a chef), causing Chef Glen to retort something about coming over there to kick my bony ass, and as a former boxer, he undoubtedly could have…except…I was thinking…he was a good thirty years older than me and almost certainly drunk. You could say Glen had an alcohol-based lifestyle, except we didn’t have lifestyles back then. He liked to drink morning, afternoon, and night.

  I took Sharon’s tray and set it—where? There was nowhere. I set it atop the garbage barrel.

  I suddenly noticed something both alarming and deeply distressing. Wheezer’s hot dishwater, now cool, looked like a vat of chicken noodle soup, cloudy with chunks of food floating in it.

  We had to drain the huge tubs and refill them, which would take a good six to eight minutes, time enough for us to be buried alive in dirty dishes.

  We were defenseless. The onlslaught of the big trays continued. I slid the next one under the washtubs. Then another and another, until I had to kick the dishes to make them stay put under there. Probably half of Arrowhead’s tableware was under the tubs and taking heavy casualties.

  I was later told it could have been even worse. Marilyn, a waitress, recalled a busy night when the dishwashers didn’t show up at all: “Dirty dishes were piled on every flat surface,” she said. Ethyl Pearl, who was a guest almost every summer weekend, went back in the kitchen to help.

  Wheezer was laughing uncontrollably, but then, he would. A lesser man might have cracked. Indeed, on just such a frantic moment on another busy night, Terry, a teenager from Webster Groves, Missouri, flipped out and began throwing dirty dishes into the trash barrel and smashing them with the end of a broom handle. It was like hand-to-hand trench warfare in World War I.

  “We kept running out of silverware,” Marilyn recalled, “until we discovered that the newly assigned dishwashers didn’t want to be bothered with it and were sticking it in the old coffee grounds and throwing it down the hill behind the kitchen.”

  There was always a good deal of plate and dish pilfering. Many dishes were shaped like arrowheads and women would furtively stick them in their purses or even down the fronts of their dresses.

  At long last, on our fateful evening, the restaurant finally closed, but for Wheez and me, our Arabian night at the washtubs had only begun. The much-hated, unwieldy, stubbornly filthy pots and pans awaited.

  Chapter Seven

  Another Day, Another Dollar

  We couldn’t complain. We were at the top of Ed’s pay scale: five dollars a day.

  For bellhops and waitresses (who made tips) it was one dollar. A buck. A dollar a day. You’ve heard the old expression “Another day, another dollar.” At Arrowhead it was more than an expression.

  “Hell, the bellhops at the Chase Park Plaza in St. Louis have to buy their jobs,” Ed reminded us, time and again.

  By now you must be asking yourselves: Why?! Why would anyone want to work so long and so hard for so little? With smiles on their faces?

  I’ve done a couple of TV pieces on ice fishing. Viewers see thousands of shivering men on a windswept frozen lake in Minnesota drilling holes in the thick ice and dangling lines down in hopes of catching a perch or a walleye and viewers ask: Why? Because men will do anything—anything!—to get away from their families and drink beer. Ice fishing proves it.

  Well, it turns out young men and women will too. A summer at Arrowhead offered an opportunity to be on our own and away from incessant interrogation from parents about where we were last night, with whom, what time we got home, were we drinking beer, and on and on.

  And, there is the distinct possibility that our parents didn’t really mind seeing us go.

  Most, perhaps all, of us were from middle-class families and trying to pay our way through college. Waitresses could clear from $1,000 to $1,500 for the summer, bellhops $800 or so. Now this may not seem like a lot, but at the University of Illinois in the sixties my tuition for a semester was—parents, do not commit hara-kiri—$135.

  We learned to work hard at Arrowhead. But we were free, unsophisticated, and easily amused (sounds like the title of a Clint Eastwood–Mel Brooks production), drinking lots of beer, laughing uproariously, dancing like wild banshees in the Pow Wow Room, pushing fully clothed, cavorting colleagues into the pool, heading down to Ron’s Town House (one account claims eight or nine passengers riding there in and on Bebe’s VW), a dance hall below the dam, having late-night repasts at Evelyn’s Rathskeller or “Sharpies” (El Sarape)…

  Now, to give Ed his due, it was $5 or $1 plus room and board.

  Board was anything we wanted for breakfast and lunch. Dinner was that day’s special. There were ways to supplement your diet. Annie’s extraordinary deep-dish apple pie with vanilla sauce was the most pilfered item in the kitchen.

  “I tasted my first lobster ever,” said Ellen, who worked in the kitchen and grabbed the crustaceans off trays of dirty dishes. How could anyone pay these prices for lobsters and then not eat them?

  Sadie, a head-turning beauty from Sedalia, had her mouth stuffed with hush puppies every time I glanced her way, which was quite often. She gained an estimated fifteen pounds on her summer hush puppy diet. It wasn’t always pretty, watching her wildly snatching the deep-fried dough balls as they rolled off trays toward the garbage.

  I would sometimes drop by the kitchen quite late when Glen was already in, preparing for the next day. We’d chat and sometimes out of the blue he’d ask if I was hungry—and who isn’t after a long night of carousing, with dinner but a distant memory eight hours before?

  Glen broiled a twelve-ounce steak, fried up some American Lyonnaise potatoes, and served me at a rusty old desk hidden from view way back in the rear of the kitchen. Despite the ambiance, those remain some of the best meals I’ve ever had. I made a habit of strolling through the kitchen late at night to say hello to Glen.

  For lunch and dinner, the grungier among us (outdoor workers) dined at a small banquet table on the She Shack screened porch next to mountains of dirty laundry. There was lively, if less than sharp-witted, banter. We seemed to always find ways to amuse ourselves.

  It was at this table where Wheezer and I created an act that would later (about fifty years later) be called the Aqua-Tones.

  We’d belt out the opening line from “Ebb Tide”: “First the tide rushes in…”

  Whereupon I’d pour—with gusto—the contents of a full water pitcher into Wheezer’s empty pitcher, from a good height to produce a hearty splashing sound as befits the tide rushing in.

  Then, the next line, “Plants a kiss on the shore,” and I’d slop a dainty amount, a kiss, into Wheezer’s pitcher.

  “Then rolls out to sea…and the sea is very still once more…” Heavy pour with abrupt stop.

  “So I rush to your side…”

  Wheezer pours with gusto.

  “Like the oncoming tide…”

  And so on, with increasingly sloppy pouring that ends with the finale: two of us pouring water on each other’s heads.

  It never really attracted a wide audience.

  Mealtimes, some including the Aqua-Tones dinner theater, were quite a departure from those back home.

  * * *

  That was the “board” part. As for “room,” the guys did their rooming on the lower level of Janet and Ed’s lakefront home, which upon entry was just a darkened basement with a toilet and an industrial-sized gray concrete washbasin for shaving and brushing teeth, and splashing on English Leather aftershave that we hoped would sway reluctant females. But the view brightened dramatically in the next three rooms, which had large windows looking out on the lawn and the lake.

  The rooms were filled with single beds, two in a dark, dank space beneath the garage next to a dark, dank shower where molds of the world were on exhibit. These beds were the last to be claimed.

  Next to last were two twins by the ironing board and washer-dryer. Although it must
be said that a dryer can have a beneficial lulling effect on those falling asleep or passing out for the evening. Bellhops wore white shirts, which we ironed ourselves and it showed.

  This whetted my appetite for a CBS piece on the increasingly (but still not very) popular sport of “extreme ironing” in England. I competed, ironing a shirt at the main gate of Windsor Castle as the palace guard looked on. They aren’t supposed to crack smiles but one did before bobbies ran me off. On that trip, I went for high tea at the five-star Brown’s Hotel where Ed served in World War II.

  Next, downstairs at Ed’s lake house, was a small and rather attractive room with its stone wall and the advantage of having just one bed (no roomies). This one went to the first male summer employee to arrive, at least until the one with the most seniority threw him out. The attractive private room did have the unattractive tendency to attract the occasional scorpion.

  The last room was a large, bright one with wall-to-wall-windows on two sides and five, six, or seven single beds lining the edges. They surrounded Janet’s art studio, where she painted rather ghastly works—you really had to see the clown portrait—that, when hung on the walls of the lodge with little portrait lights illuminating them museum style, somehow sold! I hadn’t yet learned that out there in the “serious” art world, preschool, refrigerator-door-quality paintings were sold to wealthy collectors for millions.

  The screened windows were open to catch the breeze. My screen was something of a work of art itself. Someone, probably me, regurgitated out the window one evening without realizing that the screen was there. When the screen was wiped clean: voilà! An impression that bore an uncanny likeness to Richard M. Nixon.

  Ed had a double dock for his twenty-two-or-so-foot Chris-Craft speedboat and his thirty-four-foot cabin cruiser. A houseboat was also docked alongside, that spot bestowed by Ed to Arrowhead’s best customer, Bill Justus, a doctor from Pleasanton, Kansas, who drove down to the lodge in his Corvette every Friday night for at least thirty-five years beginning in about 1955. In that golden age of playboys, Doc Justus was hall of fame caliber. He arrived and left alone. As Uncle Ed oft said: “Bringing a girl down here would be like taking a ham sandwich to a banquet.”

  Doc would ply the waters with music blasting, telling all the world the party was here! He’d have four or five beauties in colorful bikinis festooning the roof of his houseboat. How did he do it? The same scene every weekend. I went down once to cast them off and to see if the girls in bikinis just might be decorative blow-up dolls.

  Doc was not tall, dark, or strikingly handsome and walked with a slight limp. But he was cool, laid-back, fun, confident of the outcome. I lusted after some of these girls, but I looked and leered with no clue how to get to where I wanted to be. I needed and wanted everything to happen naturally and immediately. I figured, and quite rightly, I believe, that these tanned, sculpted goddesses might not be all that interested in a scrawny six-foot 155-pound kid with skin that was somewhere between ceiling white and translucent. I was considered funny, but these beauties dancing on the roof of Doc’s houseboat didn’t give a damn about that. They wanted beefcake. For me, summer was always the cruelest season. Days were worse than nights. I wore long pants rather than shorts even on the hottest days, to hide my skinny, pasty legs. I tried tanning cream one summer, but it proved closer to Sherwin-Williams than St. Tropez Whipped Self-Tanning Mousse and it collected at my elbows and knees, turning them a contrasting burnt umber hue. Plus I forgot to apply any to my face.

  Across the cove was Arrowhead Yacht Club, where some thirty or more cabin cruisers with catchy names like Boozin’ and Cruisin’ and Wet Dream docked. At night we could lie there in the dark, listening to the boats taxi slowly in and out of the cove. I especially liked the powerful low rumbling and gurgling the speedboats made as their exhaust pipes dipped in and out of the water. Once past the breakwater, which was a giant fallen tree lashed in place at the cove’s entrance, they’d hit the throttle and disappear with a roar into the night.

  You could hear revelers on boats coming a mile away. One night I waited on the dock for a boatload I was to drive to the lodge for dinner. The sounds of music and laughter grew louder and louder. Then a loud crash as the boat hit the breakwater at high speed. I ran along the shoreline to find their boat sinking but the passengers laughing and splashing about, by and large unharmed. Sometimes I got the feeling that God protects those who imbibe. But why?

  Although many a young woman had overnighted on Ed’s cruiser, none were allowed in the guys’ sleeping quarters. Were they allowed, they’d never have accepted the invitation. Ghastly things took place down there. It was no place for young women, or anyone really with a decent upbringing. For example, there were flammable flatulence competitions, which, I’m embarrassed to say, are highly entertaining to the unsophisticated.

  Around three forty-five each afternoon, a bunch of us would walk together up the hot, black asphalt road to the lodge for the evening shift. If I was going to work as a bellhop, I’d have on a starched white shirt that would be soaked with perspiration and wrinkled by the time we reached the top.

  On occasion, we’d break into song, making it up as we went along, a line sung by one of us, the next line by another and so on. It occurs to me now that those songs were akin to those sung by chain gangs laying railroad ties.

  Fourth of Ju-ly…

  Think that I’ll fry…

  Cuz it’s hotter than hell…

  In the Ozarks…in the summer.

  Makin’ a dollar a day, boys,

  Makin’ a dollar a day

  Boss has a yacht and a Caddy

  What more is there to say?

  Turns out the girls had their own song (sung to the tune of Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel”):

  Well, since Ed Popkess called me,

  I found a new place to dwell,

  It’s down at the end of Lake Ozark,

  Arrowhead Lodge!

  I’m makin’ a dollar a day, boy,

  Makin’ a dollar a day

  I’m makin’ a dollar a day, boy

  All the time!

  The bellhop’s tears are fallin’

  The desk clerk’s dressed in black

  They been so long at Arrowhead

  They never will get back.

  The waitresses are a-runnin’

  Their squaw skirts drag the floor

  Their silver belts are clankin’

  As they run through the door.1

  Ed Baskett’s2 always complainin’

  He says that life is cruel

  So last night when the clock struck twelve

  We threw him in the pool.

  The waitresses would also sing “Waltzin’ My Hoover” (to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”) as they vacuumed the dining room floor.

  * * *

  The girls roomed in one of two places. One was unfortunate; the other, even less fortunate: windowless rooms on the ground floor that they sometimes referred to as The Dungeon, with no lamps, only bare bulbs on the ceilings. This was where first-year girls stayed.

  There was a dark, narrow passageway behind the rooms that served as a closet and a path to a small bath. “How many girls did the bathroom serve?” Ellen, a maid, asked today. “Too many.”

  Annie also lived in a room off the tunnel. As did Glen, cohabiting at least one summer down there with his wife.

  Oddly, most Dungeon girls recall their summers down there rather fondly. “We laughed all summer,” said one. “We had cigar parties. We found all sorts of ways to be obnoxious.”

  * * *

  Having put in their time in The Dungeon, those who returned for a second year were customarily promoted from housekeepers to waitresses and were upgraded from their zero-star accommodations to, well, one star? The She Shack, a cottage out the back door of the kitchen, behind the trash barrels. Occasionally, a waitress walking to the Shack would be struck by refuse carelessly flung out the rear kitchen door. Marilyn, for example, was hit by a wine bottle.<
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  The two-room She Shack cabin comfortably accommodated four. But six to eight were crammed into the front room on bunk beds. The back room was a communal closet. They had to part some hanging clothes to get to the tiny, moldy bathroom. “You could sit on the pot, wash your hands, and take a shower all at the same time,” Gina, a waitress, recalled. No air-conditioning, just a fan. “Makeup would run down our faces as we tried to make ourselves presentable for work.”

  “Sometimes we’d find out what air-conditioned guest rooms weren’t occupied and we’d sleep in them,” Marilyn recalled. “A couple of times they forgot to alert us when they rented the rooms. There were surprises.”

  Chapter Eight

  Amateur Night in the Kitchen

  Chef Glen

  Most of the chefs and cooks I met at the lodge seemed to drink a lot—maybe it’s the heat—and, on occasion, go nuts.

  One drunken night Chef Glen decided to go to Hawaii, not an easy thing to do from Lake of the Ozarks. He got Slugger to drive him to Jeff City and from there flew—with any number of plane changes—to Honolulu. He debarked, walked to the nearest airport shop, bought three Hawaiian shirts, and flew back to Jeff City. The shirts looked like ones I’d seen at Kmart but the man was a slave to authenticity. Which is not to say he didn’t just buy them in Jeff City and lie about going to Hawaii.

  When he was drunk, he was most often a belligerent drunk. He got into altercations. His weapon of choice, what with being a chef and all, was a butcher knife. Never used it, he just liked to wave it in the air, to wield it.

  One such altercation was domestic in nature. Glen, stark naked, chased his wife down the basement hallway. A witness said she was laughing as she ran.