Tom Dees, Father of Holiday Island, Dies at 83

Tom Dees, founder of Holiday Island Development Corp. (Beth Hall)

Tom Dees, who rose from the Arkansas cotton fields to become a colorful resort developer who spent millions of dollars and employed everyone from Elly May Clampett to a beer-swilling chimpanzee to market Holiday Island in Carroll County, died June 10 at age 83.

Dees, who rubbed shoulders with most of the state’s business and political elite and sold a lot to hall-of-fame basketball Coach Eddie Sutton, once commanded a $4 million annual promotional budget.

A banker friend said he “could sell a fur coat to an alligator.”

Dees’ routine of flying in potential buyers and putting them up at Eureka Springs hotels was one reason for Carroll County’s tourism renaissance in the 1980s, and he was among the pioneers in the postwar boom of recreation and retirement communities. Though Holiday Island never grew nearly as big as others like Bella Vista and Hot Springs Village, he made it his cause and his crusade.

Etched out of an isolated stretch of Ozark Mountains along crystal-clear Table Rock Lake, the town found its savior in Dees when its out-of-state owners threatened to lock the gates. In 1990, Dees bought Holiday Island’s development rights for $10 million, and later developed the town’s $50 million commercial strip on Highway 23, nurturing it through ups, downs and the rise and fall of time-shares.

“None of this would be here if not for Tom,” Greater Berryville Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Dean Lee told Arkansas Business in 2021.

Dees outlasted his resort-marketing contemporaries. “Nobody would do this again these days,” he said in an interview a few years ago. “It’s a dying breed, and I’m the last one.”

‘Nature’s Best Domain’

After taking over sales at Holiday Island in 1980, Dees for years papered the American Midwest with 100,000 pieces of direct mail a week. Thousands of potential buyers flew in on an airliner owned by McCulloch Oil, the resort’s owner at the time, and received free lodging, golf and boat rides, along with a pitch to buy “nature’s best domain for a second home,” Dees said. About one-tenth of the prospects would eventually buy a lot.

“Back then, they were really starting to develop the island, blasting [the region’s rocky Ozarks terrain] and putting in water and sewer, and building the golf course and the condos,” said Jay Nygard, who retired to Arkansas from South Dakota in 1984 and went to work for Dees selling Holiday Island. “We were marketing heavily… We had as many as 30 salespeople working out of the office, taking prospects on tours three and sometimes four times a day.”

But those heady times ended later in the 1980s after the very best lots had been sold. Lots too steep to build on easily became inexpensive tickets to Holiday Island’s two golf courses, because landowners had rights to use the amenities.

Zany promotions included actress Donna Douglass, who played Jed Clampett’s pretty daughter in “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and Holiday Island’s hairiest ambassadors, chimps named Magoo and Ruben. The chimpanzees belonged to Earl Tatum, a hauler of exotic animals and proprietor of the bygone Holiday Island Animal Park.

Magoo would drink beer and water-ski on a special rig. Ruben was a teetotaler and terrified of water.

Dees recalled the chimps, a riverboat at the marina in the 2021 interview, as well as promotions that drew celebrities like Johnny Paycheck, Dottie West and Hugh O’Brian. A piece of London Bridge was laid at the Ranch House, which once housed Holiday Island’s sales office and later became Dees’ home. (Robert P. McColloch, the oil company owner, famously bought London Bridge and spent a fortune moving it to Arizona for the Lake Havasu City development, one of many McCulloch properties that Dees worked on.

When Dees rescued Holiday Island from dissolution in 1990, it had about 2,000 residents and Dees said he couldn’t abandon them. “McCulloch said the litigation and liability would cost less than it would to build the place out,” Dees said. “I said I disagreed, and they said, ‘Why don’t you buy it then.’ So I borrowed some money and bought it.

But it wasn’t just “some money.” It was $10 million loaned at 12% interest by a half-dozen banks, led by the Bank of Bentonville, now Arvest. Daily interest came to about $3,300, so Dees said that every morning before he got out of bed, his mission was selling $3,500 a day.

“The normal mode for developers is to take the low-hanging fruit, sell the property along the golf course and the lake, and then leave town, not worried at all about the infrastructure,” said Lee. “Tom took all the money and put it into roads, sewage, electrical and all the stuff you can’t see.”

John F. Cross, former president of the Bank of Eureka Springs, recalled in a 1988 remembrance that more than $7 million in bonds were sold to cover water and sewer construction, but that costs ran many times that. The saving grace, Cross told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2002, was that “Dees could sell an alligator a fur coat. The guy is good.”

College Was Turning Point

Born May 7, 1940, in Keiser (Mississippi County) to Will Thomas Dees and the former Lucinda Evaline Scott. Dees once said his only ambition was “to get out of the cotton patch.” A $100 scholarship to Arkansas State College was the turning point in his life.

His aging father asked him to stay close to home, Dees said in 2021, so he took a job teaching school in Dyess, the boyhood home of Johnny Cash. There he met his future wife of 60 years, Kathy. She survives him, along with two daughters, Michelle Dees of Fayetteville and Angela Brenneman of Menlo Park, California. Five grandchildren also survive.

After getting a master’s degree at night, Dees became a vice president and financial chief at Arkansas College in Batesville, now Lyon College. The school’s namesake, Frank Lyon, informed Dees there was little money in education, even for a college president.

As his family grew, Dees took a job with John Cooper, the West Memphis physician who started several resort communities in Arkansas. Cooper was a direct-mail trailblazer and a visionary of communities designed to purge legions of prospering postwar workers to rural Arkansas for retirement and recreation.

Cooper Communities built Hot Springs Village, and Dees was its second employee. It also built Bella Vista in northwest Arkansas and Cherokee Village, east of Salem.

Dees said he never became rich. “I have debt up to here,” he says, gesturing to his forehead. “No, I’m not rich. It’s a different kind of wealth, and I’m not picking cotton.”

When a group of Holiday Island business owners decided to change the name of Veterans Memorial Park in town to “Tom & Kathy Dees Veterans Memorial Park,” Dees objected. “I was against changing it,” Dees said. “Put my name on something and somebody will probably tear it down overnight.”

He was wrong about that, though. The morning after the rededication ceremony, the sign with the Dees’ name on it was still standing.