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Story Archives: Paradise is what you make of it


Paradise is what you make of it
by Robert Charles Payne - posted Thursday, June 4th, 2009 @ 1:05 pmE-mail Story E-mail Story | Print Story Print Story 
My father was a football coach so our family did not have a summer home, but we did have access to a log cabin several miles outside of Tioga, in a summer retreat called Magnolia Park.

The cabin was owned by my mother's parents Mr. and Mrs. B.A. Beck. Mr. Bayette, the father of my mother's closest friend, Joy Bayette, now Joy Nash, created this summer place in the 1930s.

The property had a lot of magnolia trees at one time but a fire destroyed many of the magnolias and there were only a few left scattered throughout the Bayette property. Each family had 99-year lease on the property where each cabin was built. The Beck cabin, the Beckon Inn, was just past the cabin of Judge Foote, a judge from the Alexandria area. His cabin was the Foote Rest. The Ward family who owned a big hardware store in Alexandria had a camp only a stone's throw away. These summer camps did not change hands. The same families remained the owners for as long as this summer recreational area remained in existence.

Mr. Bayette was ahead of his time. I guess you could say that he had a little Six Flags. He had built a lot of games for the recreational area on one side of the swimming pool. You can find many of these games in the arcades of today except he built these games on a larger scale. He designed his own putt-putt golf course.

All these games that he had created were built from wood that came from within the several hundred acres that made up Magnolia Park. He had a bowling game with small wooden bowling balls. This game was similar to the ones in The Excalibur in West Monroe. I can not remember all of the games, but he had 10 or 12 different types of games. He had an area for badminton, ping pong, volley ball and several greens for a par-three golf area. You could rent the equipment for whatever game you had chosen to play.

On the entrance side of the pool area was a café, and a wooden platform with a juke box. I can still remember when I lay in bed at night, I could hear the juke box playing "The Old Piano Row Blues." Boy, am I dating myself or what? My daddy was not thrilled with the juke box and the dancing area. He came from a hard-shell Baptist background and he never felt comfortable with dancing. Even though he did not make a big deal about it, he was still uncomfortable with it.

Our log cabin had three bedrooms, a huge great room, a kitchen area with a very long breakfast and dining table made from logs that could probably seat 20 or more people. The great room had a swing on one end and an area to play table games. There was never a television set in the cabin. Who needed one? We had plenty to do for entertainment.

Our cabin was sitting on a hill overlooking a small lake. The ground sloped all the way down to the lake. We took many a wild ride down that hill in a wooden wagon. The trick was to keep the wagon from spilling over on the way down the hill and to be able to stop the wagon before it ran off into the lake. Boy, it was fun.

The Bush's have their Kennebunkport cottage in Maine, but we had our Becken Inn at Magnolia Park just down the road from Tioga.

Robert Charles Payne is an inspirational writer who lives in West Monroe. He can be contacted by e-mailing robertcharlespayne@yahoo.com.
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