Holiday Island History Ready to Burn

Tom Dees, founder and president of Holiday Island Development Corp.

The last time we checked in on Holiday Island Holdings Inc., in 2017, Arkansas Business described the real estate development and management firm as possibly the least-known publicly traded company in Arkansas. (See Holiday Island Holdings Inc. Continues Quest for Assets.)

At that time, its pink-sheets shares on the over-the-counter market were selling for less than a half-cent a share and the company reported no assets or revenue.

HIHI, as it’s known, is not to be confused with Tom Dees’ Holiday Island Development Corp., though Dees and HIHI chief executive Gene Thompson are longtime business associates and Dees has a major stake in the firm. (See (See Tom Dees’ Long Fight to Keep Holiday Island Afloat.)

Nowadays the penny stock is nearly living up to the description, with shares selling last week at about eight-tenths of a cent (HIHI). This month HIHI announced a purchase contract on a partially developed RV park in Jackson County, Texas.

HIHI is paying $500,000 for the 25-acre property, has a few completed RV sites, and is committing $600,000 for development, Thompson said.

“This is a significant opportunity,” he added. “We have a 2-acre pond that we will incorporate into our design as an amenity.” The development, with access to Lake Texana, is the company’s first recreational and remote living project, Thompson said, and will be operated as HIHI Lake Texana Retreat.

“We are working on two other acquisitions [one in Houston and one north of there], and they are being presented to our investor groups,” Thompson said.

The firm’s strategic plan is “to become a major regional player in the recreational, residential, and commercial segments” in expanding real estate markets in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Missouri.

A Trove of History at Risk

Dees has a veritable museum full of keepsakes from his 50-year career in resort development — thousands of photos, documents, canceled checks, posters, pamphlets.

And he wants most of it to burn.

“When I go, I want my daughters to come in and take what they want to keep, and I’m going to have the rest of it hauled out and set afire,” Dees, 80, said before leading a tour of his real estate office on Park Drive of Holiday Island. Friends and associates are trying to talk him out of the bonfire.

Memorabilia filled the spacious office and several back rooms. Boxes and file cabinets brimmed with every document, it seemed, in the history of the planned community, and Dees seemed able to lay his hands on any piece of it, quickly.

Whitewater land documents? Right here.

“We had Whitewater long before Bill Clinton,” Dees said, referring to the Marion County land that spawned a controversy, bringing down Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan owner James McDougal and bedeviling the Clinton presidency. “Oh, I knew McDougal,” Dees said. “He got into trouble.” How? “They borrowed more money than they had equity.”

Frank Sinatra’s wife, who made Dees’ job tough on a development in Palm Springs, California, got a tough assessment that we’ll paraphrase: Dees thought she was a witch.

A back room file revealed a memento from the The Holiday Island Regional News, the newspaper Dees started when he grew dissatisfied with local papers’ coverage in the 1990s. Dees reaped a $275,000 check from selling his publication to Rust Communications of Cape Girardeau in October 1998.

Dees says his life developing Holiday Island taught him a lesson about retirees: When you provide amenities like supermarkets and coin laundries, residents will remember you, like it or not.

“I’ve had people call me to ask what time the grocery store opens, or whether bad weather has closed this or that road,” Dees said. “When I put in a laundromat, they’d call me and say they’d lost a quarter. They’ll ask for the impossible. One wanted me to just get him an appraiser’s license. I told him, ‘I can’t do it, but I’ll make you a doctor.’”