If we doled out awards for longest time between visits to
French Lick Resort, John Hobson would likely stand alone atop the podium.
Yet about eight decades later, John’s childhood jaunts to
French Lick and West Baden resonate with some clarity. The memories trickled
back for John during a weekend trip to French Lick and West Baden earlier this
month, and he shared some of those memories from a bygone era of which few
other people can provide perspective.
John, now 90, last visited French Lick and West Baden
Springs Hotels roughly 80 years ago. His uncle was a school superintendent in
this area back in the day, which is how he and his family learned of the
resort’s reputation for healing via the mineral waters native to French Lick
and West Baden. When John’s grandmother began feeling the achy effects of old
age, that was the catalyst for a couple visits.
“She eventually as she got older had rheumatism real bad.
Somebody talked her into coming here to take the waters,” John explained. “And
she did, and she took the waters. Kept the rheumatism.”
Yet they kept coming back, in part because getaways to
French Lick were a pretty darn big deal.
John grew up in the countryside town of Decker, a speck on
the map of about 200 people located a few miles south of Vincennes, Indiana. And
for a kid from Decker, the six-storied French Lick Springs Hotel and the
striking dome of West Baden Springs Hotel were both veritable skyscrapers.
“It was a big deal for me as a kid,” John said. “I had never
seen anything like it.”
John and his son Mark calculated that it was the early and
mid 1930s when John visited, so he was younger than 10 years old at the time.
That was right around the era when travel by automobile started becoming
prevalent, and John and his family would pile into their Willys-Overland (a
Jeep-style car of its day) for the treks to and from French Lick.
John recalls some of the sights, particularly the
people-watching: “It seemed like we used to watch the train come in from
Louisville, hauling the people in came by rail,” he said. More vividly, he
remembers the smells.
“It was if you were close to where the springs were, you
smelled it to high heaven,” John recalls of the sulphur-tinged mineral spring
water. “I don’t remember being bothered by it indoors. But outside, you could
smell it from miles away.
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| This was among the methods for retrieving Pluto Water back in the day: dipping a glass container attached to a stick directly down into the spring. |
“I only drank it when somebody said, ‘try this.’ Didn’t
drink it voluntarily,” John added. “It tasted like it smelled. You knew it. And
it’s supposed to be healthy for you. That’s what got these (hotels) built.”
John can still picture their daily routine: His cousin, also
a young boy at the time, was the one responsible for fetching the Pluto Water and
walking it back up the hotel’s vast corridors and back to their grandmother in
her room. Every morning, like clockwork.
Back then you could also procure the waters in do-it-yourself
style at the springs that dotted both hotel properties. By using a glass
container attached at the end of a long stick, guests could retrieve that treasured
water that bubbled up from below.
“You just dipped it out and drank it,” John recalls.
Those mineral springs have been capped and inactive for
decades, but as far as the aesthetics of the hotels, John assesses it as “pretty
much like it was” comparing them now to the mid-1930s. From Decker, John went
into the Naval Academy and spent a career traveling in the Air Force, so he
never made it back to French Lick Resort until this visit a few weeks back.
Roughly 80 years later, some of those memories are shrouded
in haze, naturally. But others remain loud and clear. Young as he was at the
time, John gathered the sense he was in the midst of some influential company
on every visit.
“That is one of the things that I remember vividly from
childhood, was mixing with the big shots here,” he said. “Even though I was a
little kid, it was impressive.”