I wrote this article in June of 2012. This week the dream has finally come to be a reality.We are calling it the Big Piney Nature Center and Museum.And yes, it is much like the dream expressed in this column. On Saturday June 28 we will open the doors to the public for our first big event. We even have an antique pool table to play on and sometime this summer we’ll have a pool tournament.

I was just 17 years old, away from home as a college freshman at School of the Ozarks, which sat on a bluff looking down on Taneycomo Lake south of Branson. One evening just after dark, I sat on that rocky bluff point behind the library, high above that old White River valley with a young lady I had just met, and she was going on about what she wanted to do with her life, and what she dreamed about. I wasn’t saying anything, so finally she asked me what my dreams were. I thought about it a moment and told her that all I really wanted out of life was to own my own pool hall! I don’t think we got past holding hands. She envisioned a boyfriend with a great deal more ambition than I had.

Well, what would you expect of a kid who had spent six of his seventeen years in a small Ozarks town pool hall, idolizing old-timers who hunted and fished and trapped and farmed? I can still see them and hear them, and my life is better for it. I took their advice, lucky to get my first education in that pool hall. I was thinking about it the other day and I have come full circle back to my boyhood. If I could just have an old johnboat and a clear, clean river full of fish, some bobwhite quail and a bird dog and a good pool hall on the side I would be terribly happy.

Actually, I would need a big place for today’s dreams. I want to have a place with a pool table, and a card tables, domino table and a little kitchen where we could have biscuits and gravy and coffee and cinnamon rolls in the morning, prepared on an old wood cook-stove. We’d allow for a refrigerator so we could have soda pop and baloney and cheese sandwiches in the middle of the afternoon. But there wouldn’t be any computers. And I would place beautiful outdoor art on the walls above everything else… paintings of mallards dropping into the marsh in a snowstorm, a big bass jumping out of the water after a frog, a big buck sneaking through the corn rows… that kind of thing.

Surrounding all this I would like to have a big “Museum of Grizzled Old Ozark Outdoorsmen”. There’d be an old wooden johnboat, and sassafras paddles and glass minnow traps and old Pflueger casting reels with braided line mounted on steel fishing rods. I’d make displays with all the things I have accumulated over the years from a better time, when men were men and rivers were rivers and you could actually live without air-conditioning.

That pool hall from my boyhood never was hot, but all it had was a big four-foot fan in a back window that carried away some of the hot air which came from the front bench. Even in the winter, we had a lot of hot air being circulated when the old timers got to telling hunting and fishing stories. For winter days we’d have to have a fireplace and we’d need a good hound to lie in front of it.

There’s nothing that grizzled old outdoorsmen like me need more than a place to get rid of all the stuff we have, because when you get to be a grizzled old outdoorsman like me, you have much, much more than you need, and a lot of it is getting close to being priceless antiques. I could sell a lot of my priceless antiques cheap if we could find the room for them.

If this dream of mine came true, I know I wouldn’t get to hunt and fish as much as I do now, but there comes a time in a man’s life when he don’t need to hunt and fish as much, and it gets to be more fun just talking about how good it use to be when he did.I know it is just a dream, and a wild one at that. But I think I will at least make the sign, in case some investors come along. It will read, “Grizzled Old Ozark Outdoorsman’s Museum, Consignment Store, Pool Hall and Coffee Shop… No Computers, Cell Phones or Lawyers Allowed. All Guns Must Be Unloaded. Hunting Dogs Welcome!

Contact me via email lightninridge47@gmail.com or office phone 417-777-5227.