LIVING HISTORY
18
HOME & DESIGN
KIPLINGER COLLECTION
Publishing titan W.M. Kiplinger bought the lodge in 1952 as a vacation
resort for his employees and their families.
Letter, and it didn’t turn a profit for five years. Kiplinger kept
himself afloat financially by writing freelance stories for The
New York Times and other prominent publications.
It was Kiplinger’s access to insiders in the Roosevelt
Administration that really made his weekly publication soar.
Always keeping sources sacredly confidential, Kiplinger could
come up with scoops like nobody else. During the upheaval of
FDR’s experimental legislation during the Great Depression,
businessmen and investors wondered what was going on.
Kiplinger told them. He made forecasts they could bank on,
and they made him a millionaire. When his son, Austin, joined
the company, a cluster of magazines were added and Kiplinger
Washington Editors’ profits reached the stratosphere.
Knight Kiplinger now heads the Kiplinger financial media
company. He tells the story of how his grandfather, Kip, first
came to Stuart in 1952, reluctantly, at the behest of a lovable
public relations man named H.O. “Bish” Bishop. (Bish has
been immortalized in a story in Ernie Lyons’ book The Last
Cracker Barrel). Kip had already been turned off by some
of Florida’s tourist meccas, but Bish proclaimed, “Stuart is
Florida for people who think they don’t like Florida.”
So, Kip and his wife, LaVerne, booked a vacation at the
Sunrise Inn, which used to command a view of the river from
the mainland across from Sewall’s Point.
“He wakes up,” Knight Kiplinger told Indian River Magazine,
“and looks out over the river and says, ‘Bish is right —
this is absolutely marvelous!’ ”
Knight’s grandfather headed straight into tiny downtown
Stuart and found a real estate broker, Charlie Arbogast, who
showed him Bay Tree Lodge. >>
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