Lakeside for a lifetime

Chat about water safety, lake activities

  • On the first official day of summer, Kipp Walters, park ranger with the Corps of Engineers at Clinton Lake, will answer questions about water safety, as well as recreation opportunities at the lake.Submit a question

Clinton Lake

Around 8 a.m. every day, Buck Sanders shows up at Clinton Marina like the other employees – except Sanders doesn’t get paid.

Sanders, 86, has come to the marina nearly every day for about nine years to fish, do carpentry work and other odd jobs and “just sit around and shoot the bull” with everyone there, he says.

“It gives me a second home. It keeps me out of the bars, probably,” Sanders said.

Sanders comes out from his home on West 27th Street Terrace at about 8 a.m. – or a little before sunup if he plans to fish off the marina dock – and stays until about 11 a.m., chatting with or offering help to customers, employees or anyone else who wanders by. Then, some days, he comes back in the afternoon.

“He’s here more than the employees are,” marina manager Lee Kennedy said. “At least they take a few days off from time to time.”

When Sanders arrived in Lawrence in 1948, a sign listed the city’s population as 18,000, he said. He met Kennedy around that time when they worked at competing auto service stations at 23rd and Louisiana streets.

Sanders later worked as an aircraft mechanic and then moved in to carpentry. He helped build his own house, where he still lives, in 1952. Just this winter, he helped build the marina’s new office.

“He’s pretty spry for his age,” Kennedy said.

He also built the dining tables on the dock outside the Johnny’s Jerkwater Cafe restaurant at the marina. In return for that work, the eatery gives him free meals.

“He fixes darn near everything that’s broken,” marina owner Megan Hiebert said.

He began fishing at the marina 13 years ago, but he became a fixture after Hiebert bought the marina nine years ago.

“She didn’t know that when she bought the marina, I’d come with it,” Sanders said.

Ever since, the marina’s workers have enjoyed his companionship, along with the occasional catch of fish and tomatoes from his garden at home. Kennedy said Sanders was likely to strike up a friendship with anyone who wandered in.

“He never met a stranger,” Kennedy said.

Sanders said he had found a family of sorts at the marina.

“This place has probably kept me alive as long as I have been,” he said.