Renowned journalist, author, and CBS This Morning correspondent Bill Geist spent seven summers at Lake of the Ozarks in his teens and early twenties, working at Arrowhead Lodge, owned by his Uncle Ed. Now, more than half a century later, Bill has released a book full of memories, titled Lake Of The Ozarks: My Surreal Summers in a Vanishing America. Told in an easy, "then there was the time when..." style, the book's tone is simultaneously nostalgic, amused, wistful and amazed—at how things used to be and how they've changed.
We caught up with Bill, and here's what he had to say about Lake of the Ozarks memories, the current state of the family vacation, and more. (The conversation has been lightly edited for readability.)
-
N - What would you say the book is actually about?
B - Well I think it’s pretty easy if you boil it way down, it turned out to be a memoir, and I didn’t know I was writing a memoir when I started writing it, but it’s just an account of a different time and a different place. When Lake of the Ozarks was different, when I was a teenager — early 20s, maybe — and it was just about my experience down there, and I think… if you wrap it all up, some of it might just be that you can’t go back again, that it’s all very different. People ask me, “Where can we go now to go to a place like this?” I don’t think you can… My uncle and all the people… the souvenir guys down at the dam… they were all such a distinct group of people, a “cast of characters” as I say, that I don’t think you can replace it. So I guess it’s just about another place at another time. It’s really simple.
N - What was the trigger, or finally the moment where you realized that this was the book you needed to write?
B - My son jokes about this, but I’ve been thinking about it for 40 years. It’s hard to believe. I went down there in the late ‘70s when I worked at the Chicago Tribune and took notes on the rocks and the trees, none of which ended up in the book. But 10 years later, I left from New York Times to go to CBS, and somebody wrote in the paper “He’s leaving the Times and he’s gonna work for television and write this book about Lake of the Ozarks.” So I mean, I had it pretty firmly in mind for a long, long, long time. The final trigger was I’ve got Parkinson’s disease now… and I had to retire last fall in September. So I finally had the time for the first time in all those years to really sit down and do it. So that’s what happened.
...This is my ninth book. Most of them are collections of written accounts of things I wrote about in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times… But what I’ve come to realize is all these people that I’ve been chasing around, these crazy people, it kinda grew out of my experience down at Lake of the Ozarks and Arrowhead Lodge, just meeting all these people. I love all the characters, as maybe you’ve been able to tell.
N - So much of what I read was a coming-of-age story, and so how was Lake of the Ozarks the right setting for that period in your life?
B - I don’t know if it’s right, I don’t know if “right” is the right word for it. It was certainly very different. It altered everything we were learning about drinking. Well, people down in the hills probably drank pretty early. But at 15, we were bartenders at cocktail parties out by the pool, and drinking and going crazy every night together. That’s one reason they kept coming back — the money was not good but we had a lot of fun, and the group looked forward to getting back together every year.
N - Do you remember what years it was that you were there and your age when you were down here?
B - I think it was seven summers being in 1960 to 1967. So in ’60 I was fifteen, and you do the math.
...Back in the old days, people didn’t have [as much] money. There was something called millionaire’s cove that we’d go by on the Lake. [Now we look] out there and say, “What’s the big deal?”
N - Right.
B - These are not mansions
N - Yeah, “only a millionaire?” Come on.
B - Yeah (laughs) someone reminded me the other day that “millionaire” can’t or doesn’t describe anybody these days… That don’t mean they’re rich. Like a billionaire. And as I said, some of the boats, we were down there three years ago, and these 55-foot yachts and stuff like, geez! I had my uncle with a 34-foot yacht, and it was a big deal because it was bigger than most of the boats on the Lake and that’s all it had to be.
N - What was it then about Lake of the Ozarks do you think, in that nostalgic period like 50s, 60s, maybe 70s, what was it that captured people? What was it that was so captivating about this place?
B - People didn’t have as much money. People would come across the dam in their station wagons, and the kids would start yelling, “Stop! We gotta go for a boat ride!” It was a craving. It was kind of a carnival atmosphere, and the Lake, as I say, was very pretty. I wrote something, once that, “Rarely does man improve upon nature.”… But down there, they really did. The Lake was a lot more beautiful than the land was before it.
N - Flooding the river valley, even though it was controversial, was actually a good idea.
B - Yeah, I think it was beautiful. We sat up right where you are now, just up the hill, and look out there and could see nothing, there was no man-made object for three miles down the river.
N - So, your subtitle was Surreal Summers in a Vanishing America. What about America from those memories is vanishing?
B - Well I think the place down there — again, you can disagree on some level, but I think the people are not the same — it’s just different, and it was cheaper and it was fun, basic stuff. For one thing, you go home now and watch television and you see everything on television. Everything is exciting and people jumping off cliffs (laughs) and doing all kinds of things, and that was a… a simpler time, it really was.
N - People resonate with the nostalgia of those days: the 50s, 60s, and even early 70s. There’s something that resonates with people about those days. Is that just a looking at the past with rosy lenses thing or was there something special about that era?
B - I think so. I think you’re right on both accounts. Some of its just rose-colored glasses, but I think a lot of it—well for one thing, when you get older like myself, you don’t have those experiences anymore, you kind of long for the old days. And as we’ve talked about on the phone here, simpler times and doing more things with your family and friends. It doesn’t have to be expensive things. I don’t know.
N - Are we better or worse off now in terms of how Americans vacation?
B - I think we’re a little worse off. I think the whole thing was there wasn’t much money around so families would hang out together and do things together. Where now it’s almost become a right of passage to spend five-grand and fly your family down to Orlando and take everybody. That couldn’t be farther from Lake of the Ozarks. I think it’s just changed dramatically, just like the country has changed. The houses are bigger, people have more money, but I don’t think we’re any closer as people.
N - I think anyone would benefit from reading your book, just to read great stories. How would you pitch this to a reader? Why should somebody read this? Why is it important?
B - I think for fun. I think it was a different time and place and an interesting time and place. The characters were interesting, the place is interesting, and it wasn’t like every other place. And I think it’s just it’s really—there’s nothing dramatic. It’s not gonna empower you, or you’re not going to lose ten pounds. But I think just for the fun of it and reading about things the way they were. And a lot of things register with people even though they were probably half a country away.
