The history of Road's End Camp and Havasu Palms

from a speech given by Bobbi Ann Johnson Holmes to the Lake Havasu City Historical Society in 2005

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            Sometime during that year, my father found an old juke box stored in one of the sheds…it was a classic…made of wood…we put it on the store porch, filled it with our records, and were allowed to keep any money it generated. It rarely made money, for my sister and I routinely opened the back of the box, and flipped the levers, causing it to play all the songs.
            My mother and one of her dear friends, Aggie Cutting, kept the store open nights during the first few days of Easter week, registering the campers, which steamed in all night. Remember that final scene in the movie, Fields of Dreams, where you see the headlights lining the road, making their way into the ballpark? That’s actually what it looked like.
            If you look at the aerial photographs of the park, the area where the circle of mobile homes are now…back then it was a campground. I remember how strange it was to wake up the first day of Easter Vacation, and look over at the peninsula, which had been wide open and vacant the night before, now crammed with tents and campers, buzzing with life.
            The big difference between the crowds then and now, is money. Back then there were small ski boats, nothing like the boats on the water today. And people weren’t staying in fancy RV’s, expensive vacation rental houses or hotels…they were in tents and campers….and it was wonderful fun.
            Once we moved to Havasu, Dad really didn’t have time to take us skiing, or to even use the boat for recreation. He managed to take an annual ski ride, doing a shore start off the docks…but other than that, it was mostly work.
            During the weekends and summer my sister and I tended the store. During the warmer months we’d wear our bikinis so we could cool off in the lake. My least favorite jobs were scooping up water dogs, counting night crawlers, or cutting 100 pound blocks of ice into 4 squares.
            Some of the trailer people had kids our ages that would spend the summers in the park, so there was always something to do, and people to meet. That first year we were there, we had company every weekend, so I was never sure where I would be sleeping.   Although the area was extremely remote, we were never lonely or bored.
After a few months without television, Dad installed an antenna and was able to pull three staticy channels from Lake Havasu City. The city was still in its infancy, yet it was offering television to its new residents. Back then there was no was no road from Bill Williams River to Lake Havasu City. If we did venture across the lake, it was by boat, and we’d rent a taxi…something that this city actually had in those days. During the first few years, we normally drove to Parker for our shopping.
            That fall my sister prepared for college, and when she left, it hit my father hard. He hadn’t truly realized how moving to Havasu meant his oldest daughter would be leaving the nest that much sooner. Had we stayed in Covina, Lynn probably would have lived at home during her first few years of college. Dad cried for days after she left.

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