Lake honor, p.1
Lake Honor, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
World Castle Publishing, LLC
Pensacola, Florida
Copyright © Alan Brown & Brian Brown 2023
Hardback ISBN: 9798387291456
Paperback ISBN: 9781960076465
eBook ISBN: 9781960076472
First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, April 3, 2023
http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com
Licensing Notes
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.
Cover: Karen Fuller
Editor: Karen Fuller
CHAPTER 1: Reflections
Branson was nothing like I remembered. I had not been to the small, picturesque southwest Missouri town in over forty years. The Dairy Queen and the one-chair barbershop, the café and dime store I knew were now memories of days passed. Branson was a town on steroids. The downtown I visited in my youth had been replaced with a boardwalk and retail district dubbed Branson Landing, which lined the shores of Lake Taneycomo. Crowds of people roamed the dozens of shops and restaurants, where I recalled a quaint park overlooking the calm waters of a largely uncommercialized, uncorrupted lake.
The innocence of the small town I remembered had been replaced by neon signs, casual and fine dining, souvenir shops, a scenic railway, a twelve-story convention center and hordes of visitors. Branson resembled a smaller version of Las Vegas. It seemed odd to me that everything could change so much. Branson was transformed. It was a bona fide tourist attraction. It seemed it had sold its very soul.
There are memories in everyone’s life that are unforgettable: graduation, marriage, a child’s birth, and the deaths of the ones you love. Time has a way of enhancing the good memories and softening the bad ones. But there are other memories that never change, memories that seem to be frozen in time, such as the ones I had of Branson and the nearby School of the Ozarks.
They weren’t all fond memories, but they weren’t exactly bad memories, either. They were the kind that found their way back into my dreams and nightmares time and again over the years. That’s what brought me back more than four decades later.
I wanted to bring closure to the ghosts of my past. Branson was the first stop. The destination was College of the Ozarks, just south of the supercharged small town. I had been a student there in the summer of 1973. Back then, it was called School of the Ozarks. Most students just called it S of O. For me, it was a time of innocence and naivety. It was a time of coming of age, of learning to be independent.
School of the Ozarks was not my first choice, second, or even in the top ten schools I wanted to attend. I had counted on getting an athletic scholarship to Kansas, Missouri or perhaps Bowling Green. But a serious health problem and a three-week hospital stay my senior year ended those hopes.
My family wasn’t poor, but they weren’t well-off either. They certainly couldn’t afford to send me to college.
It was my older half-brother that told me about School of the Ozarks. He grew up in Branson. A star athlete in baseball and football at Branson High, he received a scholarship to Southwest Missouri State, now called Missouri State. He played baseball one season and was drafted by the Seattle Pilots, now called the Mariners. He never made it past single-A ball. An arm injury cut his career short, and he went on to barber college, eventually going to work in a small barbershop in downtown Branson.
That shop is gone now, swallowed up by progress. So is Ron. He passed away a few years ago, but his heart and soul never left Branson. He was a wonderful man, caring, loving, gentle, a kind soul, just like the town he loved so much and the people that lived there.
Ron paved the way for my visit to the school. He talked to the track and cross-country coach. He talked to people in the administration he knew. S of O was a small, private school with less than eight hundred students. A lot of people knew Ron. He came to campus twice a week and cut hair for the students. He had made a lot of friends.
School of the Ozarks was a prayer answered for me. It was a free college. Everyone who attended worked on campus to earn their education. I had no idea a place like it existed. And as you can imagine, the opportunity to get a free college education was extremely popular. Only a small percentage of students who applied to S of O were accepted. The administration could pick and choose their student body.
When I visited, everything was set, with no lengthy vetting process. All I had to do was apply. I was admitted to the school that summer semester. The student selection process was generally long and intensive. The school considered financial need, dedication to Christian values and academic performance. Then they considered how a student would fit into their culture. It was extremely conservative. Rules were strict, and punishment for breaking those rules was even stricter.
They believed in building Christian values and a strong work ethic. A large, white stone chapel named the Williams Memorial Chapel was the centerpiece of the campus. I remember attending services there every Wednesday evening and every Sunday morning. It was mandatory. “Strengthen the soul, and the mind and heart will follow,” I remember someone telling me.
Like many new freshmen, I pushed the envelope as far as I could when it came to “conforming” to the rules. As a child of the 60s, the rule about hair length was one of my biggest issues. Men’s hair was not to hang more than one-quarter of the way past the top of the ear lobe. I had always worn long hair in high school. Cutting it was painful. I constantly combed it behind the ear and toward the back but on windy days, and there were a lot of them, my hair had a mind of its own. I received several warnings about my hair.
The nightly curfews were also a problem for me. We were required to be in our dormitory by 10 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends. At eighteen, I was enjoying my first taste of freedom. The curfew was a difficult pill to swallow. With time, I found ways around the restriction: sneaking out through my window, saying that I was going home for the weekend, and simply not coming back until the dormitory doors were unlocked early the next morning. Breaking the rules came with a risk of expulsion, and thinking back on it now, I can’t believe I took those risks.
Most of the student body came from small towns, many from the surrounding Ozarks communities. These were genuinely good people. They worked hard. They didn’t ask for a lot out of life. Serving God, making friends and taking care of family seemed to be most students’ main concerns. The pace was slow. Days were long. Work was hard. But they relished life.
The friendships I made represent some of the fondest memories I have.
North of the school, but south of Branson, is the town of Hollister. Just a couple of miles southwest of Hollister is the entrance to School of the Ozarks. When I entered the campus coming off the two-lane highway, I was amazed at how little things had changed. It looked as if the school had been frozen in time. It was exactly the way I remembered it.
No more than a ten-minute drive from an area completely transformed, the school looked like it had been untouched by progress. The large, gray-stoned buildings that dotted the campus were still there. They looked to be nearly a century old. But age had not changed them. They looked exactly as they did four decades earlier.
The gravel road leading from the entrance gate to the campus was just like I remembered. A gravel road that tossed up dust and rocks under the weight of car tires. The large stone church was just to the west of the road, near the center of the campus. The cafeteria, the Fine Arts building, and the church all looked exactly the way I remembered them.
The science building, new in 1973 and the only building with a touch of modern architecture, was still there. Oddly, it was the only building that appeared to age with time.
There were a few changes, of course. The athletic building appeared to be new. That was a good thing. The one I remembered was old. Plaster was crumbling in the locker rooms. The concrete floor in the weight room and basement was uneven and buckling in a few spots. The ceiling leaked during heavy rains, and the temperature inside was either too hot or too cold. I remember birds used to fly around in the rafters of the old gym. The large indoor swimming pool in a separate section of the athletic building was in serious need of repair. It reminded me of the high school pool in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It was dark, musty and cold.
The cinder, oval track I used to work out on was gone too, replaced by a rubber track, six lanes across with bleachers on either side. I remember how that old track was uneven, worn down by cleats that were necessary to gain any traction on it during rainy days. Six laps to the mile. It wasn’t a regulation track. We couldn’t host any track events on it. It was strictly used for practice.
The dormitories were just as I had remembered, too. Three dorms, two for men and one for women. The newest of the men’s dorms had been built only a few years before I attended school there. It had air conditioning, the only one of the three dorms that did. It was used to house upperclassmen, juniors and seniors.
I was housed in the old dormitory. For an eighteen-year-old away from home for the first time, it was a scary place. It was dark, cold in the winter and hot in the summer. T he floors were an ugly fading green linoleum, yellowed with age. The paint on the walls was peeling. The rooms were small, smaller than my bedroom at home. Lined down a long, narrow hallway, each room was identical. A large communal bathroom and shower were located on each floor.
When I first saw the inside of my dormitory, I thought it looked like something I would imagine of an old psychiatric hospital in a horror movie. In fact, when I first watched the movie “Halloween,” and saw the mental hospital where Jason escaped, I immediately thought about that dorm.
But, mostly, I was glad to see much hadn’t changed. The stone walkways that led students from building to building were still there. The old black lamp posts that dotted campus were exactly as I remembered. They were always so warm and inviting, particularly on a cold winter’s night when the snow was falling, and the smell of hot chocolate and freshly made smores engulfed the air around the fire pit on the shores of Lake Honor.
The lake was the reason I had come back. It had become a part of me in the short time I was there.
If there were two iconic landmarks on campus that, more than anything, represented to me the soul of the school, those would be the Williams Memorial Chapel, aka Stone Chapel, and Lake Honor. They were the constants that would never change. They were the places people went to celebrate life and the places people went to hide their darkest secrets.
Lake Honor was not really a lake. It was more like a pond, circular, less than an acre in size and man-made. It was a place of reflection, a place where young love blossomed and a place where the troubled and tired could reminisce about their carefree days. For the most part, it was a happy place.
I have a lot of fond memories of Lake Honor. I fell in love for the first time on a bench under the shadows of the sprays of water that jetted up from the fountain at the lake’s center. I came there when I was lonely, scared or just wanted to be alone with my thoughts.
Lake Honor was beautiful. It judged no one. It was a warm place on a cold, lonely night. The gentle ripples in the water and the relaxing sound of the water from the fountain lifting high in the air and arcing back into the lake like the gentle touch of a mother lying her baby down in the crib for a night’s sleep. I spent the best of times and the worst of times at Lake Honor.
It was the last place I visited when I returned to campus some forty-four years after I left. I took a seat at the same bench where I’d sat many times before. It was warm now, late summer. The trees were green. The air was dry when I arrived, and the wind was still. The lake had a quiet elegance. It was calm and peaceful.
When I first arrived on campus, I thought Lake Honor seemed to have an innocence about it. Its simple fountain in the middle reminded me of home. Kansas City has a lot of fountains. It reminded me of my childhood. I was naïve back then, full of hope, full of optimism. I was ready to embrace life.
For me, it always felt like more than a lake. Even today, I can feel its pull on my soul. It’s like a magnet drawing me closer to answers, to resolution, to rest. It’s a transcendent place where roads begin and end.
I went there often during the two semesters I spent at S of O, mostly late at night after curfew when it was quiet, and the only noise you could hear was the sound of ripples created by the fountain.
Life at S of O was not easy for me. Beyond the shores of the tiny, man-made lake, I never felt I belonged. I could never be fully comfortable there. I had friends, good friends, and for the most part, my memories of S of O were good. But I was always anxious to leave. From the first day I walked onto campus, I knew I would not be a student there very long. The strict rules, the curfews, and the requirement to attend church twice a week and take certain religious courses did not sit well with me.
The funny thing was that I had grown up in a strong Lutheran family. I had attended church services most Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings ever since I could remember. But before, it was my choice. No one told me I had to attend church. No one forced me to do it. No one threatened me with punishment if I chose not to go. My parents had always trusted me to do the right thing. If I wanted to miss a church service now and then, they would understand. They never punished me for missing.
But it was different at S of O. They used rules, punishment and threats to force conformity. At least, that was how I saw it, and I did not handle rules well, particularly those I didn’t understand. That large, white stone church in the center of campus became a thorn in my foot, a thorn that I was determined to get out. For my first few weeks, I attended church as I was required. But I watched and looked for any opportunity to bend the rules. I soon found my chance with an attendance card that was handed out when you walked into church. The card would be completed, and then when the service was over, the card would be put into a locked box as the student left the church.
So, I would come to church early, fill out the attendance card, drop it in the outgoing box, and leave. In hindsight, it was a stupid plan. Had anyone checked the locked box before the service ended, they would have seen the lone attendance card inside, and that would have likely gotten me expelled. But I was lucky. No one checked, and I continued to do the same routine every Wednesday night and Sunday morning.
I avoided that church nearly my entire time at S of O.
Lake Honor was my church. Its shores were my alter. It offered the spiritual guidance I refused to accept from the strict Stone Chapel. Whenever I felt lost or needed answers, I went to Lake Honor.
I felt the lake nourished my soul and protected my innocence until the pivotal day when everything changed.
It was the fall of ‘73. The air was crisp. The leaves on the trees were no longer green. They had changed to their autumn colors, orange, brown, and red. The trees were breathtaking that time of year. The Ozarks in the fall was a magical place. I can’t imagine anything more beautiful. The colors were spectacular. The air was fresh. The quiet was deafening. It was a place where you could hear individual leaves fall. Where the rush of modern life felt a million miles away.
The night before everything changed for good had been a stormy one with bright lightning flashes and booming thunder. Lights in the dormitory flickered on and off but never totally lost power. The wind was strong, blowing branches against the windows and making a terrible clatter.
The storm seemed to come out of nowhere. The weather could change on a dime in the Ozarks. It had been sunny and unseasonably warm earlier in the day. Clouds had begun to roll in during the early evening. By 10 p.m., the wind was howling. The temperature had dropped, and the rain had begun to pour.
It was difficult to sleep that night. Growing up in Kansas, I had seen storms like this come on rapidly from the west. Sometimes they produced the tornadoes for which Kansas was famous. I remember being concerned a tornado might come that night. The storm was eerily similar to one I remembered that spun several tornadoes and destroyed a large portion of Topeka in the late ‘60s.
For nearly two hours, the driving rain pelted the small college on the hill. Then it disappeared from Point Lookout as quickly as it came.
When I woke a few hours later, a fog had blanketed the campus. It wasn’t surprising. The temperatures had changed rapidly from warm to cold to warm again as the storm passed through. With the Branson area nestled around three lakes, S of O often experienced fog from the lakes in the valley below when temperatures changed rapidly.
Usually, the fog appeared during the early morning hours and disappeared by mid-morning. That was the case that day. It was heaviest on the way to my first class. By the time I came outside again, it was gone, replaced by clear blue skies.
The day would not have been remarkable had it not been for what the storm brought with it. I remember very little about it at all until a little past 1 p.m. I had a Religion class from noon to 1:00 that day, and the cafeteria stopped serving lunch at 1:30 p.m., so I rushed from the fine arts building, planning to eat at the cafeteria about a hundred yards away. I was very hungry. I had skipped breakfast earlier in order to sleep in a little.
I didn’t make it to lunch, though. I was distracted by a loud sound, like a motor grinding, coming from Lake Honor, about fifty yards away. To this day, I don’t remember why I decided to check it out instead of going to eat. Curiosity, I guess.
