CELEBRATING 70 YEARS: L.B. Cook ‘wanted a little fish camp’


Seventy years have passed since the late L. B. and Polly Cook moved their family in 1952 from Joplin to develop what is now the Theodosia Marina Resort on Bull Shoals Lake. The family operation has expanded into five generations, with L.B. and Polly’s son, Bill, and his wife, Nadine, pictured center front, now overseeing the family business with the help of their children, grandchildren and great-grands. Front row, from left: grandson Mitchell Cook, Kentlee Cook, Bill (holding great-granddaughter Breklyn Cook), Nadine, great-grandson Maverik Cook and granddaughter-in-law LaTasha Cook. Back: Son Bret Cook and his wife, Melanie, Vikki Cook and her husband (Bill and Nadine’s son) Ben. The Cooks’ daughter Becky died in September 2021. Two family members, great-grandsons Chase and Eli Cook, were not available for the photo.

Photo courtesy SkyDrones. This photo by Cody Reeves and Sky Drones shows the Theodosia Marina during a high-water summer in 2017. The Theodosia Marina Resort motel is the long, brown-roofed building. Next to it, hidden by trees, is Cookie’s Restaurant. The campground was completely covered, but the Fort Cook RV park stayed busy throughout the season.

Seventy years ago, L. B. Cook, shown in this 1988 photo with his wife, Polly, left the thriving mercantile store in Joplin his father had owned for more than 50 years to bring his family to the newly impounded Bull Shoals Lake, where he hoped to operate a simple fish camp. He ended up with the only Corps of Engineers concession on the lake that required not only a boat dock but also a restaurant and a motel – now Theodosia Marina Resort.

L.B. Cook and his son, Bill, along with carpenter Tom Curry, who had come with them from Joplin, built this boat dock to launch their business at Theodosia in 1952. During the three months they worked on the dock, they “slept under the stars,” Bill recalls, in what would become the Theodosia campground.

Their beginning at Theodosia was filled with setbacks, but 70 years later, the Cook family is now in its fifth generation as resort operators on Bull Shoals

 

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part story describing the Cook family’s 70 years of operating what is now Theodosia Marina Resort on Bull Shoals Lake.

 

In 1952, L. B. Cook Jr. had a good thing going in Joplin, where he worked with his father (L. B. Sr.) in the successful dry goods store his father had bought in 1900 and then named for himself eight years later. Joplin was a thriving, bustling city, home to millionaires and socialites, thanks to the area’s lead and zinc mines, and Cook’s Mercantile was one of the city’s many flourishing businesses. 

L. B. Sr. had developed the popular department store by buying an existing store, merging with another business and, in 1908, giving it his family name. He even bought another dry goods store in a nearby town and turned it into a Cook Mercantile too. 

The future looked bright for L. B. Cook Jr., who had grown up in the stores and was the obvious person to take charge, now that his dad, born in 1863, was about to turn 90. 

There was just one problem. The heir to the dry goods business “hated retail” and wanted to “get out of the city,” as he explained to Springfield News-Leader columnist Frank Farmer in 1974. L. B. Jr. loved to hunt and fish, and he wanted to find an easygoing job closer to nature where he had more time for those hobbies. 

Without telling their family, in 1950, L. B. and his wife, the former Pauline “Polly” Talbot, went to Little Rock to investigate the process of bidding on one of the 12 Corps of Engineers “concessions” that would operate on Bull Shoals Lake when it filled behind the still-under-construction dam on the White River.     

 

‘He wanted a little fish camp.’

“He wanted a little fish camp,” L. B.’s son, Bill Cook, said recently. “He wanted a little boat dock with rental boats you rented to fishermen. That way, he figured he would have plenty of time to fish, himself.” 

L. B. was hoping for the boat dock concession at Forsyth or Beaver Creek. But when the bids were let, L. B. was awarded a concession for Theodosia, a site that required not only a boat dock but also a motel and restaurant too. “Nowhere else were all three required,” Bill said. “It wasn’t what he wanted. But it’s what he got.”

L.B. broke the news to his father, and on March 27, 1952, the Joplin Globe reported that Cook Mercantile, “one of Joplin’s oldest businesses,” had been sold. 

A little less than three months later, on June 14, 1952, L.B. and Bill drove from Joplin to Theodosia in the family’s 1948 Dodge DeSoto. Polly Cook and their daughter, Barbara, would join them a few months later.

L.B. Sr. would also come along. The elder Cook died in 1956 at age 93. 

Bill, “just shy of 11 years old,” was excited about the adventure his family was undertaking. “For a young lad to come to the hills and live here, it was just unbelievable,” he said.  

Driving in from the west, they stopped at Ledbetter’s store in what was then Lutie. Store owner Hobart Ledbetter’s son Dwight was there. “He was five or six years younger, but we became friends,” Bill said. 

He remembers driving into the Corps’ campground area with his dad for the first time. “It was just a dirt road in a little circle drive. The only facility there was a one-holer the Corps had provided,” he said.

“You couldn’t see any water because of the weeds growing there in the bottom. There was a big spring out there. You could go through the weeds – taller than my head – and get down to the water,” he said.

Bill and his dad “slept under the stars – literally, without a tent – from June until September,” he said. 

Buildings in the former village of Theodosia that had existed north of the campground had been moved to higher ground, and the Little North Fork of the White River had backed up enough to have flooded much of the village area, he said. The old bridge there still carried traffic across the river that was slowly becoming a lake, but work on the new “million-dollar bridge” had started.

“There was nothing left there named Theodosia when we got there,” Bill’s sister, Barbara (Wehrman) told the Times for a 2011 story. “All the stores and buildings that had been Theodosia had been torn down or moved. It was all Lutie. We were called the Theodosia Boat Dock, and that was all there was that was Theodosia. At some point, I know Dad lobbied hard to bring back the name Theodosia.”

Eventually the town of Lutie was renamed Theodosia. All that remains of Lutie today is the school, now offering kindergarten through 12th grade in a modern building on Highway 160.

The dam had been completed a few months before the Cooks arrived, and the lake was slowly filling.  

“We didn’t have a clue what we were doing,” Bill said. 

They drove to Pontiac to visit the boat dock that was already operating there under Sanford Robbins and his brother Jimmy, who had taken over from the first Pontiac concessionaire, a Texas man named Funchis who had only stayed a few months.  

“I remember seeing Mrs. Robbins there on the dock. She was holding a baby and frying hamburgers,” Bill said.

The Corps told the Cooks where the Theodosia boat dock had to be located. L.B. ordered lumber and steel and hired a local carpenter, Russell Earnest Blankenship. Another carpenter, Tom Curry, had come with them from Joplin to help; he camped with Bill and his dad while they all worked on the site.

There were no phones in the area until 1959, and Bill remembers one day in August 1952 overhearing Blankenship ask his dad where Bill would be going to school. Cook said Bill would be going to Lutie – and then learned from Blankenship that Lutie had started more than a week earlier, Bill said. 

Back in Joplin, schools didn’t start until after Labor Day, and L.B. had been so focused on getting the dock done he hadn’t thought about asking when school started.

By early September 1952, they had finished the dock, which consisted of an office with 10 stalls on each side of it to accommodate 20 rental fishing boats. The structure floated on metal drums, or barrels. 

It rained the night they finished the roof, Bill said.

After three months of camping under the stars, Bill and his dad moved into the dock to live temporarily. L.B. fetched Polly and Barbara from Joplin, and the family settled into a rented house about a mile west on what is now Highway 160. Bill attended the one-room school at Lutie. 

 

A long schoolbus ride over crooked roads

By then the old bridge was under water, so Barbara, a sophomore, rode Fray Duggins’ schoolbus, which traveled west on Highway 160 and then across Highway 95 to Highway 5 into Gainesville. It was a long ride over crooked roads (and Highway 95 wasn’t paved yet), but several of the bus-riding students brought along guitars and mandolins. “It was a regular jam party all the way to and from school,” Barbara said in the Times story. 

In fact, she said, “It was kind of a letdown” when the new bridge was finished, making school a relatively short 12 miles away.

The Cooks’ lease with the Corps required a certain number of square feet per person for the motel and a specified seating capacity for the restaurant, L. B. Cook said in a 1971 article he wrote for the Times. With the dock finished, the family set about building the motel. L.B.  leased out the restaurant operation to Don and Oleta Speise, who had moved to the area from Kansas City and owned a liquor store in Isabella. They soon had the restaurant building under way and within a few months had “a little bitty place with cedar tables that would probably seat 12 to 14 people,” Bill said.

In one of the weekly reports he wrote for the Times several years ago, Bill noted, “When we moved to Theodosia, I thought it was the greatest adventure any young person could have, but when my sister joined us a few months later she wasn’t so excited. Understand, things were very different back then, and the big difference was we all had to work. In those early years, it was the family only, with no other employees, and we were just starting out building everything from the ground up.”

In her 2011 interview with the Times, Barbara said their dad told her and Bill, “’You kids better become good swimmers because we don’t have time to look after you.’ We were supposed to look after ourselves and work in the business. Mother and I cleaned the motel rooms. It was hard work, but it didn’t hurt us.”  

Considering the setbacks that were about to happen to the Cooks, it seems like a miracle that they survived those first few years of business. 

Continued in next week’s Times.

Ozark County Times

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