CHAPTER 20
GOING VERTICAL
By the mid-1980s, the Great Depression and World War II/Korean “Police Action” generations had entered or approached retirement, and their children, the baby boomers, were not far behind. As their pension years loomed, many members of the post–World War II generations who had vacationed or toured the lake during summers throughout their adult lives began eyeing the region as a retirement destination. Their lake shelters of choice, though, were not to be the traditional small lot cabins that had for decades thicketed the shore line nor the emerging “new lake” million-dollar lakeside mansions that had begun to materialize in somewhat improbable numbers but rather full-service, common-area condominium complexes with swimming pools, recreational facilities and attached marinas for the oceangoing vessels many of the new lake residents favored.
Resentment of the seasonal and, more recently, year-round outsiders among the true locals had slowly smoldered and crackled from the first days of the lake. The high-handed displacement of the population of what became the lake bed with the dam flood and the not infrequent Pistol Club and “party cove” sort of behavior sometimes on display during vacation seasons were bedrock of a constant sense of civic and cultural annoyance.
From the latter decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, high-rise condominium projects characterized construction along the lake’s broader channels—in particular, on the main channel and Osage Beach area.
Some entertainment venues don’t survive. The lake had many entertainment venues at “the strip” on the west side of Bagnell Dam. One such area was the Loc-Wood excursion boats and sea plane rides. These have become memories. This photo of excursion boat Tom Sawyer in dry-dock is a remnant of those fond memories. Author’s private collection (KVL).
The lake building boom—until the onset of the “Great Recession” (circa 2008)—brought with it more changes than many of the true locals cared to deal with, and for some, the final insult seems to have been the urban-style freeway system with its byzantine passages of bypasses, exit ramps and traffic arteries blasted through Osage Beach shortly into the first decade of the twenty-first century.
By 2012, one true local could no longer contain his views on the developments at the lake and mailed an edgy but well-reasoned and nuanced historical overview of the situation to the local weekly. The letter—for what it is and the information and emotion it conveys—would be difficult to improve upon. This quote is edited to exclude discussions of the Missouri Department of Transportation public hearings on the route and ramps of the new expressway and of the affairs of local businesses and persons:
In the past months I have had to read, weekly, a letter written by some angry, misguided soul who believes that businesses have been ruined due to our new bypass.
First off, as a 40-year-old, third generation local whose families, on both sides saw their Mom and Pop resorts basically put out of business by the 80s condo rush, I speak from a level of experience in this matter.
…Back when the condos came to town in my youth it was the beginning of the end for the Mom and Pop resorts that had dominated the lake for 30 years.
It was called progress, and it was. See when we sold almost all of our shoreline to create “summer shacks” and the family owned resorts began to disappear, the condo’s [sic] that replaced them hired a lot more people than the former, smaller resorts. So…most of the lake was actually better off…
I’ll venture that condos destroyed more family businesses than anything else here at the lake. Oh, but that was real progress, right?
And while it decimated businesses that had been family run for generations, overall more lake residents prospered than were injured…
Now times are tough and y’all want to point fingers and such. Ironically, the people, like my family, true locals that remember the eight months of barren roads every year never point fingers at others.
We, the folks whose great-great grandparents lived here before the lake was green, back when Carl Williams and Lee Mace owned most of Osage Beach, back when my dad…flew kites and jumped ramps for the 60s era ski show.1
The condominium model made a great deal of sense for developers at the Lake of the Ozarks. A two-hundred-foot shoreline would under the “old lake” formula be divided into four fifty-foot lots and end up with four small weekend cabins or summer houses on it. But if the formula is revised to include vertical space, the resulting product can be dramatically enhanced. Instead of four fifty-foot lots, there can be an eight-story building with multiple units per floor. That fact in itself is weighty enough to have encouraged Lake of the Ozarks developers to go condo, but there is more to the story.
Monte Davidson entered this narrative as a central character in the chapter on the establishment of the lake’s luxury resorts and the musical entertainment scene in the 1960s, but he still had more to contribute to this story.
As to why Osage Beach did not become the “Live Entertainment Capital of the World” (a sometime Branson marketing tag)—Monte D. (among others) said the reason is simple: “The business community didn’t want it. They wanted to build condominiums.”2
The primary marketing profile sought by Osage Beach was not the tour buses and early bird diners that throng to the “Shepherd of the Hills Country” town. (In other words, transient tourism was considered a secondary market and had not been on the radar of the Lake of the Ozarks commercial culture for a long time.) Rather, Osage Beach aimed to attract the urban refugees who wanted to live year round (or at least full season) in lakeside condos and sup at gourmet or upscale restaurants, shop at malls, play golf four times a week if not more often, patronize movie theaters where frozen margaritas were available at the snack bar and lounge poolside or cruise on their yachts out on the lake the rest of the time—the affluent, constant consumers.
There could have been country music shows, but they would have been of the nature exemplified by Monte D. and Lee Mace—that is, with appeal to both “mountain folk” (people from the region) and city “sophisticates” (the condo-dwelling transplants).
There is no question that Lee Mace, one of the earliest of the region’s champions, clearly understood the commercial direction of the lake. In the late 1970s, he had remarked that in the future, competition for audiences would not be other shows but the restaurants.3
There are indications that Mace planned to create a Grand Ole Opry–style operation built on the success of his Ozark Opry, but he would not live to fully implement those plans.
With the death of Lee Mace in 1985, the possibility of a major music industry at Osage Beach faded, and the remaining vision was to attract urban retirees or refugees to live at the Lake of the Ozarks—the more the better.
It is a simple matter to view the future through the lens of the local business community of the 1980s, which envisioned a cosmopolitan aura to the soon-to-be sophisticated Osage Beach (St. Louis) side of the lake. This aura may attract corporate headquarters and their highly paid corporate jet-setting executives. A stable, wealthy permanent population could make it all happen.4