by Bill Geist
Ed passed away shortly thereafter at age eighty. I recalled him telling me: “When you bury me, pour some scotch on the grave—and don’t let it pass through you first.” We did.
On my last trip to the lake, I rented a boat and found the lake to be swarming with thousands of boats. You really needed rearview mirrors and turn signals. Some days, they say, it seems you could walk across the hulls from one side of the lake to the other. On the Fourth of July literally thousands of drunken sailors, or powerboaters rather, jam into Party Cove. Picture Mardi Gras with everyone on Bourbon Street driving a boat.
Some vessels are big enough these days to qualify as oceangoing: fifty-five feet or so. Pilots seem to purposely set their throttles for maximum wakes, creating four- or five-foot waves that swamp small craft and destroy docks. Boaters die here with some regularity. The cigarette-style boats are deafening and can easily outrun police boats—and helicopters. Top speed: 244 miles per hour.
Homes sit dock-to-dock for miles on Shawnee Bend where there were nearly none before the toll bridge There are some high-rise condos over there now and stoplights.
I strolled the large vacant expanse where Arrowhead once was, trolling for memories. But there was really nothing left to see, nothing identifiable, no reminders to tug at my heartstrings, to conjure all of those memories of summers long ago. Nothing but the barren emptiness.
Jim Chappell visits the sacred ruins of Arrowhead Lodge.
An arrowhead-shaped stone flower bed that had been just outside the front door was all that remained. The big arrowhead neon sign that rose twenty-five feet out of the flower bed was gone, replaced by a small “For Sale” sign.
I sat down on the stone flower bed. I felt numb. This was nowhere I’d been before. I guess that the passing of people and places we love, over time, loses some of its power to break our hearts. Take that, death.
I recalled thinking way back that this rustic old lodge made of rough-hewn local trees and stone was the only thing that looked like it really belonged here.
I remembered thinking that perhaps it would come back into vogue as vacationers tired of the chain motels and longed for something historic and real.
But the tide of souvenir shops, go-cart tracks, and mini-golf courses on the strip now flows all the way to the spot where Arrowhead Lodge once was. It had become what no longer belonged.
Postscript
Everything changed when I was dropped off at Arrowhead Lodge that first summer.
At home, I did nothing. I’d say “next to nothing” except “next to nothing,” while very close indeed to nothing, is not close enough.
I rose late and the first thing I didn’t do was make my bed. In a few hours, it would just be messed up again. What is gained?
Sometimes my mom would give up and make it herself. And since she was in there anyway, she picked up my dirty socks, washed them and hung them out to dry on a clothesline with clothespins. She ironed. She folded. She shopped, cooked, washed, and dried the dishes (with her dishpan hands).
At the lake I found myself suddenly and rather shockingly on my own. I had counted on freedom from home and parents being one of the very best aspects—besides beer—of spending the summer away. But what about all of these relentless, nagging chores? Day in and day out. Who washes the socks?
I always thought that the message you see on those join-the-army the posters, “Freedom Is Not Free,” was just a recruiting gimmick. But, no. There is a price to pay for freedom.
My family said everything changed.
I took that to mean things like ironing, which I’d never done before. But they meant more important things, fundamental, life-changing things.
But first, about the ironing. I’d never touched an iron let alone tried to use one. As a bellhop I had to wear a starched, ironed, wrinkle-free white shirt every day. And, as mentioned earlier, we had to iron our own shirts ourselves!
One bit of good news: I was pleased to learn that starch was no longer boiled and stirred in big black iron vats like the settlers did. Or was that laundry?
Today, we have spray starch. But, as I learned through trial and error, you have to keep the iron moving. Linger for a split second and you leave a big ugly brown burn mark. The face of the iron resembled the shape of an arrowhead so when people remarked on the unsightly burn I would explain that it was the Arrowhead Lodge logo. (Not sure if we had logos back then. I think we did but didn’t know they were called logos.)
Now, about those life changes.
My cousin Charlie, Janet’s son, put it this way: “Arrowhead Lodge was the beginning of Billy Geist.” He took my brother, David, and me nude water-skiing.
“Your parents were good parents, good people, they just didn’t quite get you,” my son, Willie, says.
In contrast to my quiet home life, Arrowhead was a lively, happy place, albeit with lots more hangovers. There was lots of laughter, most prominently Ed’s distinctive booming: “Ha!-Ha!-Ha!”
And Janet and Ed got me. When I saw either one of them my brain would turn to the Amusing Things setting and I’d say something that would make them laugh or smile. Soon enough I was doing that with everyone. I became a Funny Person. People would start smiling when they ran into me. I liked bringing a smile. This was working out well.
I’d always been funny—hell, I was funny in Bible school—but I usually had to pay a price for it. Now, it was appreciated and rewarded.
It got to the point where I didn’t need an audience. I’d think of funny things when no one was around and laugh inwardly. I could amuse myself.
I wrote down some of it. I remember writing a skit in high school for our senior class assembly, which included a bit about the amorous relationship between our red-haired and highly unpopular Dean of Boys and an Irish setter. I flopped on my bed when I wrote that and yelled inside my head: “That is funny!” That’s the reward. Like the Aha! moment when that inventor guy said, “Come here, Watson. I think I’ve invented the telephone.”
My red-haired grandmother, Nell, knew what time it was. She got me. She gave me a book of poetry. She’d marked the page with this poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For this sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
“The lake gave you the confidence to run with it,” Jody says.
That confidence led me to start writing humor, even after one teacher told me, loudly enough for the whole class to hear, “You’re never going to get anywhere writing funny little stories.” Next year, different teacher, I wrote a funny short story and got an A. To that point English class had largely meant diagramming sentences, which I had no interest in doing. Still don’t diagram well.
Of course not everyone “got” it. I wrote kind of a New Journalism piece for a college feature-writing class on a colorful little barbecue shack (“We barbecue anything that walks, swims, or flies”) where all sorts of people of all ages and backgrounds—black, white, cops, professors, high school coaches, kids—jammed into ten seats, mixed, talked, and dined together, probably the only place in town where this happened. My journalism instructor didn’t like it. Said it wasn’t really news. So, I wrote a drowsy three-part series on the diminishment of privacy in our society. A-plus.
The Tribune got it, eventually. The New York Times got it most days, although there were numerous skirmishes with editors early on. CBS got it, although at the outset there were a couple of producers who were pretty sure I was ruining the Sunday Morning program. But the next thirty-one years went more smoothly.
As I learned from those entrepreneurs at the Lake of the Ozarks way back when, life is more difficult and rewarding and fun when you manage to do things your way. I think Frank Sinatra probably said this more eloquently and melodically.
Through my crazy poems, I met a beautiful woman whose most prized attribute in a man was his sense of humor. Her whole family felt that wa
y. Her father was funny. Her mother was funny. Her siblings are funny.
And she maintains that the “Arrowhead Lodge Effect” continues. We had two children, Willie and Libby, both funny. They’ve given us four grandchildren: Lucie, George, Russell, and Billy. All funny as hell.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, Uncle Ed and Aunt Janet, my second set of parents.
Jody, who throughout our forty-eight years together has never mounted a serious legal challenge to the “for better or worse” clause in our vows.
Our children, Willie and Libby, both talented, smart, thoughtful, accomplished, funny, and somehow humble. When the book sounded like a crabby old geezer from the mid-1900s (which I am), they told me so.
A multitude of the dearly departed who waited decades for me to find the time to write this book but finally threw in their towels.
My brain surgeons. If this book isn’t all that you’d hoped, you can always reach them at home.
Tom Connor, my agent for nine books over nearly forty years.
Gretchen Young, my overly understanding, at times almost saintly, editor at Grand Central Publishing, her biblically patient colleague, Emily Rosman, and many others at GCP, to include Ross McDonald, who designed this, my favorite of all my book covers.
Gina Chappell, former Arrowhead waitress, who with her husband, Jim, organized a reunion of former employees and shared her tales and photos.
All other former Arrowhead colleagues who also shared, to include Pete Havely, Tim (Wheezer) Short, and another Bill, who has to run for his public office and wisely requested his full name not be used.
Dwight Weaver, Lake of the Ozarks historian.
About the Author
Bill Geist is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books. He has won numerous Emmy Awards for his pieces on CBS Sunday Morning, as well as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bill was awarded the Bronze Star for service as a combat photographer with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1969.
He wrote a column on suburbia for the Chicago Tribune and the About New York column for the New York Times before joining CBS in 1987.
Bill has been married to Jody for more than forty-eight years. They have two children (Willie and Libby) and four grandchildren (Lucie, George, Russell, and Billy) and live in Riverside, Connecticut.
Books by Bill Geist
Good Talk, Dad: The Birds and the Bees…
and Other Conversations We Forgot to Have
(written with son Willie Geist)
Way Off the Road
The Big Five-Oh!
Monster Trucks & Hair-in-a-Can:
Who Says America Doesn’t Make Anything Anymore?
Fore! Play: The Last American Male Takes Up Golf
Little League Confidential
City Slickers
Toward a Safe & Sane Halloween & Other Tales of Suburbia
Praise for
Good Talk, Dad
“I love this book. It’s no surprise the Geists have such broad appeal. I want them to be my dad and brother.”
—Jim Gaffigan, author of New York Times bestseller Dad Is Fat
“Bill and Willie are the wittiest duo I know. Their stories are hilarious. Reading this book made me feel like I grew up a Geist!”
—Andy Cohen, host of Bravo’s Watch What Happens: Live and author of New York Times bestseller Most Talkative
“Affectionate and raucous.”
—Chicago Tribune
“[D]elightful…it is lovely, loving, and a must read.”
—Star-Ledger
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1 Sometimes sung as “As they pull up their drawers.”
2 Ed Baskett was an easy-to-tease bellhop from Sabetha, Kansas.