Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - Bill Geist

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

In this special episode of "Sunday Sitdown," Willie Geist sits down with his dad, Bill Geist, to talk about his new book "Lake of the Ozarks." It's a hilarious memoir nearly 40 years in the making about Bill's teenage summers working at his Uncle Ed's Arrowhead Lodge in Missouri. He talks about how the characters he encountered there shaped his sense of humor and led to a 31-year career covering unique stories for CBS.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here. Thanks for clicking and listening along again this week to a bonus episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. And it's my favorite one ever. There I said it. We've talked to a lot of people, but there's none bigger than this because it's my dad, Bill Geist. Many of you know him from his 31 years on CBS News on another show that came on Sunday mornings and I'm told still does from time to time. Maybe you know him from his books, from his column in the New York Times, or if you're really old school, I'm talking 1970s old school. You know his column in the suburban tribb in Chicago. He's got a new book out right now. It's called Lake of the Ozarks. It's a memoir of his high school and college years working at his Uncle Ed's Arrowhead Lodge at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. These are stories I've been hearing about literally all my life.

And my dad now, since he retired from CBS last year, finally had time to sit down and write him. And I have to say I'm a little biased. It is absolutely hysterically funny. He thought it was going to be glamorous and glorious going down to work at the lake as a teenager. And he found when he got to Uncle Ed's Arrowhead Lodge, his first job was to go out and rake over the septic field behind the lodge. A lot of that, a lot of great stuff. And so fun just for me on a personal level to get to sit down for my dad.

We're sitting in the living room of his house. A lot of you know as well that he's been battling Parkinson's disease for the last 27. years. He's been doing national television pieces bravely going out, traveling the country with his Parkinson's. And I'm just so proud that he sat down and wrote this book that he's been thinking about and wanting to write for my entire life more than 40 years. And it's here now. The book is called Lake of the Ozarks. And here right now, my gosh, I can't believe I'm saying it, on the Sunday Sit Down podcast, my dad, Bill Geist. Thanks for having me over. Have you have you have you home.

Is it weird to have all the cameras back in your house? Yes, it is. It's very weird. It's so flashback to when you used to be eating breakfast and there'd be a camera crew in the kitchen shooting something. I think it's why you're at ease around the cameras. It just became part of our lives. You'd come down for school and there'd be a setup like this with lights and audio guys.

Photographers and everything else. Yeah. Can you believe it's here? No, I can't. How long did this take? Well, I typed very slowly. I typed 10 to 15 words a minute. And I also wanted to get it right.

So it took about 45 years, which is not bad for 200. People are going to think you're joking. 200 pages. It took 45 years. You showed me the thing from 1987 when I left to New York Times and said I'm leaving to work in TV and to do my book and describe the book. And this was a book. That was 30 years ago? Yeah.

I was down there taking notes 10 years before that, so it's at least 40 years. 40 years. And it's 50 years since this stuff happened. Yeah, I came across that sometime in the last few months, and one of the papers where it said Bill Geis is the evening in the New York Times. And it was specific about this book. I know. He's going to do TV work for CBS, but also to write a book about its years at the Lake of Nios.

Yeah, exactly. So here it is. Well, the only problem was it taking so long is that many of the people who died. Right. So they're not going to be able to read it and enjoy it. You don't have the primary source. You might have had 40 years ago. All right.

So before we get to Lake of the Ozarks, because this story is really about who you became there over all those summers, tell me about your home life in Champaign, Illinois, what it was like there and who you were in that house. It was quite different. It was very, my parents were salt to the earth, hard work, people, nose to the grindstone,

and not a lot of fun. They were great people, but they were, They were not a lot of fun. Life was a little boring in Champagne. We used to play garage ball and stuff in the middle of the summer when I had two kids to play baseball. And so there wasn't a lot to do. And when we got this, my uncle said,

why don't you come down, work at my resort. Bing, ding, me, like the resort sounded great. You know, it sounds really like a lot of fun. We thought it was going to be terrific. I even got a friend to go with me. And so this started when in high school? Yeah, the high school and college, the summers of high school.

in college, but seven summers. And what did your mom and dad say when you said, I'm going to go spend the summer with Uncle Ed at the Lodge? They didn't look disappointed. Really? I think they were just as happy to get me out of there as I was to get out of town. Do they know all that it meant to be with Uncle Ed? A little wild.

I think they did. They'd been around him for a while. They knew him. He was a colonel in World War II, and he came home a year late because he was having so much fun at his place in London and Paris. So he came, so he was kind of a playboy. crazy guy and he would come and visit us and I remember I have an image of him coming in the front door for Christmas time flipping silver dollars in the air my brother and I are guiding for the silver

dollars so he would get him first he was like a big shot he was like born to be a big shot in a small pond down there but and that comes back in a minute we'll see that again at the lake of the Ozarks the flipping the coins to people as he walks into the bank is it fair to say that in champagne you were funny but you didn't really have an outlet or maybe that your sense of human or wasn't as appreciated around the dining room table as it was at the late. The dining room table, my dad once said to me, do you say everything that comes to your mind? Oh, boy, this is going to be tough.

And then at school, I'd go to school, and I went up sitting out in the hall or down the principal's office, and so it wasn't exactly appreciated, no. And your dad and Uncle Ed couldn't have been more different. Completely different. Your dad is a print shop teacher. My dad was horrified by some Uncle Ed's story. Uncle I would talk about writing off his clothes

and his cabin cruiser and all that. My dad would sit there and I could just see him. I think he was getting incensed by all this. Like he's not a regular salt of the earth, middle American like the rest of us. That Uncle Ed wasn't that? Yeah, no, not at all. So your dad believed in just doing things by the book.

Yeah, he was a good man. He went to work every day, brought home his paycheck, put it on the table. And it was great, but he was strictly by the book. He would play the piano. He played the piano. He used to play the piano with his eyes closed. Or he'd go down in his dark room. He had a dark room in the basement.

was a door closed. I think he was safely away from all of us. And I think he was, he was a high school teacher. I think he was glad after chasing kids around all day to be home and away from kids. There's a great scene in the book, and you talked about it before, where your dad's down in the dark room, and you don't know what's going on on the other side of the door, and all you hear is jazz coming out from a movie. If you play it on the radio, the jazz shows from high atop to some hotel in Chicago and he'd be listening to them. And we'd hear those as we go by. But we weren't allowed to go in because we were in all his photographic,

his printing and picture. And as you say, he might have liked it that way. I think he didn't mind that. So just to orient everybody, what time, so you're in high school, so we're talking about early 60s? It was mainly the 60s. It was mainly in 60s, yeah, like 60 and seven years.

So what were you like the first summer, 15 years old, 16, something like that? Yeah. And what do you remember about your first time seeing the lake? Well, we had some, we thought it was, my friend and I thought it was going to be speedboats and girls in bikinis and being a lifeguard, whatever, having a really great life and wild. And I got down there and they gave us a couple of shovels and some boots and pointed us out to the open-air septic system where the water was collecting on the surface and we had to wade in and churn the sand. And so it would seep in. I said, I think, where are the girls in bikinis?

When does the nepotism was my uncle kick in? But that was a rude awakening. And then in the afternoon, we'd haul laundry out, dirty laundry out to the trucks. And then at night we'd probably wash dishes or on some nights when the chef, chef, chef Glenn, we'd walk by the pool and we'd notice he was laid out by the pool. Had two too too many to drink. He had a lot to drink every day. and some days it was just too much

he couldn't make it back to the kitchen so he'd be laid out like at a funeral home out on his hands crossed over his chest and laying out there by the swimming pool so some days we knew when we saw that we knew we were going to have some cooking which weezer my friend he was at asthma

and very sensitively his friends called him weezer so we'd go in and we'd go in and cook and it was just a madhouse said, we'd shake, the steaks would come out looking like pieces of charcoal. Did you have any experience cooking prior to running that kitchen? Weezer had worked in the morning. He knew how to cook an egg.

He couldn't flip one over, but he could, he could cook an egg. And I couldn't do anything. I'd had craft macaroni and cheese my whole life. So how does that work? You're out by the pool during the day. You see the cook passed out because he's had a bunch of beer, scotch or whatever. And Uncle Ed says, Billy, you're in, go cook.

Yeah. With no training. One of his associates, my uncle's associate. He gets talked directly to my uncle. And so you're expected to somehow know how to cook everything on that menu. I don't think there's a lot of thinking involved in it. It'd be like Saturday night in August. It would be 250 people coming in for dinner.

And we were back there just going wild, just being totally driven out of our mind. Just churn it out. Just churn it out. Did you get some complaints? Any food sent back? We did have a number of things sent back. A lot of them said this isn't my order. It can't be.

It doesn't look anything like what I ordered. I thought it was going to look like. I guess if you get a pile of charcoal when you order it to be a T-bone, you might say that. I want to stake on top of the charcoal, not the charcoal itself. So, yeah, yeah, we got a lot of complaints. And one of the waitresses said when the night was over, he said, we made it. I don't think we've got any repeat customers. No repeat customer.

You referenced it at the beginning of your answer, but we have to go back. really talk about the chili pond because as long as I have memories in our family, the chili pond has been right up near the top. And that is the septic field. Yeah. And the term chili pond is so descriptive, isn't it? It is. It makes you sick when you think about it. There's a visual to it. Yeah, it's, they call it a day at the beach. So you're going to the beach today. That was not a good So it was a big, like, open-air sandpit? Open air 40-by-40 sand pit with pipes coming. Everything dumped out into it.

Dumping stuff in into the sand pit. And you had to go kind of till it? Turn it over so it would seep in. Oh, man. That was not good. Did you have protective? No, they didn't have protective anything back there. You put like a bandana over your face or something?

No, we weren't into protection. Oh, that was considered unmanly to go to the Chili Pondwell. So just a hot Missouri summer day. Yeah. You're out there on the beach. sort of festering up. Welcome to the lake. That's it. Welcome to, yeah, welcome to resort life.

You were also a bellhop. I was. At Arrowhead Lodge. I was. Actually, explain one thing. When we worked outside, we made $5 a day plus room and board. When we were promoted to bellhop, they cut our pay to $1 a day because you were able to get tips from people, and that was in theory because the Ozarkians weren't real,

hip to tipping scene. Right. And you reach for a suitcase and some farmer from Versailles, Missouri would be holding his suitcase. He reached for it to grab it and take it for him. And he, it was like taking a sword out of a stone. It was like the old King Arthur thing. And what I said was always take change for a quarter because you're likely to get a dime or a tip if you get anything at all. Yeah, so it was pretty tough. So it didn't add up to. to five bucks an hour at the end of the day. Five bucks a day. You never quite made it back to that guaranteed safety net $5 a day.

And this was pre-bidimum wage, obviously. Or maybe there was one. It wasn't observed at the lake. I think Uncle Ed would be in jail. He did to us what can be done these days. There were no time clocks, no modernity at all, no workers' rights, no such thing. You talked, too, about the...

The garden rooms, as you show people different parts of the hotel and where they could stay. What were the garden rooms? That was a euphemism. The garden rooms were downstairs, and my uncle expected the bellhops to sell the room. Like when somebody came in and wanted to see a room, you sold it to them. Right. You put it on you. We'd call up a good.

You're not full yet. That's your fault. So we'd go down the garden room and I'd be walking down the hall like the linoleum hallway in the basement, kind of slick. Yeah. And the woman I'd be showing a room to and say, do you smell something? And say, no, no, I don't.

It must be the cleanser they're using. What it was, they called the garden room because of the green stuff growing in the shower. And you sold that as sort of a feature of the room? Yeah, I tried to. And they'd say, gee, this is really small. And I'd say, well, there are three of you. There were husband and wife and their kid.

three of you and I'd say well that's funny you say that and the beds are about that far apart. Yeah. And then the chest or drawers was right next to it. So there was no room to walk around. But I'd say that's funny. We had four or five people stay in this for a month and they loved it every minute of it. And they go okay and they check in? No. They'd say I'm going to talk to my husband. You never see them again. And they go out in the car and tear out the parking lot. It'd screech out on the highway. I also love that it was so damn hot there that at least those rooms were kind

of underground a little bit so you'd go sleep in those rooms sometimes. Yeah, well the yeah when it was hot out there was a thing called the she shack which were all the cottage where eight of the waitresses and housekeepers slept women and they would go there was no there's a little fan in there was no air conditioning so it'd get a hundred degrees during that obviously in Missouri in August, and they'd go sleep in one of the bedrooms downstairs in one of those garden room, and then, of course, in the middle of night, they'd rent the room and the people would walk in there. Right. They're in the room. Yeah. Right. Sorry. But at least it was cool for a little while for you guys. Let's talk a little more about Uncle Ed and who he was. What did he look like? What did he sound like? Who was this guy?

He was kind of, he seemed large. I think in looking back, I mean, he wasn't that big. He was probably about six feet tall. stocky, had a cigar, had his hair slick, red hair slick back. He always liked me a little bit because I had red hair back then. And he was just a very overbearing kind of guy. I said a colonel in the army and he barked more than he talked. He'd like bark orders at you, do things, get things done, yell at people, scare him. Intimidation was a big thing.

Although when I ever fired somebody, they just wouldn't leave. It wasn't real effective being a bully. You probably forgot that he fired him anyway. Yeah. By the name, he had many scotches every day. He'd get everything in order up at the lodge in the morning. He'd go out on his boat in the afternoon with friends or whatever

and drink scotch all afternoon. And he drank scotch when he got up from his nap and he drank scotch at night. He drank a lot of scotch. It's funny you say he's big, but maybe he wasn't that big because my memory of him is a huge tall guy. Yeah, I think of him as an over, bigger, larger-than-life kind. guy because he was so loud and such a presence.

He always talked real loudly and barked. I don't think he was that big. And as you say, he was unlike anybody you knew in your life back in Champaign. Didn't know anybody. What was it like driving around Lake of the Ozarks riding shotgun and his big car with him? Well, he would, he had two Cadillacs a year, a convertible in the summer, which I saw. And then the, so he'd be in a Cadillac convertible. He had a cat, another Cadillac hard top in the winter.

You'd be driving down the bank and I just remember, I think I've told you about this, how you just feel like a dream, you're in a dream. The big tires, you're floating on the road. You're going so smoothly. You're like floating on air. I said, I thought it was kind of how people must get around in heaven because it was just perfect, the temperature and everything. But then he'd pull into the bank. He always took his bank statement. When he took some money in the bank, he always put a little in his pocket before he put it in the deposit thing.

So I guess something for the big guy. Sure, yeah. Something for myself. And he pulled into the bank parking lot, clouds of dust would come up, and he had a cow horn. He'd push a lever on his dashboard, and it would move.

So I think he intended to get horns for it too. So he'd walk in the bank, and he'd just start yelling, hello everybody, how you doing, Jimmy? The bank president. And every clerk was a beautiful. He's called Beautiful. If they were women, he would flatter them immensely.

That was part of his thing. And he was just a big presence, wherever he went. He just filled up the room. Yeah, and he would flip the coins, people, and bring the money in. Yeah, he'd flip coins of people sometimes down there. I don't think he ever flipped silver dollars like he did back in Champaign. There are also, he was the lead character in this cast. You actually dedicate the book to the cast of Arrowhead characters.

Yeah, yeah. There are so many of them. Annie Hicks is a great character. You like Annie? Yeah, I'm a big Annie fan. Annie was kind of a hillbilly woman. She talked like she was. And she was old, and she worked in the kitchen for decades.

And she always smoking unfiltered cigarettes. I always picture making a salad with her arms. She'd get salad up to her arm. She had that cigarette dangling over the top of the... I don't know if that added anything to the salad. or not like grilled salad or something. Smoked. Little ash.

Yeah, a little ash in. I don't know what that adds to it. That's a secret sauce. But she was a great character and she kind of, she ran the place. Glenn was drunk. He's the chef. He's out of the pool face down. He's out of the pool face down.

And she's, she makes the lobsters and the chicken and all that. But she, she, I don't know, her favorite expression was shit fire. Mm-hmm. Glenn would try and, Glenn would go out to California. in the winter and work at a diner or something or something. He'd come back, I always had some great idea

from California. And one year it was the innovation. One year it was broasted chicken. And Annie wouldn't put up with that. She had no idea what broasted meant. I said, I don't either. What does that mean? I don't know.

Roasted? It's a good question. I don't know. Sounds very California. Yeah, very California. And then the next year, he came back with Salad Bar. A very innovative,

unique, kind of overwhelming change in the restaurant. You know, it's funny when you read her take on it, if you never knew what a salad bar was, she's right. It's absurd. She said, people are going to get up from the dinner table and make their own salad. So what are we doing here as waitresses? Exactly. And she's right.

She and Glenn got in a big fight over the salad bar. She said, do you pay them to make their own salads or make their own? Why would they go out to dinner? and have to do everything yourself. Yeah. So she thought it was crazy, and she, Glenn was going to go ahead with it. He decided that there was also, you can't have any seconds. Oh, at the salad bar?

She said, what do you do if a big fat guy comes in and eats everything at the restaurant at the salad bar? And he said, small plates, you have small plates. And then the other thing was you had somebody observing. There would be a sign-up saying, you're under surveillance. You're under surveillance. Today it'd be you're under surveillance, right? I'm surprised nobody's done that.

Maybe they had. So there was no return to the, that's, to me, that's the whole justification for the. No, you couldn't go back. Wow. You had to put it all in one heaping over the sides of this small plate. But they decided not, they were going to have one of the other, if I may, hillbilly or hill person or whatever, was, was, was a very muscular and big strong guy. I did all the electrical work and heavy lifting at the hotel. He was going to watch the salad bar and enforce the no seconds thing.

And my aunt heard about this. She said, we can't do this. Noble was his name. And he said, Noble would take this very seriously. He might kill somebody who would be over-react. So there was no enforcer? No enforcer. No enforcer.

No enforcer. And so Janet, my aunt Janet called it off. She just thought somebody would get killed by taking a second. I forget. Going for more lettuce, a wedge or something. And, yeah. So, and she didn't decide to take up too much room, too many tables. And she just didn't, she never, they never did it finally.

But Annie had to put up with it. The wisdom of Annie Hicks. I think she was right about this. I do, too, now that I think about it. It's kind of crazy. It's a crazy concert. I thought at the time, I thought she makes a lot of sense. I couldn't.

It was pretty revolutionary idea, I think, make people get up and get their own side. I've been in places since we're out west where you cook your own steak. Yeah. It's like, come on. This isn't a restaurant. You do this at home. What am I paying for here? The night desk.

So there was an overnight shift, obviously. An overnight shift. And you'd get some characters coming through. Get some characters coming in. We'd have some guy come up and tell old stories about the area, which were very interesting. You'd tell about this old lady who house. They had to burn down. all the wooden structures and tie back the trees in half,

so they'd be low enough for the lake. And so this guy would come in and tell these stories. They'd come by and say it's time to go, and they'd burn your house down. So it was a pretty sad, moving thing. But then there was a night desk clerk. It was friends with this guy. He was an elderly guy.

And I was sitting in there one night, and this guy burst in the front door, he was like drunk, yelling, but, is the restaurant open? Is the restaurant open? And the elderly guy said, no, it's not. It's been closed for two hours. And the guy said, he grabbed him by the collar and said, now is it open? And was really, and pushed him back, the old guy back and fell down. And at that point, it just, I had to hit him over the head with a plaster Buddha statue. And it sort of took care of the situation. He left, you're encouraged to take just,

to send you your own hands. So I hit him over the head with this, and he kind of crab walked sideways out there. I'm the front door. Stunned. My aunt was mad because she was selling the Buddha statue in the gift shop. Yeah.

So that was... She would have rather you picked up something else. My friend of Pete, Uncle Ed, came up, so what the hell happened here last night? And Pete said, well, a guy came in and asked the iron room and was open, Billy hit him over the head with a statue. And there's some irony, of course,

in using violence with the Buddha statue. The symbol of peace and harmony. Yeah, yeah. They worked. But you sent a message to anybody else who would barrel in. It was kind of a lawless area. You're kind of encouraged to take care of things yourself. There was a man found in a large load clothes dryer into laundromat.

He had passed on. And the cops, there weren't any cops because there wasn't a real town there. So they came down from Jeff City State Trooper. to investigate the situation. They didn't want to be down there. So they said it's a probable suicide, which left open the question, how did this guy get the quarters in the machine to kill himself? Yeah, there'd be some suspicion there. But the family said, that's okay, we'll take care of it. So it's like the hills. Right. Yeah, it was take care. Well, yeah, I think if people went there, if they go to Lake of the Ozarks today, they would see something that doesn't even resemble the place

you went because it was rural and weird and quirky and some of the stops along the way before you got to the Arrowhead Lodge. Oh, yeah. Some of the big tourist trips that you write about in the book. For example, the monkeys on bicycles was a big attraction. They drove cars. Oh, the monkeys drove cars. Tom's Monkey Jungle.

They drove cars. And yeah, that was very. And we were thrilled to see it. Back in those days, we were simpler folk. We hadn't been to Disney World or any of these places and seen these roller coasters that come down out of the sky at 60 miles an hour upside down. So we were real happy.

We were thrilled to see it. We saw a five-legged deer with nothing to sneeze at. And it was, yeah, there were lots of these places leading up that gave you a strong sense that you were not in Nantucket. There was also extraordinarily, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more press. The one place on Earth was gravity, gravity does not apply. That's right.

Gravity called the mystery spot. It was on the strip of amusement things after the dam. And the guy who ran Al something, he explained it that a meteorite had come down and hit right by the highway. Back far enough to allow parking out in front. But it changed. There was no gravity there. So people, when you go in, I'd look at you and you'd be standing, I don't know how they did that.

You'd be standing sideways. I don't know how they did that. And water flowed uphill. Water flowed uphill. It did. I saw it. I know people think I'm crazy. It sounds like a modern-day conspiracy theory or something, UFO's story.

And the meteor had that impact to reverse. Normally a meteor I've looked at up since. A meteor, I normally leave a huge crater. Right. Luckily, it didn't leave any crater. It could open right up with a gift. right after it struck. I don't know if the gift shop was there already.

You might have been. So what was it like to go back a few years ago to see Lake of the Ozarks when Arrowhead Lodge has now been torn down? That big famous sign isn't there anymore. It was so different, so changed that I didn't even get teary-eyed or anything. It was just so different. They rerouted the interstate so that went around the lake kind of. You didn't even go buy Arrowhead Lodge anymore, the main road. So there was that, and stuff down at the dam was all like tattoo parlors,

and there was nothing fun and ingenious about some of the things they came. One thing I liked so much about being down there with all the characters you'd meet, the people who ran the, who came up with the idea of a mystery spot, and Larry Albright was a souvenir king. He had some great ideas. His dream, which I don't think he ever got a chance to fulfill, was to give rare Ozark seal tours.

I didn't realize there were seals. No, I didn't either. It's all crazy. You don't understand a lot of it. But he was going to give tourist the Ozark seals, and I said, well, how would you do that? He'd say, get youngsters in brown suits of some kind

and swim around. And with a seal head on? I don't know. They must have had something on their head. But you'd pay him a dollar an hour. And he never went through with that? No, he never, he was going to build a window in the bottom of the boat so you could see the sunken city of... What was that?

Right, but you couldn't quite see. No, you couldn't see anything. No. But he said if you couldn't see anything by drawing of it in the gift shop. But these were the kind of innovators who... Yeah, yeah. Who you came to appreciate it. A lot of them were guys who, World War II veterans, some of them, they come back and they didn't want to sit in an office and push paper.

and they wanted to get out and do something, be on their own, do things. And they were doing some crazy things. When you said you went back and you didn't even recognize it so you couldn't get teary-eyed. I like what you write in the book where you say, Arrowhead Lodge had become the place that didn't belong at the lake where it was just the opposite when you were there 50 years before. When it was first built, it seemed like the only place that belonged down there because there were trees and wood and all that kind of stuff.

And now everything was kind of gone. And it just, and there were golf, not many golf courses, it was right next door to the lodge site now. And so it really, it really was, the lodge didn't really belong there anymore. It did when they built it, but no more. And you saw you got together with some of the characters in this book and told old war stories?

Yeah, some are going to be surprised to see their names. I haven't sent them all copies yet. suddenly had cross-cultural exchange programs and Pete took a girl to drive in. I think he's going to be surprised to see his name. Oh, oh, I hope there's not too much detail about Pete in there. So what I love about the book is that it's funny. All these stories that we've been talking about are hilarious. But even for me as your son, getting to the end of it, I went, oh, that's where this all started for him.

That's where he fell in love with weird guys. like the mystery spot and the monkeys driving the cars and you had an affinity for them. And it created your sense of humor, but also gave you your career. Those are the kind of stories you did for CBS for 31 years. For better or worse, I did hundreds of pieces on crazy entrepreneurs around the country. In this country, overseas, everywhere, searched them out. And that was, I didn't really realize this until I wrote the book. You pointed out to me one day, you know, this looks like you made a whole career out of this.

maybe where it started for better or worse. Well, when you see the contrast to the first years of your life where you're almost a frustrated, funny guy with no outlet for it and nobody who'd appreciate your jokes and they'd roll their eyes at you. And then it was almost like you stepped through a portal into Lake of the Ozarks and people were laughing at the jokes. Uncle Ed and Janette thought it was very funny. They took me to Acapulco once a winter. Sort of amusement. But yeah, everybody thought it was funny and I think of funny things to say before I'd get places. It was great.

So do you look back at Lake of the Ozarks as the beginning of something for you? I hadn't thought that, because like you said, I was funny before that, but didn't have the appreciation for it. And yeah, I think it was the beginning. It was the beginning of something, something that lasted my whole life. I can't believe. I don't know if it's good or bad. It's good.

It worked out pretty well. Worked out pretty well. We talked about when the cook would be passed out by the pool. And you go in and have to cook. But when you weren't cooking, you were back there washing dishes. Extreme dish washing. Extreme dish washing. And there were so many and they were coming in so fast.

Let's just say you guys weren't meticulous as craftsmen. No, we were doing what we couldn't have moved the dishes. And so Weezer and I would, my friend, put on towels on her heads and stuff. I was Larry Arabia and he was Saudi. And so we'd wash dishes and we thought you had to really get pumped up to do this because there were so many coming in. There's kind of a tsunami of dishes came to. They put them on the rack and pretty soon all of a sudden you were overwhelmed.

And you look down the dish water would be like chicken noodle soup. It was that color and it had stuff floating around. And you're washing it in that water? Yeah, well, yeah. And we had to change the water and that put us another seven or eight minutes behind. Right. So people were putting stuff on the trash can. And eventually, we started putting them on the floor and kicking the dishes under the...

Just to slow things down a little bit. Well, we were just trying to get some breathing room. We're kicking the dishes under the washtubs. And we had one guy who went crazy back there, and he put, he'd throw the dishes in the big trash barrel and hit him with a kitchen sweeper. Oh. Some of a broom. He'd take a broom handle and smash him in the...

Wow. Yeah, it was just too much. He'd had enough, right. They were just, it was, we were overtaxed. It could break a man, you know? Yeah, it did. It broke him. I also like that sometimes the traffic was so fast in the kitchen

that there'd be, somebody would have eaten half the broccoli for their meal. Yeah. And you might just fish some off one. plate and get it on to another one. I've seen that happen. We can say it now. String beans and broccoli, yeah. Vegetables might find themselves

if they're at the top of the trash barrel. They might be rinsed off and put back on a plate, especially there are some of the last customers of the evening. Sure, right. Yeah, they had to expect that. And they'd been there a long night. They're not going to even taste it anyway.

We were talking also about your bellhop years. Oh, yeah. And what you had to do to get those tips, even if they were a dime here and there. Did you have any tricks? Well, as I said, we went to a dollar a day because we had tips. We're entitled to tips from people.

But Ozarkian people don't exactly. They're not kind of hip to the whole tipping scene. They probably hadn't seen a bellhop ever before in their life. We're probably the only ones between St. Louis and Kansas City. So we had to develop techniques. I told you, we'd try and get the suitcase out of the guy's hand, and he wouldn't let it go. And so we'd go down, carry the bags and eventually get them,

carry him downstairs to his room or upstairs. Upstairs if you wanted to avoid the garden floor. Yeah, I'd go down and take their bags into their room and drop them and then I'd look at them. And they weren't looking at me and they weren't kind of looking at the floor and looking around. I don't think they knew that they were...

They weren't even aware that the tips was a part of the deal. I don't think they were part of the deal. Yeah. So I'd look at them now. And early on, I'd leave and get mad. But later I'd stay in later years, I'd stay. and say, is your TV working okay? And I turn on the TV and all the channels,

all channels working there are two channels. But you need more towels. Anything you could think of to stay in the room and stay at me. And then you just finally just stand there and stare at them. Usually the wife would get, you know, Harold, give them some money. Right. And punch them in the ribs or somebody.

I think you were a pioneer in that now, because that's standard. If I've ever had somebody help me with the bags, they do now that you mention it. Just stand there? They go and they open the curtains. Oh, yeah, yeah. Show you how the drawers work. I know how the drawers work.

That's very good. Oh, I know why you're hanging around. Very good. Sorry. See if the drawers work. Yeah, that's right. That's the kind of thing you'd ask. The pool's right down at the end of the hall.

We're open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. American plan or European plan. I didn't know what American plan and European plan were. Is that Uncle Ed brought that back from Europe? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. That was one of his. He must have that in one of the hotels where he had a headquarters. So he had all the trappings of a fancy place, European plan, the bell pop, all that.

Yeah, he had extra things, yeah. Yeah. It was kind of, I think at one point, it was probably posh. Right. Early posh. And then later on, by the time I left, they were building huge resorts and lodges. You know, it's funny, though, I bet now because sort of the nostalgia and the throwback stuff is hip now. if we put in an arrowhead lodge, make it a little nice but keep that same sign and all that.

I'd be considered like a cool place to stay in the lake. I tried to get him to sell the, I'd put it out on the sign, the letters you put on the sign, I'd say, fine dining in a rustic setting. There you go. He didn't like that. Nobody, nobody bought, no, it wasn't what you put up there. You put prime rib, 595. Yours was a little too vague.

Yeah, I think he was. he was headed. I want to ask you, too, because we were talking about drawing a line from the Lake of the Ozarks through the rest of your life, and you finding your sense of humor there and finding your career there. But you also can kind of credit the Lake of the Ozarks with finding your wife and my mother

because she thought you were funny. Yeah. And you met at the University of Illinois, and she came up to you in a bar and said, what? She was kind of a Marlena Dietrich kind of. I think she had the cigarettes, you need to smoke. She had got a light. And she was beautiful.

This beautiful blonde woman kind of woman I've always wanted to go out with and everything. And so that started because her parents were both funny. And they taught her that the most important thing in finding a person to marry is their sense of humor. That's all I had. So I was good with that. So, yeah, I do credit that a little bit. And I go on to say, you and your sister, funny people and the grandkids are some of I said they're funny as hell at the end

Lucy George Billy and Russ. Billy and Russ they're all funny and mom had been reading those weird poems oh yeah you were writing yeah it was writing poems I didn't know anybody saw them somebody told me they were putting them up on telephone poles and so I had no idea that happened I just wrote them in my room so you must have been shocked to see the beautiful blonde woman with a cigarette yeah yeah yeah yeah I love your work I love your poetry I love your poetry You're saying, what? Women come up and say they like your poetry. They're supposed to have long, greasy hair and just bad glasses.

Yeah. And you weren't a poet on top of it. No. You didn't know what you was. None of it made sense to you. Well, they did rhyme. And they're in the book. They're funny.

So Uncle Ed didn't really adhere to the customer service philosophy that the guest is always right. No, no, he didn't. If a guest was unruly or annoying, how would he deal with that? to be unruly. One of them carried a watermelon through the lobby. It was dripping. My aunt saw that and said, you're out of here. She told him to throw him out. He'd always come out and say, get out of my hotel. And you're like to call my hotel, hotel. And he was just a very tough guy. And the help, we always saw he was tough on us. But if you went out to pool and some some guest complained said, your help is using the pool. Say, why don't you get out of my hotel?

He was sticking up for the help. Yeah. People said he was just a tough guy. He was, he was, he just, friend and foal like he would go after him. I have a vision of him with a scotch and maybe a cigar. Yeah. Going up and yelling at the guest to get the hell out of his hotel. It isn't really what you're used to seeing these days.

No. From the GM of the hotel. That's not hospitality school. It's not. Yeah, hospitality. Yeah. Isn't that what they call it, the hospitality industry? Yes.

He wouldn't have made it there. No, he wouldn't have. But a lot of people wanted to be him who worked there, my friends and stuff, and they'd go back to school at universities that had hotel management school. And they'd teach them all this stuff that you just can't teach this. Yeah. We've talked about this a lot, but that you took us back there. It was the summer of, when we went back, it was the summer of 1991.

So I was, I was 16. Wow. And remember how hot it was that summer? It was blazing. It wouldn't get out of the car because it was so hot. It was terrible. But I got to get a little taste of it. I was the age you were when you started going.

And I met some of these characters. And I met Doc Justice. Who had the white corvette. He's a playboy who came down every Friday night. So, yeah, what was he like back then? He was great. He wasn't, he always had scantily-clad women on top of his houseboat. Oh.

And I thought they were blow-up dolls because from a distance because he can't have the same scene. every weekend. But he was great. He had 50-cent tipper, which was good. Ooh, that's big. And he kind of flip it to you. Yeah.

And he came down, he was kind of the world's first playboy, or one of the original playboys. He was a doctor in Kansas, and he'd drive down every Friday night. Yeah, and when I met him, he had the white corvette. Yeah. And I thought, wow, what a cool car. And he said, well, come on.

And I said, this is great. Dad, I'm going to go for a ride in the Corvette with Doc Johnson. Justice. He said, the hell you're going for a ride. And he threw me the keys to the Corvette. I didn't have a driver's license. And I said, is this okay? And you said, yeah, go ahead. So Doc Justice and I worked the roads of Lake of the Ozark. That was cool for me to see your world. The devil-may-care attitude is down there. Lawless. Nobody thought about getting in trouble. Well, I'd say there weren't any cops because they're going to have a town. But, yeah, that was very,

very true to the atmosphere around it. We drank and served. drinks when we were 15, 16 years old. Yeah, there are several incidents in the book where I go, oh my gosh, I wonder how they handled it. And you said, we would have called the cops if there had been any. There was some 911. Yeah, an ambulance. And they just kind of like let nature take its course.

Exactly. That's right. That's right, which is great. I liked a lot about that. We seem very controlled now. Yep. And probably not so much as I think. but it had nothing to do with the way I was raised down there.

There's a great scene in the book later where after you've gone to Vietnam, you're coming home and it's Uncle Ed. Oh, at the airport. We meet you in tears, big, strong Uncle Ed. That moves me now when you say it. In the airport, he was moved down to Florida and he and my aunt were at the gate. He could go to the gate then before 9-11, way before. And he was shedding a tear at the gate from me.

And I thought, gee, it was. It really touched me because I'd never seen him even close to shedding a tear over anybody. And what do you think that was about? I think we were really close. I think there are a couple things. One is my namesake was killed in World War II, William, a very guy. And that was my aunt's brother. And the other thing, I think we just were very close.

He liked me, and they were relieved that I was home. and I was just happy to be home. I was relieved. He was worried about you. Yeah, he was. But you couldn't conceive of Uncle Ed in tears before that. No, no, never. Driving around the car with a scotch and a cigar.

I missed that on going to the bank. There was a scotch and water in the center console at 11.30 in the morning. Wow. And Pierre, his black poodle, his ears flapping out from the air conditioning, looking into the front seat. Man, that's a visual. Yeah. Can I ask you about the cover? Because this is my favorite cover of any of your books. Me too. Is that based on a postcard from that era? Yeah. It kind of is. It has that look. It even feels a little bit like a postcard.

Yeah, it's got the texture. I recommend everybody buy it and put the cover up in their room frame it. Frame it. You can throw the book out. And that's the dam itself right there. That's Magnail Dam. Yeah. You still talk about going down to the dam. You call places that aren't dams. Like, you know, beaches. Yeah, yeah. We go to the dam this weekend? It just means we're going somewhere happy. I do. I go out to, yeah, out to Long Island. Going to the dam.

Congrats, Dad. Thanks. Love you. Love you too. My dad's book, Lake of the Ozarks, is in stores now online, wherever you get your books. Thanks to all of you for checking out a special edition of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. If you like what you hear, be sure to check out our library of guests and click subscribe so you never miss an episode. And of course, don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist.

We'll see you back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.