Dave Wood

The Beautiful Wife and yours truly are back home in good old River Falls, after a punishing pilgrimage to Branson, Mo. Once a hick town in the Ozarks, it now booms with activity and keeps its 10,000 residents busy building condo after condo, the clanking of cranes and bulldozers waking us each morning in our hilltop aerie, which is already crowded with cheek by jowl of very commodious and elegant apartments. Ours slept 10 in 5 of 8 bedrooms, each appointed with a bathroom and a TV—and boasted a kitchen complete with two refrigerators and dishwashers, cooking and eating equipment for 25 folks—much better than many tourist destinations, like our last family  reunion in Pigeon Forge, which supplied two water glasses and a fork to help nourish 12 people.

No doubt about it, ours was a beautiful place located on a piedmont that spouted spectacular forests, looking down on huge Turtle Rock Lake and dazzling palisades that mesmerized us as we approached our destination. It made me wonder what it was like before movers and shakers decided to make it a tourist destination with attractions like the reconstituted mid-20^th century five and dime, a Paula Deen (!) pie shop and theatre after theatre of either has-beens or never heard of musicians and actors. Roy Clark is gone, dead, as are many other talented entertainers who put Branson on the map half a century ago.  Yakov Smirnoff’s theatre is still there, but the Russian vulgarian was nowhere to be seen, probably up in the Vodka Swilling Dacha in the Sky.

Admittedly, downtown Branson has lots of attractions, certainly more than Wisconsin Dells, with  its Papier Mache Roman Colosseum, and its very ungenuine lumberjack pancake house. Curiously there wasn’t a huge crowd on weekdays, many more on weekends giving credence to my friend’s remark that he had once gone there and the whole shebang “was worth about one day.” Our merry band was booked for a week. A few of our number tried that weekend to inspect the small mockup of the HMS Titanic, but faced a long line of weekenders clamoring to do the same, so gave up. Tickets for shows were pretty easy to book at the last minute, though.  

Several in our party left the fancy resort to see Dolly Parton’s “Stampede,” a rodeo cum cafeteria, serving the “best food in town:” Finger food, which featured an entire Rock Cornish Game Hen for each customer (ecologically sound: no plastic utensils to dispose of!) No Dolly, of course, just horses and square-dancers, introduced by an announcer with a very lame script and an equally lame sidekick.

B.W. and I drove all over the beautiful countryside on weekdays. We spotted a huge amusement park atop a mountain, The Silver Dollar. It had no cars parked in its mammoth lot at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. On Sunday, however, the lot was packed with autos, driven in by those “worth one day” tourists like my friend.

My prescient brother-in-law wondered as we listened to the clang of forklifts what would happen if tastes changed and the never heard of musicians got old and died off and if Parton’s nags were put to pasture.  What would happen if the heart of the operation on Main Street dried up? Who would rent or buy all these fabulous resort structures?

Given the business acumen of the town’s movers and shakers, I’m certain they’ll come up with the answers. Here are some suggestions for the Branson Chamber of Commerce:

Retrofit Main Street and turn it into a plush retirement village for the wealthy intellectuals and emphasize a trend that has already taken hold at some colleges. Oberlin College in Ohio, for instance, has for years advertised in the New Yorker that when the regular semesters are over, folks who want to soak up some learning and culture can rent dormitory rooms for a vacation in Ohio.

At Branson retirees could rent or buy condos, the 10,000 locals could work as custodians in the classroom, emptying wastebaskets, washing blackboards. Faculties could be hired from the already unemployed Ph.D.s from places with seriously ebbing institutions like St. Cloud State, St Mary’s in Winona and other struggling institutions. The Chamber of Commerce could select some of the rundown resorts to house faculty and provide leftovers from the school cafeteria to feed them. (Filet Mignon, barely touched by a wealthy, stern, old matron.)  The Titanic could house the Naval Engineering Department. Paula Deen could become Dean of Students in the Home Economics Department. Dolly Parton’s theatre could house the Equestrian Science building modeled on the program at UWRF.                                  

You get the picture. It’s all been done before with success. Sewanee (the Episcopal college in the hills of Tennessee) did it for years. Giving faculty log cabins for their families to live in, permitting those families free food at the college cafeteria. But the Branson Model would be even better because after their dinner, the wealthy oldsters could hop into their Alfa Romeos, Porsches, Teslas and Range Rovers to partake of the beautiful scenery, as it was before Paula Deen donned her apron in the foothills of the Ozarks. After that they could retire to their elegant condos and sip on a snifter of Courvoisier Five Star cognac. Whatta life! What about graduation? No need. Branson students already have their degrees from prestigious schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Wellesley. No need for a diploma from B S U. -- Branson Senior University.