Very few of us make it through life without some kind of “Triumph Over Tragedy” story. I talked to Lebanon’s Gail Anderson this week about her family’s experience with surviving tragedy.
It was in 1948 that William and Clarise Splan with their two young children were taking a vacation in the Bennett Spring area. Many times people return from vacation saying they wished they could have just stayed in their vacation spot forever. William Splan actually thought he had made his family’s dream come true when he discovered the Bennett family were wanting to sell the old Bennett Hotel and decided to purchase it for his family. Even before the movie, he had often said he wanted to live on land where “the river runs through it”.
He sold their house in St. Louis and moved his young family to what is unarguably one of the most beautiful nature spots in Missouri. But just a year later in 1949 tragedy struck the family. His two children, Gail and Bill, ages 10 and 12 respectively, and a 10 year old guest at the hotel were swimming close to the hotel in the Niangua River.
The river was up and the adventuresome guest went past the warning signs into deep water and began to struggle. William, known to be a champion swimmer at his local YMCA, tried to rescue her but he fell on a little bluff and struck his head and although he made it to her in the water, he was unable to save her. He drowned that day. He was 52 years old.
Twelve year old Bill Splan got a boat and rowed out to the struggling girl and he was finally able to pull her into the boat, bringing her to safety.
Clarise Splan found herself a widow at age 47 with two children to raise. Family members advised her to move back to the city, but she decided to stay at the hotel and raise her children there. She loved to cook for a crowd, and family came from the city to help her for the rest of the summer.
Bill and Gail were not always helpful. If their mother wasn’t around, and prospective guests asked about a vacancy, the children would sometimes tell them the hotel was full because they knew having guests meant having to help with cooking and cleaning the rooms. That little ruse ended when their mother found out what was going on.
Clarise worked hard to keep the hotel, consisting of six rental rooms and a dining room, going. She would get up at 4 a.m. to serve breakfast to her guests and charged them eighty-five cents each until they complained that the price was too low and demanded she raise it! Pancakes, ham, bacon, fruit, muffins, biscuits and gravy were always on the menu. She also kept a Jersey cow on her property so she had fresh cream and butter and cottage cheese.
It would often be 10 p.m. or so before the kitchen was cleaned up for the day. Fishermen and women would bring in their catch and Clarise would fry them up for them. There was one catch about their “catch”. They had to be totally cleaned before they were brought into the hotel.
Her fried chicken was deemed the best in the country and of course she always had home made pies of every kind.
When the Splans bought the property from the Bennett family there was one restriction by the Bennett family - that alcohol would never be served on the premises. The Splans agreed with this, but there was nothing they could do if the fishermen had a little to drink before they showed up at the hotel. One day a guest came in who had consumed more than “a little”. He left a $20 tip for the waitress, a young woman who probably had never seen that much money at one time in her life. The next day he came back after he had sobered up and told Clarise that he had made a mistake and wanted the money back. She told him in no uncertain terms he was absolutely not getting his twenty dollar bill back and furthermore that she hoped he had learned his lesson and would stop drinking!
Gail and Bill, who had always attended a large city school in St. Louis, tried to learn the ways of a country school at the Windyville consolidated school. It was a culture shock for them as well as the other Windyville students. One day the two Splan children overheard the others talking about “the furriners”. They were curious and asked someone who the “furriners” were. They were astonished when they were told it was the two of them. Then there was the time Gail wore a snowsuit to school. It was common for girls to dress that way for winter in the city, but she soon learned nobody in Windyville even had a clue what kind of outfit it was!
Eventually Clarise divided the property and sold the hotel and cabins to Hobart and Nellie Burtin. She built a new motel with six units and a duplex and called it Splan’s Resort. Eventually the State of Missouri bought up all that land and all the buildings were razed.
Shortly afterwards, Clarise bought another farm in the area and lived there for a while before moving to Lebanon where she was the first resident at the newly built Adams Place. She died at age 93. Bill is also deceased, and Gail told me her family now refers to her as the “matriarch” of the Splan family. She feels very blessed to have been a part of the history of the beautiful Bennett Spring area and growing up around the river her father loved so well.
© Joan Rowden Hart 2017
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