Branson

by Jesse Gloyd
(as edited by Andrew J. Hamilton)

I went to Branson for the second time when I was twelve years old. It was the childhood home of my grandfather, who we called, Poppo. Aaron Hoholik, a friend who later graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in film studies, came along. While at Santa Cruz he took a class that studied the work of Stanley Kubrick for half a semester and Robert Altman for the other half. During the Altman portion of the class, they were blessed with the opportunity to view an original print of Nashville. As the story goes, the morning after the screening, one of the students stripped naked, wrapped himself in an American flag, and hung himself dead from the rafters of the theater. Santa Cruz is a big school and I do not know if Aaron knew him.

We flew in to Kansas City. I can't recall if the airport is on the Kansas side of the city or the Missouri, but I do remember the sweet, thick smell of car exhaust and cigarette smoke that held stagnant in the humid summer air as we waited curbside for my dad to come back with the rental van.

From the airport, we drove to Prairie Village to stay with Poppo’s brother Bob. It was on the Kansas side of the city. Bob was Poppo's youngest brother. He had a stroke and passed away recently. He was a funny guy. We spent the first few nights eating cheese sandwiches and brisket and talking about the Royals. Wally Joyner had just signed for about $4 million and was supposed to be a lot better than he was. History says that he probably was, but it didn't matter much because the Royals were no good and would continue to be no good until 2003 gave way to luck and circumstance. Bob didn't get to see 2003. His wife Gene and his son Mike did though, and I would imagine it was fun for them. They had a dog who coughed and wheezed a lot. They think he had emphysema, and he probably did.

We stopped off at the Precious Moments factory about four hours down the road from Kansas City. I don't think we bought anything.

Poppo had a sister named Thelma who was born in 1906. She was still alive and living with her husband Carl in Republic, Missouri when we came down to visit. They had a large place on the corner. We bought a red truck from Carl a few years later. It was supposed to be my first car, but I took more to the my dad’s Trooper and the truck went to my mom. Thelma's granddaughter, who may have been older than my dad, lived in a house on the same property. The house smelled like Carmex and anytime spent outside the yellowed, wafer thin curtains was welcome.

In Republic, I caught fireflies but didn't know what to do with them. Two cousins of mine introduced me to bottle rockets, which were something of a revelation. Pure, powerful, dangerous; the crack, the quick whoosh they made when released. I started by lighting them on the ground but would perfect, later in the trip, the art of releasing them by hand.
Springfield is about thirty miles away from Republic and about an hour or so from Branson. We stopped in Springfield for a coffee, McDonald's, and a spin through the Bass Pro Shop. Those were my glory days of fishing. The Bass Pro Shop, though not purely dedicated to fly-fishing, was a vision to the twelve year old me. Hats, houseboats, lures, motor homes, rods, reels, restaurants, sunglasses, and a forty-pound bass named Bertha called it home. I bought a hat and a t-shirt and some wet flies that we'd heard would work in Lake Taneycomo.

We stayed at Allendale's Resort in Branson, right on the Lake of the Ozarks. Poppo had worked there a few years before World War II. We fished for croppy and dodged falling water moccasins in the inlets of the lake. Small huts, probably seventy or more years old, circled a pool. A billiards room came off the lobby. Poppo used to work in the restaurant. The last time we saw it, they were tearing it down.

Branson is a small town, no matter what people told you. You can walk from Allendale's to the downtown in about ten minutes, and drive from the downtown to the Shepard of the Hills outdoor theater in about another ten.

Fireworks were everywhere. A man in a boat would buzz up and down the lake shooting bottle rockets at us. He was dressed as a pirate and had some type of bottle rocket gun that slung the rockets at a blinding speed. It was a bit of a battle for the docks, I suppose.

For the most part, I managed to eat gravy three meals a day. Breakfast was biscuits and gravy, eggs and bacon; lunch included some form of either fried chicken, chicken fried chicken, or chicken friend steak, mashed potatoes, gravy, and sweet iced tea from a fruit jar; and much of the same for supper, with the possibility of blackberry cobbler a la mode.

A lot happened in Branson. It was my This Boy's Life summer without the gay stuff, abuse, and single motherness. For better or worse, it was where I discovered both the Imax and Ray Stevens. I lean more towards better. Part of an Imax movie was being shot at my great-uncle's farm while we were there. His name is Everett, but for some reason we call him Uncle Fudge. He was a shriner (complete with wacky small car and fez) and had a wife named Becky who used to be a fantastic golfer, from what I hear.

The beginning stages of Alzheimer's were setting in for Becky on this trip. She would bring us drinks three and four times, sandwiches too. She's in a home now, barely able to breathe. We went out to eat one night and she yelled at the waiter for bringing out the food twice.

Everett was a storyteller and a great fiddle player. A lot of the session musicians from the shows would come over and play occasionally. He'd been mayor in the seventies and was really tied in to the history of the region, the vigilantes of the post-Civil War era, the backwoods life of hollers and Brier Rabbit and such. It was as foreign and new and fresh and real as if it happened yesterday, though most of the characters were long dead. The river that ran through town had been part of the Mason Dixon line. The ghosts of back then seemed to lurk clear and vivid in the morning mist of that water.

When Everett was a child, about thirteen or so, his mom came down with some form of nose cancer. A traveling medicine man came through town one day and she bought some lye soap from him. The stuff shriveled up her nose and turned it into a thin flap of black skin. One morning, when the pain became unbearable, she came to Everett with scissors and told him to cut it off. He was scared, I suppose, but he obeyed.

There are many stories floating around down there. I found a baseball program in an old shop in Joplin. I bought it for twelve dollars. There's a picture of Mickey Mantle in it that became mildly famous, an original. The shop was next to a restaurant that served the crispiest, juiciest chicken fried chicken I've ever had in my life. We went back to find the restaurant a few years ago, but it had become a Waffle House.