Nita Smith, 82, the widow of Belton entrepreneur Frank Smith looked back recently on a lifetime of memories working with her husband at Frank’s Lakeview Inn and Anchor Club overlooking Lake Belton.

She said many a serious relationship started there over steaks or cheeseburgers, Lone Star longnecks and a Texas sunset shimmering in the water.

“It was a romantic setting,” said Mrs. Smith. “We had a lot of weddings in the gazebo on the back patio.”

Before the family closed the restaurant and club in October 2005, it seated 150 in the dining room and served items ranging from steaks and seafood to hamburgers.

The Gold Room, a separate dining enclave, seated 100 for private parties. The Anchor Club adjoining the restaurant was used for dances and weddings and seated 350.

Around the corner and down the hill boats bobbed at their moorings in 200 slips at Frank’s Marina. The boat docks were nestled in the most protected cove on Lake Belton.

But things were not always on such a grand scale, said Mrs. Smith.

How it all began

Her husband was a farmer in the Leon Valley at Moffat in the early 1950s on land handed down in his family, she said.

The federal government took many area farms in an eminent domain condemnation beginning in 1949 to build a flood control reservoir. The Smith’s farm was one of those purchased.

It was May of 1953 that Frank and Nita Smith went to watch construction on the Belton Dam. Many locals did that in that day and time, said Mrs. Smith, because it was the largest construction project anyone had ever seen.

It was warm that day and the construction workers and sidewalk superintendents looked parched. Her husband immediately saw an opportunity, she said.

The next weekend they came back with a No. 3 galvanized wash tub filled with ice and sodas in the back of their pickup. But a cool front had blown in and the couple waited two hours for a customer.

“Frank got so excited on the first sale that he backed up and fell into the wash tub into all that ice and water and sodas,” said Mrs. Smith. “I’ll never forget that.”

Gross receipts that day came to $2.20.

Smith asked the construction superintendent if he could come back the next weekend and bring a snow cone trailer. He got the go-ahead.

“We first sold soft drinks and snow cones then hot dogs, popcorn, peanuts and candy bars,” said Mrs. Smith. “You would not believe how many snow cones we sold. It was unreal.”

Smiths build first store

In 1955 after the dam was complete and the water impounded, the Army Corps of Engineers advertised to lease land for restaurants and fishing docks, said Mrs. Smith’s son, Rick Smith, 63.

“We submitted the top bid,” he said. “It was so much a year plus percentage rent of gross sales. I don’t think anyone bid against us. It was so far out in the country no one else wanted it.”

The family built a small store on a plot of land near the dam where the Army Corps offices are located today.

“It looked like a Dairy Queen and was called Frank’s Tackle Store,” Mrs. Smith said. “In addition to all the food orders and snacks we also sold minnows, bait and tackle. We had a small grocery store and installed gas pumps outside.”

She said business boomed as locals found out they were there.

One day a helicopter from Fort Hood landed in the parking lot. The crew ordered 45 cheeseburgers to take on maneuvers, she said.

“I only had one girl helping me that day,” said Mrs. Smith. “We were running around like crazy cooking burgers. We knew then we had been discovered.”

Frank’s Lakeview Inn

In 1955 the Corps wanted the Smith’s corner location back to build offices for the Little River Project.

“They gave Frank his choice of land in the area,” Mrs. Smith said. “Frank was a visionary. He liked the view from that location overlooking the lake.”

Mrs. Smith said they built a second establishment on the hilltop and named it Frank’s Lakeview Inn Restaurant. At one end they constructed a three-bedroom home where they lived.

“We had some cabins across from the restaurant we rented for $5 and $10 a night,” she said.

In 1957 Smith got the water rights to build a boat dock. At that time the lake was 25 feet lower than it is now.

The Corps had built a gravel road around a cove to the opposite side from where Frank’s Marina is today. Smith leased a spot to put a fishing dock and boat rental slip.

Fire destroys restaurant

On July 5, 1967, fire destroyed their restaurant and home, Rick Smith said.

“A grease fire started in the vents above the burners,” he said. There had been a major power failure that afternoon and the vent fans over the stoves went off. But the stoves were on gas pilots and they kept building up heat in the vents, he said.

“Grease in the vents eventually ignited,” said Rick Smith. “We called the Belton Fire Department.”

Mrs. Smith described it as one of the most traumatic days of her life. The Belton Fire Department appeared to have the fire under control when their tanker ran out of water.

“They took the truck down the hill to the lake to fill it,” said Rick Smith. “But then it was too heavy to make it back up the hill and bogged down.”

In the meantime the restaurant burned to the ground.

“It was so hot all the tableware melted into globs of metal,” said Mrs. Smith.

She said she went into a state of total amnesia that day about all the things they lost.

“I didn’t want to know,” she said.

Mrs. Smith said her husband didn’t believe in insurance. The only things insured were new tables and chairs recently delivered at a cost of $18,000. The bank required coverage on them.

“After the fire, our banker Dale Yates with the First National Bank came out to the site and told Frank, ‘Whatever you need to get rebuilt we will back you,’” said Mrs. Smith.

She said Smith began clearing the hot, burned wreckage that same day. He equipped two rental cabins with some borrowed restaurant equipment and sold hot dogs and hamburgers out of them during construction.

When completed, the new restaurant was twice as big as the former, she said.

Seven years later Smith built a nightclub next door to the restaurant with a dance floor. He christened the new complex Frank’s Lakeview Inn and Anchor Club.

Frank’s Marina takes shape

In 1972 the Corps raised the lake level to its current height of 594 feet above mean sea level. That flooded the road and fishing dock site Smith leased. So the Corps offered Smith the land on the other side of the cove.

“That’s when we put in the marina you see today, “ Rick Smith said.

At first people wanted berthing space for barges. They were popular back then, he said. A barge slip rental was $25 per month.

As time went by, Rick Smith said, they put in floating docks for sailboats and powerboats.

The good memories

Family members say they cherish the warm memories about the restaurant more than the hot ones like the fire.

Mrs. Smith said the restaurant was a family oriented experience because everyone in the family worked there.

“I made 98 mini-loaves of bread every Sunday morning along with two sheet cakes and seven cream pies,” she said. “On Thanksgiving I made two pans of banana pudding.”

Granddaughter Terry Lynn Molina, 39, said that she can remember as a child her granddad making cornbread dressing every Thanksgiving.

She said later in life when he got too sick to make the dressing himself he would taste it to make sure it had enough sage and complain if it didn’t.

Comical memories

“A customer ordered a hamburger and told the waiter to hold the tomato,” said Mrs. Smith. “He was a foreign born waiter who didn’t know what the customer meant. So he came back from the kitchen carrying a hamburger in one hand and a tomato in the other.”

Romantic memories

Mrs. Smith said she couldn’t count the number of people who have told her they made or received a marriage proposal on the back patio overlooking the lake.

“Someone told me this Valentine’s Day that he had proposed to his wife on the back patio overlooking the lake Valentine’s Day 38 years ago,” Mrs. Smith said.

She said he also told her that when they were expecting their first child his wife broke the news to him on that same back patio.

Mike Carey of Belton, formerly of Killeen, said when he was in high school he took a date to Frank’s. The couple later married.

“If you took a date you wanted to go to one of three places,” he said. “There was Frank’s, the Captain’s Table in Morgan’s Point Resort and the Stagecoach Inn in Salado.”

Carey said the drive from Killeen was worth it because Frank’s had good food at a fair price, atmosphere and a view.

“They had a pond with huge yellow catfish in it,” he said.

Carey said his two daughters liked to go there as children because they liked to feed bread to the tame raccoons that came up for handouts on the back patio.

Memories steeped in gravitas

Rick Smith said his dad was the first restaurant owner in the area to racially integrate a dining establishment around 1961.

“He was such a friend to everyone,” he said. “He was colorblind.”

Mrs. Smith said a black family came into the restaurant and her husband had them seated immediately. Later, a couple who had been customers for years walked up to Smith.

“They told him that if he was going to ‘let people like that in’ they would stop coming to eat,” Mrs. Smith said.

She said her husband told them he appreciated their opinion and understood they held feelings on the subject.

“But if these people are good enough to cook your food they are good enough to eat next to you,’” Mrs. Smith said her husband told them.

She said the couple was influential locally and brought other customers to the restaurant.

“Frank was brave to stand up to them,” she said. “We didn’t see them for several months. But later they came back.”

Mrs. Smith said her husband also befriended a local motorcycle club. Among its members were professionals such as doctors and lawyers.

She said in the 1960s people looked askance at biker clubs because of the reputation of the Hells Angels in California.

“But Frank welcomed them,” Mrs. Smith said.

She said each year hundreds of bikers camped out at the Corps of Engineer’s park next door for a convention. She said her husband arranged for them to use the Gold Room as a private dining and meeting room.

“When Frank died he had an escort of more than 40 motorcycles to the cemetery,” she said.

The great catfish caper

Family members shake their heads perplexed. None remember the great catfish caper.

However, the Temple Daily Telegram reported on July 1, 1981, the theft of a catfish from Frank’s. The fish’s size doubled with the retelling.

“Like fishermen, police sometimes exaggerate the size of their catch - even the ones that get away,” wrote reporter Mike Heckman.

Belton police reported the theft as a 30-pound yellow catfish taken from Frank’s Lakeview Inn in the wee small hours.

A police dispatcher told the Telegram when last seen the fish had been thrown into the back seat of a waiting car that sped away.

A call to the restaurant confirmed the theft but reported the fish as only 15 pounds.

Employees said two men had been drinking in the bar and took the fish from a pond in the restaurant.

Employees spotted them and yelled at them to put it back in the water, but they tossed it into a car and fled the scene.

Police could not confirm later if the evidence had been eaten, wrote Heckman.

The next day Frank Smith reportedly settled the difference about weight. He said the fish weighed 29 1/2 pounds.

The thieves were caught, but Smith did not press charges since they paid him for the fish.

Hall of Honor

In 1995 Smith was inducted into the Texas Restaurant Association’s Hall of Honor at a ceremony at the Hyatt Hotel in Dallas, said Linda Smith, Rick Smith’s wife.

“Frank was the only mom-and-pop shop inducted,” she said. “The others that year included Norman and Nancy Brinker of Dallas who started the Chili’s chain and Larry Durrett who owned the Taco Bell franchise in Texas.”

End of an era

Terry Williamson, 57, Frank and Nita Smith’s daughter, said her dad got very sick during the last seven to eight years of his life. She and her husband ran the restaurant during that time.

“He lost his eyesight and both legs to diabetes,” she said. “By 1996 he was really sick and couldn’t do what he wanted to anymore.”

Mrs. Smith said the times had changed and the restaurant needed to move forward. Her husband’s health had broken and he did not have the capital to go the next step and upgrade.

“Frank had a dream of building a hotel there,” she said. “But he couldn’t do that.”

Frank Smith died July 11, 2000, at his Belton home. He was 79.

Postscript

In a June 18, 1995, interview with the Telegram, Smith said, “I couldn’t have made it if I hadn’t have stayed here to watch the back door and front door. It’s definitely not an eight-hour-a-day job. It’s a tough business.

“I don’t think nowadays a man could start out like I did by selling cold drinks out of the back of the truck and make a success.”

He said the proliferation of franchises had caused the mom-and-pop restaurants to disappear.

Smith took pride in a sign that hung inside the front door of his restaurant.

“The people who walk through these doors are our friends not just customers,” it read.

Smith once told a Telegram reporter “When customers come here they expect to see me - and they do.”

hclark@temple-telegram.com