Author John Stanard shares childhood memories of his youth at Wappapello Lake
STORY AND PHOTOS by Jim McCarty
If you are a child today, chances are you were robbed of an outdoors education. The culprit is the TV set and any kind of device with a screen designed to keep you indoors. Can you answer these questions in the affirmative?
• Were you taught to distinguish the calls of a fox squirrel versus its gray cousin?
• Have you ever baited your trotline with a crawfish you seined from a muddy roadside ditch?
• Have you pulled said trotline out of the water and found a hundred-pound alligator snapping turtle snarling on the hook?
• Did your childhood meals include squirrel stew?
• Were your vacations staged way back in the jillikins?
If not, you may be entitled to compensation — in the form of a trip to the woods, a splash in a creek or a summer spent in the wilds near a large body of water. Welcome to “The Lake House,” a memoir from the well-sharpened pen of John Stanard.
An Education in the Wilds
Many in southeast Missouri knew John as the editor of the Daily American Republic newspaper in Poplar Bluff. Others know him as a fervent conservationist who witnessed the closing of the Lake Wappapello Dam, discovered champion trees, saw the preservation of the Current and Jacks Fork rivers as the Ozark National Scenic Riverways and assisted with the introduction of steel shot to waterfowl hunting. He’s often been seen prowling the hills and hollers of the Ozarks, wetting a hook at Mingo National Wildlife Refuge or wingshooting ducks in the Bootheel marshes.
But long before he edited his first galley, earned an expert rifleman’s badge at Fort Leonard Wood and graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, John got an outdoor education at an old lake house.
His razor-sharp memory shares the story of that unusual outdoor education at the hands of his beloved grandfather, “Daddy John” Wolpers, in a new book titled “The Lake House: How Rich Boyhood Memories Inspired a Life in Conservation.” John received the help of his artist wife, Rose Anne, to illustrate the book with drawings ranging from the critters that were his playmates to the characters who added to his education with hilarious stories.
The result is a glimpse into the life of a 4-year-old boy who would grow into an avid conservationist and sportsman. He would learn not to fear the dark on a trip to the outhouse and that wild animals make poor pets.
“It’s obvious from the book that the Lake House was a very special part of my early life,” John says. “My experiences with my grandparents were notable compared to all my friends and anybody I’ve known about. My great-uncle Frank Kinder was part of that. He and my grandfather grew up in the wilderness, literally, in the 1880s up on Castor River, and they knew all about nature. They knew all about animals and their habits, and insects and snakes, and so I learned all that stuff. And that’s really what turned me on to the outdoors.”
The house was leased during World War II from the Corps of Engineers, who bought it and the surrounding land when the lake was built. It was intended to provide respite from the grind of publishing a daily newspaper for the elder John and his wife, Hattie Wolpers. On weekends they would head into what was then wilderness on Cozort Point with a toddler in tow.
Their time was spent picking blackberries, squirrel hunting and fishing on the lake. There were many adventures along the way that made an indelible impression on the boy. Many of these came in the small wooden boat Daddy John named “Two Johns.” One story tells of an 18-mile boat ride through the flooded lake all the way to Highway 67 and back. This came after torrential rain stranded the family at the Lake House, much to the delight of the author, who wasn’t ready to be rescued.
Lessons in Sportsmanship
If there’s a common theme, it’s the lessons passed down from grandparents to child. For example, the hunters never took the limit of six bushytails. “They’d bring two or three squirrels into the Lake House because there were four adults and a little kid there, and you know, three squirrels was all the squirrel meat you needed,” John relates. “And same thing with duck hunting. If they got two big old mallards, that would feed that group of people because a half of a big mallard is a lot of food.”
There were no toys at the Lake House, so John entertained himself studying insects on the front porch. He learned to tell cantankerous wasps from the docile mud daubers by the latter’s tiny waist. He observed doodlebugs eating ants, lay next to cow piles to watch dung beetles, listened to the high-pitched squeaks of Bessie bugs and entertained himself for hours flying June bugs tied to a piece of string.
Later great-uncle Frank taught him how to make whistles by slipping the bark from a hickory twig. This led to John’s first experience with government regulation when he tried to sell whistles to his classmates. The principal, “Miss Lucy,” told him the fertile playground marketplace was off limits for his wares.
Witness to Conservation
Little known to the boy, his childhood would parallel the first efforts at conservation in Missouri. So rare then was the sight of a deer that John wrote about his grandfather pointing out some tracks he found in the mud about 1950. “My grandfather said he had not seen a deer, or even deer tracks, since he was a boy growing up in the Castor River wilderness of the 1880s,” John wrote.
River otters, beavers and wild turkeys were scarce. Peregrine falcons and bald eagles faced extinction. The once-plentiful hardwood forests of the Ozarks had been logged off. Rampant burning of the woods led to the loss of habitat for many members of the food chain. “I realized when I was writing that we didn’t have any deer at the Lake House, and no turkeys, no beavers, no otters, no eagles,” John says.
But as he grew older, science-based efforts by the Missouri Department of Conservation and other agencies restored many species thought to be doomed. During John’s tenure as editor of the Daily American Republic, a bald eagle nest was discovered at Mingo refuge. Deer are so plentiful today they entertain him at the home he and Rose Anne share in the city limits of Poplar Bluff. “You know in the ’30s we had 400 deer in Missouri — 400 deer, and that was it,” John says. “That’s all we had. And last year, the legal harvest was 302,000 deer in Missouri.”
As a reporter, John boated on Current River along with Tricia Nixon Cox, daughter of President Nixon, who traveled to the Current River country to dedicate the Ozark National Scenic Riverways. As the editor of the outdoors page in the newspaper, John was invited along on an ill-fated expedition to tranquilize and relocate a bear, as told in the book. Today, bear encounters number in the hundreds, prompting bear hunting once again in Missouri.
There’s more work to be done, however, as he relates in late chapters of the book. Grouse, quail, pheasant and prairie chicken populations “hang by a thread” as John puts it.
“The Lake House” is a wonderful memoir, made all the better by the writing and editing skills of its author, combined with the detailed artwork of Rose Anne. The most poignant section tells of the passing of Daddy John, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the old house. While an amazing era had ended, the author would continue to visit the Lake House until he left home for college.
The end came when the Corps burned the decaying house. “It broke my heart,” John wrote. He visited the site with other family members, where one of the few remainders of his time there was discovered. It was a copper stencil, ordered from Montgomery Ward by his grandfather. The stencil read “Two Johns,” and it was used to paint the name on the old wooden boat.
Finding that stencil caused a flood of memories that dripped down the cheeks of the grown man who once spent his childhood there. Those memories are now a 304-page book that will delight any lover of the great outdoors.
“When John was writing, he kept writing it like a newspaper reporter at arm’s length, and I said, ‘John, we need to know how you felt, what you thought, what it meant to you,’ ” Rose Anne says. “ ‘You can give us your opinion. That’s the whole point.’ And over and over, I had to encourage him to do that because it played such a huge role in his life.”
“The Lake House” is available in print and digital formats. For links to purchase the book and for the dates of book signings, visit
www.johnrstanard.com.
Email Jim McCarty at jmccarty@ruralmissouri.coop.