The Snellings leave a lake after more than 40 years on the job.

Dale and Loretta Snelling will do more than retire in the usual sense of the word when they leave their home at Marion County Lake for a farm home near Wonsevu in April.
First they’ll have an auction March 31 to sell years of accumulated possessions..
Dale has been park and lake superintendent there since 1964. That means 43 years of their 46 years of marriage have been spent living at the lake in a job that usually has Dale up by 6 a.m. and many times out doing law enforcement duties around the water until 2 a.m.
Loretta said even at 2 a.m., Dale usually has an ear tuned to what is happening outside. His duties have been seven days a week. He hasn’t taken vacations.
Loretta has been his co-worker, most of the time keeping the lake bait shop open where part of their job benefit is entitlement to the concessions. As a matter of fact, when they moved to the lake, it was for a pay check of $210 a month, plus a home and the concessions rights.
When you talk to Dale about the varieties of fish, wildlife and plants at the lake, you also begin to realize you are talking to someone who has learned to appreciate nature to all of its depths. He not only knows the importance of mowing grass, and maintaining live trees for people. He also appreciates the dead tree that can provide an eagle perch, or habitat for other life, and the brush piles that provide fish spawning area in the water or cover for wildlife on the land.
Even in the Marion County Commission room they are asking themselves, “How do you replace a Dale Snelling?” The difference between finding a replacement and finding a successor becomes more obvious than usual.
Dale’s duties in public relations have included all of the little fine points that many persons might not realize. For instance, he said, when he has found a father with his family who has violated a lake boating or fishing rule, he doesn’t usually write a ticket for the father like he is empowered to do. Instead, he carefully explains the rule to that father, even gaining his support for the rule. That kind of care, Snelling said, means he has seen up to four generations of the same family returning to the lake instead of never returning because they were embarrassed. Many of the same people have become lake residents, he said.
Snelling said another key to the lake’s success is that it has stayed a relatively rustic setting. In these days when electronics, commercialism and development are taking over, Snelling said people have appreciated being able to return to a “natural” setting.
Snelling takes satisfaction in knowing that in recent years his management at the lake has brought in $95,000 to $112,000 lake income in things such as boating and camping fees in addition to the $39,000 to $50,000 tax levy received. He has had income for such things as encumbering money over from year to year for improvements, and for stocking fish before the state took over that job. “I’ve always had money left at the end of a year.”
The Snellings never were strangers to this area. Loretta said she grew up only two miles away, in what was considered to be the Florence area, with her parents, Frank and Nellie Richmond. Dale grew up not far away on another farm near Peabody with his parents, Richard and Dorothy Snelling.
Loretta said Richard Snelling ran a county road maintainer, and was well known.
“My Grandfather Snelling also was kind of a politician,” Dale said. She and Dale always thought that might have had an effect on his getting the job.
The move to the lake was acknowledged as good for the next generation of Snellings and their children too. Loretta said her four children all became swimmers and fishermen. They also learned to work at mowing and other lake jobs. There was always plenty to do at a park with 150 acres of land and 150 acres of water. “Danny was just three when we came here and Sherry was eight or nine months.”
Part of the Snelling’s plans now is just to enjoy their grandchildren. Of their children, Daniel lives in Marion, Sherry Hess lives in Marion, Leann Leurman lives in Sedgwick, and Dean lives in Goessel. Among them, the Snellings have 11 grandchildren and one great grand-baby.
Dale also plans to enjoy the pond and the creek on the farm where they’ll live. “And, we’re going to travel. That’s something we’ve never been able to do,” he said. “I’m 64, and we’re going to go enjoy ourselves.”
One of the things Dale regrets is that they probably will leave the Lake with perhaps the county’s most popular restaurant, Kingfisher’s, still not open under new ownership. Dale said Kingfisher’s was built at the lake in the 1950’s, and seems to have been popular right from the start.
The Snellings appreciate the history of the lake, and find memories of the Works Progress Administration workers who built it all around, from things they built to a new statue commemorating their work.
The Lake was finished in 1939, and Dale said it opened officially May 26, 1940.
Contrary to what many old timers said, Dale said it wasn’t built using mules and dirt sledges. The oldtimers probably were confused because mules were used in building Highway 77, Dale said. The lake workers had bulldozers, but they definitely weren’t modern ones, and much of their equipment would be unusual by today’s standards, he said.
For instance, they used trucks called “Indians” that dumped loads of dirt from the side instead of from the rear like a modern truck would. The Snellings have a pile of photos of the process.
The first County Lake managers were Jerry and Verona Mulligan. After he died, Dale said Verona ran the lake a while herself until John Waner took over in 1955. He still lives at the lake. Then the Snellings came in 1964, making only three sets of managers in the lake’s history.
Dale said the lake hall when they came was a 90-foot army barracks with a kitchen at one end. The new hall was built in 1976, he said.
His first office was the old engineer’s office left from construction , just to the west of the current office and home, and included a long part for showers and sleeping quarters. One popular feature, the heated dock for fishing, was already there.
Snelling said that Marion County Lake always has been noted for the crappie fishing there. Even during the ice-cold weather of the last two weeks, the crappie were beginning to bite. He has seen new hybrid varieties of fish introduced like the the wiper and the saugeye. Walleye were popular when they were introduced in the 1960’s. The Northern Pike died out after a short while. Catfish are important. But, still, the crappie is the lake’s most popular fish.
If demand is a measure of any kind of popularity, then Dale Snelling is popular too. He had to put in a dock at the lake with workman when it arrived earlier this month, the first time this interview was scheduled. Then it had to be cancelled again. He isn’t slacking off as a short-timer.
“Oh, I’ll be able to walk away from it,” he said. “But it will be hard not to think about it a little bit.”