THE JOURNAL REPORT: ENCORE
If You're Thinking of Retiring In . . .
Simple Solitude

The Arkansas town of Mountain Home is off the
beaten path. Way off. And that's what residents like.

By Jeff D. Opdyke
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 14, 2005; Page R10

MOUNTAIN Home, Ark. - This isn’t a town you stumble onto by accident. You’ve got to be headed here on purpose.

Tucked deep into the Ozark Mountain s and several hours from the nearest interstate, Mountain Home is reached largely by two-lane roads that wind, ascend and fall through pine and hardwood thickets.

Yet despite the remoteness – and in some cases because of it – older American from California to Florida to the snow belt of the upper Midwest increasingly are finding their way to this Southern outpost. Though such moves have been happening for decades Mountain Home is just now starting to shed its image as one of America’s least-known retirement havens.

For many transplants, Mountain Home is the memorable destination of their youth: a small community where families spent summer months boasting, canoeing and fishing on the three rivers and two lakes that define the region. Now in later life, people like Mary James, a 68-year-old retiree from Sturgis, S.D., are returning to the solitude of this corner of northern Arkansas.

“We used to come here” to escape winters in South Dakota, Ms. James says, “and we decided we didn’t want to be anyplace else.”

The area is also attracting people from traditional retirement state s alike California and Florida, and from urban locales like Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis.

West Coasters are fleeing the high costs of living; Floridians battered by too many hurricanes are pursuing more peaceable weather patters; and Midwesterners are looking for a home where, in winter, snow shovels aren’t needed daily.

Gone Fishing

Mounting Home dates to the late 1800s, just one in a string of tiny towns spread through the mountains. Nearby Cotter claimed all the action because the Missouri-Pacific railroad rolled through town. Mountain Home came into its own about 60 years ago when work began on the twin dams that built the Bull Shoals and Norfork lakes. Because the town was situated in the middle of both those projects, workers gravitated here looking for homes and services. That brought in businesses.

Today, Mountain home is the biggest town in the region. Roughly half of its 11,000 locals are retirees. And word continues to spread that Mountain Home has much to offer retirees who don’t mind life without a symphony, a Starbucks or a glitzy shopping mall.

For one, there are the fish. This part of Arkansas is known as the trout capital of the world because of the quality and quantity of trout pulled from local rivers that run cold along nearly sheer limestone cliffs, vistas that often resemble scenery from the movie “A River Runs Through It.”

Those rivers, in turn, have given a number of world-record state-record inhabitants, including a 38-pound brown trout and 64-pound striped bass.

Meanwhile, nearby Norfork Lake and Bull Shoals Lake, both created by dams erected in the 1940s and ‘50s, routinely produce trophy-size bass and walleye. The walleye fishing is so good, in fact, that the professional FLW Walleye Tour will make a stop on Bull Shoals Lake in 2005 for the second time in two years.

As such Mountain Home and the surrounding region lure retirees keen on fly-fishing gin-clear streams and rivers, or those eager to reel fish from boats for bass, walleye, crappie and other species in lakes 200 feet deep.

“I was out the other day and pulled in 35 trout – and that wasn’t even a good day,” says 67-year old Dean Darling, an Ohio native who moved here after spending `3 years working in the oil industry in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Darling heard about Mountain Home from a fellow employee who had bought land here, so he drove through the area on a vacation, like what he saw, and settled in for the retirement with wife, Rita, and a fly rod.

“What we catch here in one day,” he says, “is what other s catch in an entire season in places like Colorado or Montana or Wyoming.” Last year, Mr. Darling fished 220 days of the year.

Fishing tourism largely propels the regional economy. Fishing resorts, fly-fishing schools and fishing shops are abundant. The area also is a big draw for businessmen from Dallas, in particular, seeking a close getaway for a few days of casting brown rainbow, cutthroat and brook trout.

Along with the fish retirees say the biggest attraction is the locals themselves. “This is a place where if you stand outside the Wal-Mart with a map in your hand, someone is going to stop and help you find where you’re going,“ says Jim Rowe, 76, who retired to Mountain Home with his wife, Phyllis, after spending years in Mesa, Ariz., and Chicago.

“It’s just a place where people really care,” Ms. Rowe says.

Volunteerism is so ingrained that Mountain Home and various near by towns have at one time or another in recent years, all been singled out by the state as Volunteer City of the Year. Retirees also make up a significant portion of the local elected officials running the town and the county.

“When we came down here to look around before we retired, we stopped to talk to people in grocery stores because we wanted to see if, like in many places, you’re considered an outsider if you move here from somewhere else, “ says 61-year old Jackie Jedlicki a retired health-care administrator, who moved to Mountain Home from Minneapolis with her husband, Gene. “But most people here are from somewhere else, so everyone accepts you immediately.”

Indeed, so many different places are represented in the area that clubs have sprung up for retirees from a variety of states, such as the South Dakota Breakfast Club, the Wisconsin Club and the Illinois Club.

The local retiree populations from Wisconsin and Illinois, in particular, are so robust that Chicago Cubs and Green Bay Packers bumper stickers compete with those for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks.

The Jedlickis were drawn to the area, in part, because unlike traditional retirement destinations that experience just two seasons – hot and less hot – the Ozarks offer the full complement.

Summer days can sometimes exceed 100 degrees, and winter typically brings snow, if only about seven inches a year. Fall foliage is dramatic enough to be a tourist attraction, and spring is wet and mild.

Little Diversity

Not that everything is utopian in Mountain Home. Racial diversity is nonexistent. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics make up a negligible 1.9% of the population, according to the 2000 census.

And like any growing small town, residents now complain about traffic on the main drag, Highway 62. Travel is largely by car, though that will change later this year when American Connection, a marketing alliance three small regional air carriers have with AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, begins flying several times a week between Mountain Home and St. Louis.

Some residents also complain of culture shock. There’s not much in the way of shopping, beyond local merchants and discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Dollar General. The closest big-city shopping is two hours north, in Springfield Mo. Little Rock, Ark., is 3 ½ hours to the south; Memphis, Tenn., is 3 ½ hours to the east; and St. Louis is about four hours to the northeast. Upscale restaurants are limited, too. The town has just two nationally known casual-dining chains: Chili’s Grill and Bar and Captain D’s Seafood.

Still, “when I saw this place, I knew I was home, “ says Darrell Rinehart, 67, who moved to Mountain Home in 1998 after spending his entire life in Rochelle, Ill., about 80 miles west of Chicago. Mr. Rinehart’s sister-in-law and her husband came to visit and liked Mountain Home so much, “they decided to move here from Tucson, Ariz., and now live just one block from me and my wife.”

More for the Money

Like many retirees, Mr. Rinehart says the health-care facilities are the cost of living make life in Mountain Home more comfortable than in many other places. Highly regarded Baxter Regional Medical Center offers big-city health care – with services such as open-heart surgery and intensive cancer care.

The hospital’s expertise in these areas stems from the fact that so many retirees are now in the market.

As for the cost of living: Mr. Rinehart says he sold a 28-year-old house in Illinois for $105,000, and bought a new one here for the same price. “My property taxes went from $3,500 in Illinois to $760 here,” he says. Car-registration fees, meanwhile, fell to $27.50 from the more than $300.

The average three-bedroom house in Mountain Home sells for about $118,00, according to the local Multiple Listing Service. But some home s can run toward $1 million or more, particular the big, custom-built houses overlooking a river or lake, or some of the 4,000 – to 8,00-square-foot homes going up in town at the Big Creek Golf & Country Club. (The Big Creek course is rated the top public course in Arkansas; Golf Digest Magazine gives the course five out of five stars and encourages duffers to “pay any price [to play this course] at least once in your life.”)

Many retirees relocating from states with high-dollar housing markets are typically using a portion of the proceeds from the sale of their former homes and are buying local homes in the $200,000 to $400,000 price range, says Rodney Wagner, owner of Mountain Home Real Estate. That range generally buys a 2,000- to 3,000-square–foot home, with three bedrooms and two baths, either in a tony neighborhood or along the water. Waterfront homes can sit literally along the White River or Norfork River, or they can be situated hundreds of feet up limestone bluffs overlooking the water area lakes and the rolling Ozarks Mountains.

There are no gated communities in Mountain Home. Older adults simply meld into the larger community, living alongside young families and midcareer couples. And while retirees are the largest segment of the population, the area isn’t entirely gray. More than 700 babies were born at Baxter regional Medical Center in 2003, the highest level in five years. The town is building a complex with numerous soccer fields for youth. And the local campus of Arkansas State University, with about 1,300 students, helps keep the town youthful – though a few of those students are in their 80s.

The region’s outdoor resources help retirees stay young, as well. More than 100 miles of trails snake through two parks, “and I see retirees out there all the time – even when it’s in the 20s outside,” says Kelley Linck, executive director of the Ozark Mountain Region, a tourism association.

Says Mr. Rowe: “This is a wonderful place to spend retirement. Just don’t advertise that too much.”

- Mr. Opdyke is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Baton Rouge, La.