A Voice from the Past

Orig­i­nal Owner, Ace Anthony and his daugh­ter, Lynne

On the same day that we signed the own­er­ship papers (!!!!!!) Lynne, the woman whose father built Big Bend Lodge, got in touch with us. How weird is that? Lis­ten­ing to her sto­ries about grow­ing up on the banks of the Eel River was incred­i­ble. We’ll be talk­ing to her some more but here’s what we know so far.

The prop­erty was pur­chased raw — noth­ing on it but mead­ows and trees, and of course, the river. Lynne’s father, Ace Anthony (such a great name) brought his wife, Jean, there to live in a tent while he built the first two units. All the con­struc­tion wood is from the property’s red­wood trees that he logged and milled and the cin­derblocks were formed by him on site as well. As Lynne said, “Despite being in the mid­dle of log­ging coun­try, there were no lum­ber­yards or hard­ware stores any­where nearby, and besides, he didn’t have the money, so he had to make almost every­thing from what was already there or find the cheap­est way to do it.”

While they were build­ing, Jean got preg­nant. Now this was a mir­a­cle, Ace and Jean had been try­ing for over ten years. In fact, a leg­end soon devel­oped about the water at the lodge and for years, vis­i­tors who wanted to get preg­nant bot­tled the water and brought it home. After Lynne was born, she and her par­ents lived in one of the units and her grand­par­ents in the other until they built the main lodge where she grew up.

Ace, who was a leg­endary fish­er­man, fed the fam­ily from the abun­dant trout and salmon in the Eel River. “My father didn’t know the word ‘limit’ in any respect,” said Lynne and she remem­bers him bring­ing home giant piles of fish for her to clean. In the win­ters, the lodge could be a lonely place except when fish­er­man came up to fish with Ace. So every win­ter, he and Jean would treat all of their favorite guests to a long week­end of lodg­ing, food and drinks.

Sum­mers were mag­i­cal. The lodge was filled with fam­i­lies who stayed any­where from a week to a month and came back year after year, bring­ing plenty of kids for Lynne to run wild with. “The only rule we had was not to drown. And no one did,” she said. Ace enjoyed social­iz­ing with his guests and every night would make the rounds of the cab­ins and have a cock­tail. By nine or so he would grill meat and then every­one would set­tle down to tell sto­ries by the camp­fire.

Lynne also con­firmed what we had sus­pected, that the recep­tion area was orig­i­nally on the north side of the build­ing, directly across from the camp­fire. She encour­aged us to locate the huge red­wood counter that Ace built and Jean kept stocked with candy, soda pop and fish­ing sup­plies and hoped that we would return the recep­tion area to being a cozy hang­out for rainy days.

It was won­der­ful to lis­ten to Lynne’s tales and also to hear the excite­ment in her voice about our group con­tin­u­ing Ace’s vision of, “a super casual place where guests could just kick back and relax.” We know we have a lot of work to do to bring the lodge back into shape, but know­ing that Ace and Jean are there in spirit makes it all seem pos­si­ble. Big thanks to Lynne for telling us their tale.