Tragedies Won?t Sink Famous Trout Resort

LAKEVIEW — After three decades of building a White River resort from the six pink cabins his father left him into a small city that is the headquarters of world-famous Ozark trout fishing, Jim Gaston thought his life mission nearly complete. Although their relationship was at times tumultuous, Gaston’s only child, Eric, had been groomed to take over Gaston’s White River Resort.

“That was always the way it was going to be,” Jim Gaston said. “I never thought of it any other way.”

But on August 9, 1995, Jim Gaston’s plan went up in smoke. That’s when Eric, battling alcoholism at age 31, and the father of two sons, committed suicide.

“At first, I was just torn apart … I remember the night before,” Gaston said, pointing to a spot in his office. “Eric stood right there. He hugged me. I told him I loved him and he said he loved me.”

Gaston barely weathered that storm. Ask anyone close to him, his wife of 19 years, Jill, or his friend for almost 40 years, Richard Davies, who is the director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism. Ask them if they were concerned that Jim Gaston wouldn’t survive his son’s suicide, and they’ll look you dead in the eyes and say, “Yes.”

No further explanation needed — simply, “Yes.”

Jim Gaston was 20 years old, the son of a Flint Hills, Kan., farmer and oil construction worker, when he first drove down the dirt road leading to 20 acres and six cabins his father had purchased on the banks of the White River. At age 24, he took on Gaston’s White River Resort as a business. It was sink or swim. His father would die bankrupt, a victim of trying to put groceries on the table for a wife and two sons while working in two of the highest risk businesses of the 20th century.

Over the next 30 years, Gaston earned a reputation as “the godfather” of the White River. When President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Interior James Watt proposed shutting down the nearby Norfork National Fish Hatchery, Jim Gaston’s office became the crisis headquarters.

Gaston’s office again was the information hub when low dissolved oxygen levels from Bull Shoals Dam killed thousands of trout and threatened the reputation of a world-renowned fishery in 1990. The same thing happened again when trout hatchery closings were threatened in the early years of the Clinton administration. All those threats were handled to the benefit of trout fishing.

Critical in those victories was the fact that Jim Gaston always had an eye for the big picture. He eagerly accepted an appointment to the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism Commission in 1973 by then-Governor Dale Bumpers. He was often referred to as “the Marlboro man” by then-Governor Bill Clinton, who followed the lead of his predecessors and continued to reappoint Gaston to the Parks and Tourism Commission.

Trailblazer

Clinton’s nickname for Gaston is apt. A slim six-foot man with a weather-tanned face, Gaston is known for his wardrobe — a long-sleeve cotton shirt with two breast pockets, blue jeans and cowboy boots. He doesn’t own a necktie.

That one of those front shirt pockets always held a pack of cigarettes furthered the image. But most of all, Gaston earned that reputation by taking a role as the John Wayne of Arkansas’ $4.3 billion tourism industry.

As Davies likes to say, “Gaston, you can get away with saying things that nobody else can get away with saying.” As in, the cold, hard truth.

“He’s been right so often on so many things that when Gaston speaks, you have to listen,” said Davies. “He has always been ahead of the times. Always.”

A case in point would be Gaston’s embrace of computers and the Internet.

He is recognized as the first Arkansas resort owner to completely computerize his operation, in 1980, as well as being the first in Arkansas to have a Web site.

Gaston has long recognized the need to be flexible in the tourism business. When asked to compare his customers from the early 1960s to those now, Gaston says, “The only thing that’s the same is that we still have pink cottages by the river. Our customers today are more experience oriented. They want to have a good time. They want to relax and experience some of the natural beauty of the Ozarks.”

They don’t have to catch a limit of fish to be happy, he said. By building more than six miles of nature trails, Gaston has made sure there’s something to experience in the great outdoors, other than fishing, at his resort.

That wouldn’t have worked 40 years ago, he said.

“In 1962, if the limit had been 100 trout and you caught 99, it was a bad trip,” Gaston said.

The flexibility of the resort, located 125 miles east of Fayetteville in Baxter County, has proven fabulously successful.

Cabin Fever

Gaston’s Resort today includes 78 cabins, ranging from hotel type accommodations to a 10-bedroom, 10-bathroom, two-story lodge. It’s most popular cabins feature full kitchens, two bedrooms and two bathrooms.

The rates are equally diverse, ranging from $87 per night through $1,010 for the River Villa 10-bedroom setup. The rates and amenities are detailed at www.gastons.com.

All have a picture-window view of the White River. On the opposite side of the river from the cabins is a 3,200-foot grass airstrip. (Flying was another one of Gaston’s hobbies.) There’s also a restaurant overlooking the White River, an 1,800-SF conference lodge that can accommodate 125 people, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

Gaston’s includes almost 400 acres, two miles of which border the White River. The accommodations attract 30,000 guests per year.

Most of the resort was already in place when Jim Gaston’s world turned upside down on Aug. 19, 1995. Gaston went into deep depression after his son’s death.

“Some nights I’d be laying in bed and it felt like somebody had beat the hell out of me,” Gaston said. “I just ached. I held it in for a long time, trying to be strong for everyone, but I was ruining my life. I almost became a recluse. That was the first time in my life that I’d ever had a battle in front of me there was no way to win. I’m not saying I won every battle in life, but there was no way to win this one.”

It took Gaston 18 months to get through his depression. He openly talks about the subjects of suicide and depression today, as is Gaston’s style, hoping his experience can be of help to others. Time, counseling and, importantly, medicine, helped revive him.

“When something like that happens, you can either go up or down,” Gaston said. “You can sit there in self pity, and everybody does that for a time. But all you are doing is destroying everybody around you, everybody that loves you, and yourself.”

Eventually, like so many other things in his life, from airplanes to photography to wildflowers to Harley Davidson motorcycles, Gaston followed his heart and mind and learned all he could about both suicide and depression.

“It’s not that uncommon to have a suicide in the family,” Gaston said.

“People used to put that in a closet. They didn’t want to talk about it. I can only hope that because I went through all that and was candid with others, maybe I helped soften those things for them.”

Strong Winds

But Jim Gaston still had a problem to solve. With no son to leave his resort, he began thinking about what to do with it. What would happen if he died? For many years, he has received significant corporate offers to buy his resort. He never considered them because his plan was for the long run. With that plan in question, he spoke to the State Parks Department and the Nature Conservancy about an eventual transfer of ownership.

But as Gaston emerged from depression, he was able to focus not on what he’d lost, but what he had. Namely, two grandsons, Danny and Clint.

“It finally dawned on me, I’ve got grand kids,” Gaston said. “I look back on that now and ask myself why I didn’t think of that immediately.”

When those grandsons are 12 and 5, it’s easy to see why you wouldn’t think about them taking over a resort that employs more than 150 people at times and never less than 70. But when you get to know Danny Gaston, the oldest of those grand kids, you quickly sense an unusual level of maturity. Since he was six years old, Danny has worked at the resort, whether sweeping floors or selling bait or washing dishes in the restaurant.

Danny is now the manager at Gaston’s Resort. He turned 22 years old in March. His anguish didn’t end with the death of his father.

In November 2002, his mother, Lisa Gaston, was burning leaves and brush in her yard when she apparently passed out and fell into the fire. After what had to be more than a minute, she was able to get up, walk into the house and call 911. Lisa had always been into physical fitness and worked out nearly every day. There is no explanation for the accident that left her with fourth degree burns over 60 percent of her body.

She lived only a few more days in a Springfield, Mo., hospital. Danny Gaston, at age 18, was fatherless, motherless and left with the responsibility of raising his younger brother.

“Things happen and they make you who you are,” said Gaston, who lost a grandfather in a tractor accident six months after his mother died. “It was a really strange sequence of events.”

Getting out of Mountain Home and Gaston’s Resort might have occurred to someone else in those circumstances — just running away from the heartaches. Gaston says that never crossed his mind.

“I don’t want any sympathy,” Gaston said. “There’s an expression — strong winds make strong sailors. That’s my philosophy. I try to take everything that happens and roll with it.”

New Bond

Danny Gaston is the future of Gaston’s White River Resort. To him, this is what he was supposed to do and, more importantly, what he wanted to do all his life.

He did have other options. Danny Gaston has been interested in computers since the sixth grade, when he started designing Web sites. At age 16, he was selected for a Sony internship that took him to Japan for a month. Danny Gaston says he had job offers from Hewlett-Packard and Sony after high school, but turned them down.

He’d been through about three semesters of college work at Arkansas State University-Mountain Home when his mother died.

Taking on the responsibility for his younger brother left him no choice but to drop out of college and devote his time to Clint and the resort. In addition, Danny Gaston got married almost two years ago, further defining the idea of being an adult at age 22.

In the meantime, Jim and Danny Gaston, grandfather and grandson, have forged an even stronger bond.

“It’s really a special relationship,” Danny says. “We have a work relationship and a personal relationship. If I mess up something at work, he can chew on my butt here in the office, but we can go out and do something later and it’s like it never happened.”

Adds Danny, “But he hasn’t had to chew me out in a couple of years now.”

Like Jim, Danny is embracing Arkansas’ tourism industry. He is a member of the Arkansas Travel Association, which meets quarterly to look at the big picture of state tourism. When he was appointed, at age 21, he became the youngest in the association’s history.

“I’m not going to be a clone [of Jim Gaston],” Danny said. “He has set the bar high for me. As different as we are in age, he and I share a similarity in the way we think and react. It’s odd. It’s not like I’ve always been following him around.”

A week earlier, Jim Gaston had used the same word — clone — when talking about Danny.

“We work together as far as ideas,” Jim said. “But I don’t want him to feel like he needs to be a clone of me. When he goes to Arkansas Tourism meetings, I don’t brief him before he goes or debrief him when he comes back.”

That bond is made stronger in their time away from the office. After everything from rebuilding old steam engines to collecting fountain pens (Jim Gaston has the “world’s largest fountain pen Web site” online at www.jimgaston.com), Jim’s latest hobby is off-road adventures in four-wheel-drive Jeeps. He’s been taking off-road adventures to the Moab, Utah, area for several years now.

Danny’s personal Web site ( www.djgaston.com) illustrates his passion for the sport. Although Danny calls Jim “Grandpa,” they can both act like a couple of high school kids when out four-wheeling.

“[Jim] is more father than anything,” Danny said. “The only reason I don’t call him that is out of respect for my dad. He is truly one of my best friends. We’re an excellent team.”

Jim Gaston expects to spend many more years working 10 to 12 hours a day in his office at Gaston’s Resort. His joy for work is now back to the level that built Gaston’s Resort into one of the premier trout fishing destinations in the United States. His goal is back in place.

“When you look at the game of business, I’ve won,” Gaston said. “But I’ve won for a reason very few people would realize. I’ve won because this is going to stay in the family. It has nothing to do with possessions and nothing to do with the value of White River land.”

Danny Gaston shares that goal.

“That’s the dream, hand it down to a kid of my own,” says Danny, who then with a smile, adds, “If my kids don’t want to run it, I’ll adopt.”

Pink Paint’s Price Started Tradition

The tradition of the pink cottages has ended at Gaston’s Resort.

No, there’s not going to be a new color slapped on the long row of cabins that begins on the White River 3.5 miles below Bull Shoals Dam. But if you look carefully, you’ll notice cabins No. 74 through 77 feature natural-colored cedar siding rather than pink paint. But that doesn’t mean the other pink cottages will change.

“We can’t ever get rid of the pink cottages,” Danny Gaston said. “That would be like Coke changing its logo. We have had customers who didn’t even know the name of the resort. They just knew us as the place on the White River with the pink houses. That’s part of holding on to the tradition and the roots of what is Gaston’s.”

So where did this pink thing start, anyway? Consensus has it that the color was born from Gaston practicality.

Jim Gaston doesn’t know why his late father, Al, painted the first six cabins pink. But Richard Davies, the director of Arkansas’ Department of Parks and Tourism, says he’s kidded Gaston about that, based on Al’s reputation.

“I think it went something like this,” Davies said. “He walked in a paint store and said, ‘I need some paint for my resort.’ The guy in the paint store says, ‘What color is your resort?’ Gaston says, ‘What’s the cheapest paint you’ve got?” The guy says, “Pink.” Gaston says, “I’ll take five gallons of pink.”

That Gaston pragmatism is definitely why cabin No. 7 was painted pink.

“The original six cabins were pink, and when I added one more, I couldn’t afford enough paint to redo them all in another color,” Gaston said.

So he bought just enough pink paint for the new cabin. Thus a tradition was born.

No Trout to Monsters in 50 years:

1938 — President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Flood Control Act of 1938, giving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authority to build dams on free flowing streams. The legislation is a reaction to the “Great Mississippi River Flood” of 1927, when nearly 1 million people in the United States were forced from their homes.

1941 — Jim Gaston born, on Dec. 18 in Herrin, Ill. Also, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begin construction of Norfork Dam on the North Fork River in Arkansas. Commercial power generation begins at the dam in 1944.

1948 — The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission experiments with stocking 600 rainbow trout (4 to 6 inches long) in the 50-degree water that flows from the depths of Norfork Lake to turn the hydroelectric power generators in Norfork Dam. Most Ozark native fish can’t reproduce in 50-degree water, thus the experiment with trout, which are a cold-water species not native to the Ozarks. Within one year, two- to three-pound trout are caught. After two years, six- to eight-pound rainbows are landed.

1952 — Commercial power generation begins at Bull Shoals Dam. It is the second of five Corps of Engineers-built hydropower dams in what the Corps refers to as the White River System. In order of construction, they are 1) Norfork Dam on the North Fork River, begun in 1941; 2) Bull Shoals Dam on the White River, 1947; 3) Table Rock Dam on the White River, 1954; 4) Greers Ferry Dam on the Little Red River, 1959; and 5) Beaver Dam on the White River, 1960.

1957 — Construction of the Norfork National Fish Hatchery is completed. Congress authorized the trout hatchery two years earlier as mitigation for the loss of native warm-water fish habitat in the White River Basin. It produces about 2 million trout per year, 75 percent of those are stocked in Arkansas as 9-inch rainbow trout.

1959 — During the first year of record keeping, Arkansas’ rainbow trout record is broken four times from June 11 through Oct. 2 — increasing from 11 pounds, 3 ounces to 15 pounds, 8 ounces.

1961 — Jim Gaston, at age 20, comes to Arkansas from Flint Hills, Kan, to run his father’s resort on the White River. It was supposed to be a temporary job, but Gaston will never reside anywhere else.

1971 — The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission begins requiring trout anglers to buy a special permit in addition to a fishing license. Of the 660,205 people who bought Arkansas fishing licenses (440,524 residents; 219,681 non-residents) 41,886 also bought a trout permit — 6.3 percent.

1972 — Troy Lackey, a fishing guide from nearby Lakeview, lands an Arkansas and North American record brown trout weighing 31 pounds, 8 ounces. He caught it near Partee Shoal, on the White River just below Gaston’s, using a crawfish tail for bait.

1977 — Leon Waggoner from Flippin breaks Lackey’s record with a 33-pound, 8-ounce brown trout.

1988 — Mike “Huey” Manley of North Little Rock sets new state and world records with a 38-pound, 9-ounce brown trout caught from the North Fork River.

1992 — Howard “Rip” Collins of Heber Springs caches a new world and state record brown trout — weighing 40 pounds, 4 ounces — from the Little Red River below Greers Ferry Dam. Collins caught the fish on a 1/32nd ounce, olive-colored marabou jig and four-pound test line. The record still stands today.

2004 — The AGFC’s’s sale of trout permits reaches a new record total of 165,928. Of the 561,683 people who bought Arkansas fishing licenses last year (396,413 residents; 165,270 non-residents) 29.5 percent — also an all-time high — bought a trout permit.

Gaston’s By the Numbers

Here’s a quick glance at some of the highlights from Gaston’s world-famous resort on the White River near Lakeview:

0 — Number of neckties owned by Jim Gaston.

2 — Minimum number of dogs lounging at the feet of Jim Gaston while he works in his office each day. Pets are welcome at Gaston’s, but guests must keep theirs on a leash. Gaston’s pets are free to roam.

3.5 — Miles below Bull Shoals Dam on the White River to Gaston’s Resort. Nearby Lakeview is the mailing address for Gaston’s. The town of Bull Shoals is just across the river from the resort. Mountain Home is 15 miles east.

78 — The number of cabins now, including everything from hotel-type rooms to a 10-bedroom, 10-bathroom two story cottage.

216 — Total number of full size beds at Gaston’s today, thus it represents the basic figure for maximum daily occupancy.

380 — Acres of land, including two miles of White River frontage, that’s owned by Gaston’s Resort today.

6 — Miles of nature trails, lined with a variety of native wildflowers, maintained at the resort. The original nature trail runs along the river downstream from the cabins. The newest trail covers a steep Ozark hillside near the entrance to the resort.

1,800 — Square feet in Gaston’s Conference Center, which holds up to 125 people.

3,200 — Length in feet of the grass airplane runway at Gaston’s. (298 degrees from Flippin VOR [6 mi.] 100 LL Fuel, Kansas City Chart. Unicom 122.8.)

$10 — Cost to rent a cabin for one night at Gaston’s in 1961.

$87 — One night charge for the cheapest room available at Gaston’s today.

$184 — One night charge for the popular “Ultra Deluxe Cottages,” each of which include two bedrooms (two regular size beds in each), two bathrooms, a full kitchen, fireplace and a deck.

$1,010 — Cost per night for the most expensive cabin, the two-story River Villa, which includes 10 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms and a large kitchen/dining/den area.

(Steve Wright is a freelance writer in Fayetteville and the author of “Ozark Trout Tales” and co-author of “The Arkansas Duck Hunter’s Almanac.”)