Book details

  • Genre:nature
  • Sub-genre:Ecosystems & Habitats / General
  • Language:English
  • Pages:304
  • eBook ISBN:9798234101921
  • Paperback ISBN:9798234101914

The Lake House

How Rich Boyhood Memories Inspired a Life in Conservation

By John R. Stanard

Overview

John Stanard's delightful story of his long life in nature illuminates the challenges facing a natural environment that is essential to our welfare. Stanard's a great writer. Just buy the damned book and enjoy it!

Leigh Fredrickson, Ph.D., Wetland Ecologist

The Lake House is the story of the author's heartwarming boyhood experiences with grandparents who taught him about nature and life. Bugs, lizards and other critters were his toys at an old farmhouse in a wilderness setting.

Stanard learned about wood stoves and coal oil lamps. He was gently taught to visit the outhouse alone in the dark, unafraid of being eaten by a varmint. He loved bedtime, knowing a grandparent would read him a story about one of his wild playmates.

The author highlights extirpated animals restored by science-based conservation. More than 70 illustrations by his talented wife, Rose Anne, poignantly enliven his memories and authoritative insights into ongoing conservation issues: Are all "flood-control" dams worth destroying rivers?

As an outdoorsman and prize-winning writer, the retired newspaperman has spent a lifetime prowling the swamps, rivers and rugged Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. Stanard's background and story-telling talent uniquely qualify him to blend his memoir with modern conservation successes and challenges.

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Description

The Lake House was a story long in the making. Author Stanard for many years had thought about writing an informal memoir, for his two children and three grandchildren, about his childhood experiences at his grandparents' retreat on Wappapello Lake. After his late wife, Vida, suggested the memoir, he wrote a couple of pages, got busy with life and let it slide. Then Vida passed away.

Three years later, he married Rose Anne Huck. She, too, suggested a memoir. The experienced author resumed his project, this time in earnest. One evening, as he sat at his computer writing about the small bugs and other little critters that were his "toys" at the old farmhouse, he had an awakening. There were no deer, no wild turkeys, no beavers, no river otters, no bald eagles and no coyotes at the "Lake House," as the weekend retreat was called.

Extensive research followed as Stanard wrote the story of the recovery of those animals and many others. The coyotes showed up on their own, after migrating naturally from the prairies of western Missouri and adjoining Kansas and Oklahoma. The other species recovered largely through the science-based efforts of the Missouri Department of Conservation. Missouri once more has healthy populations of all those "missing" animals.

Related conservation issues such as habitat loss, predator control, removal of dams, etc., soon found a place in the manuscript as the author continued writing. He also managed to weave in personal anecdotes from his long life in the outdoors until all of a sudden he had "a real book," as Stanard told friends. 


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About The Author

JOHN R. STANARD, a native of Poplar Bluff, Mo., grew up in a newspaper family. His parents were journalists, and both grandfathers were editors. After editing his high school newspaper, he earned a journalism degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where the faculty voted him the "outstanding male graduate" in 1962. Stanard was a news staffer on the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise. After two years of service in the U.S. Army, he worked as a copy editor, makeup editor and page designer on the Minneapolis Star before joining the staff of his hometown daily, which his family owned. Stanard was honored by the Associated Press (AP) for his coverage in words and photos of an extortion scheme in which a banker, his wife and teenage daughter were murdered. His dramatic photo of a drug raid was declared the top spot news picture of 1981 in the Missouri/Kansas division of the AP. Stanard served on the board of directors of the Mid-America Press Institute, a mid-level editorial seminar for training of professional journalists across the Midwest. A longtime member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, Stanard wrote a weekly outdoors column for many years. He also covered scores of Missouri conservation issues, and served on the statewide citizens committee that helped pass a one-eighth-cent Missouri sales tax dedicated to the Department of Conservation. After the sale of his family's newspaper, which they owned for 72 years, Stanard wrote two volumes of Butler County: a Pictorial History. In 1997, he wrote Caring for America: the Story of Family Practice, commemorating the 50th anniversary of family medicine as a recognized specialty. He has two adult children by his late wife, Vida Loberg Stanard. 

ROSE ANNE BARBOUR STANARD, the author's wife, designed the book and cover and illustrated the interior with 72 black and white graphite drawings. She studied graphic design and illustration at the University of Kansas and earned a degree in art from the University of Missouri. After a career in graphic design and marketing, Rose Anne and her late husband, the Rev. David Huck, returned to her home town of Poplar Bluff.

She immediately became an acclaimed fine artist in the region and was represented by galleries in St. Louis, Austin, Texas, and Poplar Bluff. As a nature lover, Rose Anne focuses on natural landscapes, painting scenes from her family farm and the scenic rivers of her beloved southern Missouri Ozark Mountains.

John and Rose Anne's families have  been friends for well over 100 years in their home town.

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