It’s a state park with a sandy beach and strikingly clear water where thousands of people visit every summer. There are documents that show designs for a Sand Harbor Hotel and Casino - today, thankfully, Sand Harbor has no such thing. Julie Brown / SFGATEĪt first, Whittell planned to develop his land in Tahoe. This land once belonged to George Whittell. The view from the Thunderbird Lodge, looking out toward Sand Harbor and Crystal Bay. Courtesy of Thunderbird Lake Tahoe Archives
The deal was a bargain, even for the 1930s.Īn aerial view of the Thunderbird Lodge and Whittell's land in Lake Tahoe, during winter. He paid $6 for every shorefront acre and $3 for every mountainside acre. In total, Whittell owned about 45,000 acres in Tahoe, according to Bill Watson, chief executive and curator of the Thunderbird Lodge Preservation Society. Whittell wound up buying Blitz and his partners out, becoming the sole owner of virtually the entire length of Tahoe’s east shore, from the water to the top of the mountains.
(Nevada still doesn’t charge an income tax, and for that reason, the state has lured generations of millionaires and billionaires to its side of Lake Tahoe.) In Reno, Whittell befriended a man named Norman Blitz, who was securing a deal to acquire about tens of thousands of acres in the Tahoe basin. In the 1930s, Whittell landed in Reno, Nev., to skip out of California’s growing income taxes. Before the crash in 1929, Whittell liquidated his shares in the stock market and emerged from the Great Depression as one of the wealthiest men in California. His first love affairs were high-society scandals, which his family tried unsuccessfully to cover up.īut Whittell also inherited some of the business intuition that made his family so wealthy to begin with. In his youth, he ran off to join Barnum & Bailey Circus.
While Muir devoted his lifetime to the creation of our country’s national parks, Whittell was more focused on his whims. Ideologically speaking, Whittell was the polar opposite of John Muir. The Thunderbird Lodge was George Whittell's summer home in Lake Tahoe. I wanted to know how Whittell - tycoon, recluse, playboy, gambler, animal lover - became Tahoe’s greatest conservationist, by accident. And that’s why, on a Tuesday morning, I drove down the east shore and turned onto the winding, narrow road that led down a boulder-strewn hillside to the Thunderbird Lodge. As the story goes, the winning pool was so big in that game that King used the money to purchase and name Kings Beach.īut there’s another story about Whittell that is lesser known. And one of my favorite tall tales about Whittell is the poker hand he lost in a high-stakes game to another man of Tahoe folklore, Joe King. I’ve heard stories of showgirls from the Cal Neva casino secretly boating across the lake under a dark sky to spice up late-night parties at the Thunderbird. Some say he’d allow his larger-than-average pets to roam freely on his property. Or about Whittell’s pet lion, named Bill, and his pet elephant, Mingo. There are many stories of Whittell as a technology savant who collected luxurious automobiles, aircraft and yachts, including a king-sized wooden boat, also called the Thunderbird, that still occasionally roars to life on Lake Tahoe.
0 kommentar(er)
