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JOHN MORRIS ON JIM OWEN

 James Fork of the White, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 102023
 

1950s mailing piece for Jim Owen’s famed float fishing enterprise

After the publication of James Fork of the White, we acquired this brochure with the photo of Jim Owen holding up a stringer of bass. It is not dated but it refers to Bull Shoals as “one of the best fishing lakes in the United States.” It also states that Owen can arrange five- or six-day trips on the James River. The four-panel promotion for his float services must have been produced between 1951 (Bull Shoals) and 1958 (Table Rock Dam, which ended long James River float trips). If we’d had it then, we would have noted his enthusiasm for the new reservoir was surprising, given his long opposition to Corps of Engineers projects that turned free flowing rivers into ponds. The cigar chomping float trip king went with the flow – or, in this case, lack of it. “As usual ole’ man Owen is ready to take care of your fishin’ on the new lake.”

Bass Pro founder John Morris recalled Jim Owen’s influence on the evolution of Ozarks outdoor recreation in a 2012 interview with Ed Fillmer, video journalist. “He was a very colorful character. Great promoter of the natural beauty and the Ozarks. The guides – sometimes they would have to paddle hard through eddies, but mainly drifting through the river, there’s not too many rapids. A little bit of hillbilly thrown in there.”

Fillmer commented, “All along, Owen was a conservationist, stressing to his guests, nature’s balance in the forests and rivers of the Ozarks. For example, Owen insisted they keep only enough fish to enjoy in that evening’s fish fry, returning the rest of the catch to the river.”

Morris: “In a way, that ties back in to helping to preserve what we have here, these resources, these rivers and streams and how important it is to take care of our rivers and water.” Modern fishing tournaments, which the Bass Pro CEO once competed in, are catch-and-release.

Bass Pro’s White River Fish House, a floating restaurant on Taneycomo in Branson, “is kind of a salute to Jim Owen,” said Morris. The restaurant displays an historic Owen Boat Line johnboat, with photos and memorabilia.

Like Morris, Owen had many irons in his Ozarks’ campfire. He somehow found time to be Mayor of Branson, bank president, breeder of foxhounds, car dealer, a movie theater operator, restaurateur, and, with Charlie Barnes, a manufacturer of johnboats.

Johnny Morris’s empire has exceeded Jim Owen’s portfolio a thousand-fold, but both entrepreneurs artfully adapted Ozarks traditions to the consumer taste of their era.

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork of the White is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid. James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River.

TAKE AN AUTUMN FLOAT WITH “SHERIFF WHITE RIVER” JIM OWEN

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Dec 072022
 

A Jim Owen mailing piece by Steve Miller – the go-to commercial artist in the Branson area as its reputation as a tourist destination grew in the post-World War II era prosperity. His deft drawings imparted a lively pop look.

A small mailing piece drawn by Steve Miller for “White River” Jim M. Owen proclaimed, “THE BIG BASS ARE ON THE MOVE and the months of October and November are the two greatest months of the year to take an Ozark Float trip.”

Branson artist Miller’s cartoons of the native fish are silly. Oddly he proclaims, “Spike Channel, alias ‘The Cat’” is a “plug-snatcher.” Rarely are catfish taken on artificial lures, but then cartoonists have a license to distort. Still, it’s a catchy 1950s style graphic and on the flip-side is a bit of descriptive prose, reminiscent of the Arcadianism of the early railroad advertising, but toned down: “Smooth water, fast water, wide stream, narrow stream, rapids, racy riffles, tumultuous torrent, foam-flecked glides, deep holes that fair breathe of big bass . . . all this and more you will find . . . “

Both Owen and later John Morris promotions mixed contemporary media looks with splashes of the Ozarks’ earlier romantic imagery. Overall, Owen’s services were attuned to real sporting needs and featured documentary photographs – Spike the Plug-Snatching Channel Cat excepted. It’s a neat trick to continually update advertising to accommodate evolving public taste without destroying the region’s long-time, old-time image.

 

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork of the White is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid. James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River.

Congressman Dewey Short – Hillbilly and Orator and proud of it

 James Fork of the White, Lens & Pen Press, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 092022
 

Press photo, May 9, 1938, showing Congressman Short, Rep. Dudley White and their wives at a DC barn dance.

Dewey Short was “an avowed Hill-Billy.” Neither he nor renowned folklorist Vance Randolph ever disavowed the term. Unlike the transplanted Kansas folklorist, the educated congressman was an Ozark native. Like politicians from Andrew Jackson on, he exploited his backwoods credentials. The cutline of this press photo, “Chicken and Fixin’s YUM YUM,” notes they were dressed in “approved rustic styles” at a D.C. barn dance. Galena’s famous son alternately postured as an Oxford schooled philosophy professor and a Stone County hillbilly. And he was both.

Born in Galena to a family of 10 children, he served in the infantry in World War I, then graduating from Baker University in 1919 and from Boston University in 1922. Short also attended Harvard University, Heidelberg University, the University of Berlin, and Oxford University. Dewey rose to national prominence as the Representative of Missouri’s 7th congressional district.

In 1942, the St.  Louis Star and Times sent a reporter down to Galena to find out, “Just who is Dewey Short, this 44-year-old, one-man hillbilly band from the Ozarks, who has been elected for four straight terms in Congress from the Seventh District in Southwest Missouri?”  Encountering Jackson Short, Dewey’s father, the reporter “came to the right place.”  Writer Ralph S. O’Leary noted that “the oratorical gifts” for which Dewey Short was noted came from his father, “who talks fluently and decisively.” Dewey’s own speechmaking talents earned him the moniker, “Orator of the Ozarks.”

 

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

River Guides at Owen’s Theater – near the end of the era

 Beautiful Ozarks, James Fork of the White, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 052022
 

Jim Owen leans jauntily on the truck (front row, right), with artist Steve Miller and Owen’s float-fishing guides in front of his Hillbilly Theater, 1940.

At the height of the float trip era, Jim Owen and his team gathered for a photo on Owen Company truck, in front of the Owen Hillbilly Theater, Branson venue for early moving pictures. Table Rock Dam would ultimately kill the famed Galena to Branson float, but floating is still alive and well on interior Ozark rivers when this photo was taken.

James Mason Owen was many things – twelve-time mayor of Branson, bank president, car dealer, restaurateur, movie theater owner, dairyman, fishing columnist, breeder of fox hounds, manufacturer of dog food, and publicity genius. Never was he accused of being an Arcadian. Cigar-chomping capitalist and master of mass media that he was, Owen had the good sense to recruit old time river men like Charley Barnes when he launched the Owen Boat Line.

Owen’s roster included many who had pioneered floating the James and White back in the days when city folks detrained at Galena. A jokester himself, Owen encouraged colorful rustic behavior that fulfilled visitors’ expectations of being escorted downstream by a tractable variety of hillbilly.

Today, canoes and kayaks have replaced wooden john boats and lighter, more functional gear has made camp set up easier. These quick and easy floats, unlike the leisurely floats on the White River or on the James from Galena to Branson, don’t require guide services or provide colorful local characters to entertain the visitors. Newer generations don’t know what they’re missing.

In his memoir, Ted Sare, a guide for the Owen Boat Line in the 1940s, praised the colorful entrepreneur:

“There was no better promoter of that than Jim Owen. He was an ex-newspaperman and knew the value of advertising and also knew how to reach the famous and important people, and he did. He had some of the biggest names in the country and a lot of Hollywood movie stars as his clientele. Jim did more than any other one man to put White River and Branson, Missouri on the map.”

Today, the Historic Owen Theatre is the official home of the Branson Regional Arts Council presenting amateur and professional level Broadway musicals and plays year-round.

Photo from James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

“So long, free flowing White River!”

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
Sep 072022
 

Dewey Short and other VIPs say goodbye to the free-flowing White River

Photograph by Townsend Godsey.  Congressman Dewey Short and unidentified colleagues looking at the White River. On the back is written, “Table Rock dam site 9-14-4″

Dewey appears to be pointing out the location where the long-delayed dam would be built. Only a month earlier the President had signed the Flood Control Act of 1941, which included both Table Rock and Bull Shoals. Headline of the October 11, 1952, Kansas City Times announced: “Start A Big Dam Barbecue And Music At Launching of 76-Million-Dollar Reservoir.” Mayor Claude Binkley of Branson remarked he had ‘hurried to the Ozarks twenty-six years ago’ to be here for the construction start.”

Although a Republican dedicated to smaller government (mostly), like most politicians the lure of bringing big buckets of federal money to his district was strong. Congressman Short did get the appropriations for Table Rock Dam flowing again. Construction got underway in 1954, and the White River was backed up behind a $65 million, 252-foot-high dam three miles above Table Rock in 1958. Dedication ceremonies were held on June 14, 1959, when the powerhouse was completed.

Short had been a fiery opponent of FDR’s New Deal except when the federal handout was in his district. Dewey self-identified as a “hillbilly.” The term better fit his bank-robbing brother, Leonard, who perished while on the lam.

 

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, which examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

1940s View from Table Rock – still no dam

 James Fork of the White  No Responses »
Aug 102022
 

Into the 1940s, visitors continued to visit and pose for photographs on the flat rock above the White River valley – where there was still no sign of earth-moving equipment, much less a towering blockage to the stream.

That stretch of river was promoted as a dam site by Henry Doherty, Empire District Electric Company, even before Taneycomo, his first successful White River project, had finished filling.  Table Rock, described as “probably the most scenic spot in Taney County,” in a Springfield Republican article, Feb. 1922, would be the location of his next dam he announced. There he proposed the erection of a 200-foot-high dam, which “would create a lake 100 miles in length and extend up the James to Galena.”

A lot happened in America between 1922 and 1958 (a Great Depression, a World War, a New Deal, Korean war) when Table Rock Dam was finally completed. Even those averse to Corps of Engineers projects cannot doubt its engineers are well trained. Between 1929 and 1948, the Corps of Engineers completed surveys of 180 rivers in 176 separate reports and submitted them to Congress. Not only did Army personnel boat and wade streams, but they also consulted with private power companies, academics, and other agencies.

The federal government ultimately took dam building away from private companies in the late 1930s. World War II and then Korea delayed construction of many projects. Again, local dam advocates became nervous that the feds would repeat the stalling tactics of Empire District Electric. However, the once-dam-averse Army Corps of Engineers ultimately changed the free-flowing White River into a series of reservoirs.

 

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

 

 

DANCING AT PICNIC IN THE OZARKS, 1910s

 Beautiful Ozarks, James Fork of the White, See The Ozarks, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 202022
 

Real photo postcard by George Hall

Unlike the posed hillbilly family real photo postcard we shared in June this is a straightforward document of the surviving folk culture on the upper White River, circa 1910.  Hillbilliness is based on these anachronisms.

Locals at this hoe-down appear to be wearing store bought clothes. Once the railroad made its way to southwest Missouri, Stone Countians had access to prêt-à-porter clothing just like the tourists.

Music and the moves it inspires have always been part of life in the Ozarks. Some of the Arcadian resorts built dance floors and natives joined in with visitors. Distinctions between locals and visitors were not always clear when melodies filled the air and boots and shoes started tapping. That tradition continues today in music festivals in the hills as well as regular weekly gatherings like Friday night parties at the old McClurg general store. The decades old weekly gathering was recently well represented at the Smithsonian Folklife Fest, on the Mall in Washington.

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

View from Table Rock – pre-dam, 1920s

 James Fork of the White, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 082022
 

Real photo postcard, 1920s, by Payne Johnson, Branson Mo.

The white lettering on the card can be hard to read. It says, “Table Rock Dam will be built across the big sand bar.” And so -eventually – it was.

Most bluffs along Ozark rivers are named. Table Rock Bluff had a relatively flat top (hence the name). The spot was accessible by road and afforded an impressive view of the pre-dam river valley. Fro generations, a visit to this overlook was on many vacationers’ itinerary.

In 1922, Empire District Electric applied for and received a preliminary permit to build a large dam at Table Rock, five miles southwest of Hollister. World War I had concluded satisfactorily, and Americans were optimistic about the prospects of better living through technology.

Still, it would be thirty-six more years before the lower James River became the James River arm of Table Rock Lake. For decades locals anticipated seeing machinery below building a huge dam. That this didn’t occur frustrated dam supporters and led them to question if the utility really intended to proceed. During that time utility companies constructed three hydroelectric dams within the Osage River system after Powersite Dam (1911-1913). None of the much-publicized private projects in the White River basin would go forward.

From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations, which examines the entire watershed of the famed Ozark float stream, a tributary of the White River. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.

EARLY ENTRY IN HILLBILLY CARICATURE

 James Fork of the White, Lens & Pen Press, See The Ozarks  No Responses »
Jun 082022
 

The idea the Ozarks is inhabited by primitives has been perpetuated in books by educated travelers like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, in popular songs like the “Arkansaw Traveler,” and in souvenir postcards, like this one by otherwise-respected photographer George Hall.

We have incorporated many quotes by Lynn Morrow in our books. This paragraph from Shepherd of the Hills County: Tourism Transforms the Ozarks, 18802-1930s by Lynn Morrow and Linda Meyers-Phinney, so perfectly describes this posed photograph that we use it in its entirety. The book exquisitely describes the romanticism and sentimentality that pervaded early Ozark tourism. Like Mark Twain, the authors debunk popular culture without dismissing the people who embraced its mythologies.

Morrow and Meyers-Phinney reproduced the Hall postcard, captioning it, “Commercial stereotyping using the Arkansaw Traveler story.”

Twentieth century Arcadians came to the White River expecting to see rustics whom the national press labelled as hillbillies, since journalists and tourists had used the term from the very beginning of commercial tourism. Ozarkers quickly learned to cash in on the demeaning hillbilly image. If the tourists wanted to see hillbillies, then hillbillies made their appearances. Float-fishing guides were model hillbillies at the gravel bar camps, telling tall tales and manipulating their Mid-South dialect for the enjoyment of sportsmen; locals at resorts and the legendary sites of Harold Bell Wright’s novel took up the challenge of dramatizing the hillbilly stereotype for visitors.

As we found in the gift shop of the Shepherd of the Hills Ziprider Canopy Tours tower, the practice continues:

Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork, Damming the Osage, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness and others are now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for half the original price, postage paid.

One of “10 Books to Read by Springfield Authors”

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
May 282022
 

Delighted to see our book among an impressive selection of works by SGF authors!

Posted to the Murney Associates blog is their list of 10 books you should read.  Our history of the famed mountain theme park in Branson is nestled amongst works by luminaries David Harrison, Nancy Allen, Shawn Askinosie, Ethan Bryan, Sophie Bryan and Brad Zweerink, Connie Yen, Robert Stephens (former mayor) and Stephen McIntyre.  Makes a body proud!

THE STORY OF SILVER DOLLAR CITY: A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF BRANSON’S FAMOUS OZARK MOUNTAIN VILLAGE THEME PARK

by Crystal Payton
Love Silver Dollar City? You might enjoy seeing how it all began. Crystal Payton takes you through the years as Silver Dollar City grew in popularity in the Ozarks and became a nationally known brand. This book is an oldie but a goodie. Payton originally released the book in 1997. A lot has happened since then; maybe she’ll do a follow-up someday. Nothing describes SDC or Payton’s book better than the SDC slogan, “You’ve Got a Great Past Ahead of You.”

 

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