Cotter man recalls early tourism efforts

By The Associated Press

Can you imagine opening a resort on Bull Shoals Lake today without a telephone? Bill Jennings remembers the days, not so very long ago, when there was no phone service on the east side of the lake. The year? Circa 1965.

“I had a darkroom in the house,” Jennings said. “I bought a postcard-sized mimeograph and (photographic) postcard stock.”

Jennings, a resort owner on Bull Shoals Lake and avid photographer, took photos of the beauty that surrounded him every day, of the changing seasons, and sent picture postcards to a mailing list of potential customers almost every week.

“Dogwoods in bloom next week!” a postcard might read.

Jennings and his camera were instrumental in the early promotion of the Twin Lakes Area as a tourist destination. When pressed, he offers a wild guess that he taught “at least 1,000 kids” how to water ski.

Every summer afternoon at 1 p.m., Jennings gave water-skiing lessons on the dock.

“I had a two-minute routine,” he said, describing how he showed people on the dock what it would feel like to get up on skis in the water.

When the new skiers were ready, he fired up the ski boat and hit the water.

“I had my Nikon camera with a 400mm lens on the seat next to me,” he said. “I’d turn around and pop a picture of that kid on water skis.”

Jennings would put the photo on a postcard and mail it a few weeks later.

“They’d show that around the neighborhood,” he said, and the business came flowing in.

Jennings had a bit of training before he developed such tourism savvy. He and his wife, Polly, first visited Norfork Lake on a fishing trip in 1950. He was 22.

Before going home to Rapid City, S.D., Jennings bought 65 acres of land on the lake. He paid $75 an acre. By 1952, he was back for good as owner and operator of Plug and Paddle, a resort that was all about fishing. The three-cornered, flat-bottomed boats were all wood. (2 of 3)

“We didn’t have trolling motors then,” Jennings said. “One guy sat in the back of the boat and paddled. The others plugged the shore.”

Jennings says there were 1,800 people in Mountain Home (current population: 11,000) at the time, 10,000 in Baxter County (now 38,000). Most businesses were within a block of the square.

In the summer of 1952, Jennings bought a sportsmen’s shop with Dell Wood at the corner of Fifth and Main. They took their shop on the road in what they called “wagon-jobbing.” Wood took Norfork Lake. Jennings drove Bull Shoals Lake and covered two resorts in Cotter. They carried gas cans, boat paddles, anchors, bundles of lures, anything a resort might need, and stopped at every single one on the two lakes and the White River.

“There were no paved roads back then,” Jennings said.

In 1957, Jennings and his wife adopted two siblings — Robyn, 7, and Ryan, 2.

In the mid-60s, they bought a resort in Lakeview with eight units, a gift shop and a soda fountain — Jennings Lakeshore Resort.

“It’s amazing to me to drive through Lakeview now,” Jennings said, “and think about what it was like in ’65. It was buzzing, something going on all the time.”

Jennings was partly responsible for all that buzz.

His weekly rounds of the resorts in the area taught him a lot about what businesses needed.

“Every resort was trying to market their own little area,” he said. “I got them to join forces.”

Jennings started the Bull Shoals Lake-White River Association, an organization that has since evolved into the Ozark Mountain Region, to market the area as a destination. Sam Welch, known as the Ozark Fisherman, sent a weekly newsletter to 115 news sources.

“I think he coined the term ’lunker,’ “ Jennings said. “I never heard that term before he used it. A lunker was a fish four inches or more. On every front page, Sam listed people who caught lunkers and where they were from.”

Jennings also was the president of the Community Club, and at his resort, he scheduled activities every night — watermelon feeds, hayrides, Larry Nelson’s band.

“Every night we had something for people to do,” Jennings said.

Jennings’ contributions to the area didn’t stop when he moved to Cotter in 1984. When a planned gift shop didn’t materialize with his daughter, who fell in love and went another direction, Jennings went to work for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission conducting creel surveys.

On that job, he watched stocking boats, filled two-thirds with water and fish, become unseaworthy, and did something about it.

He made a better stocking raft.

Jennings’ boat had a net in the middle and a gate in the front that he could operate with a string from his seat. He could run the boat under the truck, fill it with fish and take it out on the river. The new raft allowed Game and Fish to stock various points on the river instead of only where the trucks had access.

“People would fight to get a good position near the truck,” Jennings said. He tried to tell them those weren’t the fish they wanted to catch. Not then.

The same people started following Jennings in his raft.

Today, at 83, after a stint as mayor of Cotter, Jennings still isn’t interested in retiring, but his knees make it difficult to get around like he used to, like he’d still like to.

“There were people who recognized what we had here,” Jennings said, “and let other people know about it.”

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