When we opened in January 1983 there was an ole well on the property and a filtering system to remove iron from the shallow well. The well man went out of town and forgot to buy propane. The filling system froze and broke. We straight lined the well into the piping system and if you mix a bourbon and water there was so much iron in the water it was black.

At the bait shop I had 3 concrete minnow tanks with aerators in each one, and a big fan and hammock stretched out over the tanks full of water and aerators and fan running.  A good napping place for after lunch with that hammock and all that wet air blowin' by the big fan.  Lots of folks called that the Tait Tate think tank in there.

After the droughts of the 80s and the plug blowout. The lake would stay up with the river rise, and drop again with it's falls, which made fishing conditions awful.  I started out with the County Board of Supervisors. You see in the 80s the four fish camps were almost as big as the town of Tunica, about 160 acres of property, 1 mile long and 1/4 mile wide.

In the 1960s we had the Wild Life League, a piece of property between Mhoon's Landing and the north end of the Cutoff. It was a big timber company's property and our Tax Assessor, Bill Webb, worked it out somehow to form this league. 

The Cutoff, in the beginning. The southern-most fish camp was H & R camp, south of Nel-Win.  A man named Henry Lee ran H&R and they had a rail and tram, no dock.  They would put their boats on, loaded with gear and motor, and launch it into the water ready to fish.  The camps all had restaurants with cold beer and the kitchens would always cook what you caught that day.

We had a tenant once, Larry White (God rest his soul), with a bad case of cancer. He was a coon-ass from Louisiana, Cajun, you know.