My visits to Bull Shoals usually begin with an early morning call on Big Phil and his wife Benitia, who own the Mar Mar Resort and Big Phil's Tackle Shop, located on the main street. All the locals were at their regular seats at Connie's, the inimitable coffee clatch and breakfast nook across the street. The BassMasters Bull Shoals tournament was being held so I immediately ran into a gaggle of well-known, sleepy-eyed bass fishers at the cafe at dawn when I arrived. Their eighty-K rigs were sitting on trailers all over town.
But I wasn't after bass. I was in town to meet Bob Harper, author of the History of Bull Shoals, a book I recommend to anyone interested in reading tales of how the White River became a series of impoundments that are now, well, fished by a hundred guys in boats each worth more than a typical family farm around here. I had my son, Brendan along, who manned the video camera as we took Bob over to the Bull Shoals Historical Society Museum, which he helped to start a few years ago. The place is a first stop for those of you who like history and want to see how the country's fifth largest dam was conceived and built. Bob opened up the huge, glass covered display cases for me so I could photograph pages from newspapers popularizing the building of dams throughout the region in the 1940s.
Bob showed us his archival database of hundreds of articles and photographs, including Ranger Boat advertisements from the 1960s and Corps of Engineer feasibility studies of the dam site years before construction was approved in 1946. Bob proved to be a fascinating interview, with a personal history as a guide on the river during the 1980s. Having "written the book" on Bull Shoals, his story will make a great addition to our project, White River Memoirs: The Spoken History of a Liquid Legend.
