much wider than they are out west. Then he saw the McClellan– Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System and the size of the stripers people could catch. “I came down here for fishing, and then I liked fishing so much, I was looking for a place to buy,” Stan said. “When I walked up on the front porch, when I found this vacant house, I fell through the porch.” At the time, the house was a 500-square-foot building, overgrown with weeds, about to fall down, Stan said. “You couldn’t even see the river then,” he said. “The river bank at that time was the city dump, so to speak. The Johnson
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grass and the trees, car bodies, just about anything you can dump in a dump.” He still bought it and cleaned up the property. He said that, after a major flood in 1986, the Army Corps of Engineers allowed him to put rocks along the banks. “I purchased it just for a place to be out here,” Stan said. “It took me 10 years to prepare the place,” he said, adding that Lottie came into his life around 1996. After he retired from his medical practice, the Huffords moved to the river in 1997. Stan said he wasn’t sure Lottie would like it. The Huffords added the
windowed expansion a few years ago. A sloping ceiling, done in knotty pine, adds even more brightness to the room. A ledge under one slope stores part of Lottie’s massive collection of knick-knacks. It came by accident. The builder had put in a brace piece, which created a ledge, Stan said. Old fishing reels Stan has had through the years line a window sill. “One reel I had when I was a little bitty boy, the reel is probably 80 years old, and I’m 77,” he said. The building has had other additions over the years. “In the beginning, we had to go long because it was just a