After the lease was signed in 1984 Havasu Palms continued to improve the park.  By 1986 they completed 100 new boat slips, and in 1987 nine new mobile home sites were added.  In 1989 the first real telephone system came into the park, when Contel added a microwave dish, and my father prepared the trenches. That year he added a breakwater to the harbor…and that year he came down with congestive heart failure.
            We also began to learn the pitfalls of operating a business on a reservation.  First, you are not guaranteed your constitutional rights, you are truly under the rule of a sovereign nation.  The Tribe has the options to change the terms of their lease, if they are operating as a government….if they are operating as a business they must abide by the rules, yet they determine if their action is on behalf of the government or business.  It really isn’t that much different from how own federal government operates in a similar situation. The difference is accountability.  As a citizen we have some measure of accountability, elected officials we can go to, actions we might take.  Yet on the reservation we were not a citizen, and do not have the same recourses we might have when dealing with our own government. 
            My father continued to work, in spite of his illness.  In 1990 he added lights to the rental boat slips, and by this time, he had finally built my mother a beautiful mobile home.  They’d had several mobile homes throughout their years at the park, yet this time it was not an old fixer upper, that my father had remodeled.  This was a custom mobile home, designed and built by my father.
            In 1991, when my father’s condition worsened, my husband and I moved to Havasu Palms.  I came first, as my parents went to Utah, so my father could undergo experimental treatment. my husband and I had just completed construction on our dream house in Wrightwood California. We had only been in the house less than two months when I moved to Havasu.  I sold my business, my children followed when school was out that summer, and in October, my husband, Don closed his business and joined us in Havasu.
            When my parents returned to Havasu, Dad continued to work, like a man possessed. Although he was no longer able to physically do the labor, he continued to supervise.  He was deathly ill, and some days he would take to bed, and we were sure he would be unable to go back to work.  Yet, after a few hours of rest, he would drag himself out of bed, and onto his next project.  During his last months he added onto the restaurant and store, moved a trailer used by the employees, adding  onto it, and remodeled a mobile home for my family.  Several times Each week my husband  and mother would transport my father across the lake  in the restaurant supply boat.  He would then check into the intensive care unit in Lake Havasu City's hospital, where he would undergo medical treatment.  In the morning my husband would pick him up, and return to Havasu Palms. (next)

Photo: Havasu Palms docks, circa late 1990's