When Steve and Deena Wright arrived in Glenwood in 1986, they brought their baby girl, their belongings and two canoes.
One canoe was strapped above Deena Wright’s vehicle, while the other rode atop her husband’s truck as they made the long drive from Florida. They were coming to a city where they knew few people to try something that hadn’t been done in Glenwood: renting canoes on the Caddo River.
“We had never seen anyone on the Caddo,” Wright recalled in an interview. “I’m sure the locals used it sometimes, but we just never saw them.”
What they started that year as Wright Way Canoe Rentals would become the first of several canoe rental businesses in Glenwood and help establish an industry that would reshape the local economy.
Today, visitors crowd the Caddo during the summer, canoe and kayak rental businesses line the river and tourism is considered one of Glenwood’s key growing industries. Wright remembers a very different community when she and her husband arrived 40 years ago.
“There was no tourism here,” she said.
The Wrights’ journey to Glenwood was largely the result of circumstances in their personal lives.
Deena was from the town of Stephens, between Magnolia and Camden. She moved to Little Rock, where she began working at Worthen Bank in 1975 and took a second job at a pizza restaurant in Sherwood.
It was there that she met Steve, who was stationed at Little Rock Air Force Base.
They married, and after he left the Air Force in 1979, the couple moved to Stephens. Health problems led Deena to undergo surgery that left the couple unable to have children naturally. With the help of an adoption attorney, they moved to Gainesville, Florida, and adopted a daughter.
Afterward, Deena wanted to return to Arkansas to be closer to her mother. Her father had died, and she missed home.
Steve agreed — with a condition.
“We’ll move to Arkansas if you’ll let me open up a canoe business in Glenwood,” she remembers him telling her.
“Glenwood?” she replied.
“Yeah, where that Caddo River is.”
The couple knew the river from trips through Glenwood while traveling from south Arkansas to float the Ouachita River and other waterways. The Caddo seemed largely unused.
“I said, ‘I don’t care. I just want to go to Arkansas,’” Wright recalled.
STARTING THE BUSINESS
There was no internet advertising to introduce their new business to potential customers.
Steve first set out to learn the Caddo River himself, she said. He traveled the river, sometimes camping overnight, determining distances and how long different sections took to float. The information became the basis for a pamphlet advertising Wright Way Canoe Rentals, which they delivered to state welcome centers.
“That is how we advertised,” Wright said. “That was the cheapest way we could do it.”
The business opened in April 1986, initially operating out of a mobile home near Caddo Gap, she said. The couple put up signs directing customers to the location. Wright still remembers the excitement when the first customer followed the signs and found them.
The business later moved to a house on Highway 8. As demand increased, the Wrights expanded from their original two canoes to dozens.
Steve Wright drove all the way to Maine with a friend and returned pulling a trailer loaded with Old Town canoes, a brand made with impact-resistant materials considered more durable than cheaper aluminum canoes. He had tested different types of canoes on the Caddo and determined Old Town canoes could best withstand rocks, logs and the punishment of repeated rental use.
The Wrights also offered transportation for people who brought their own canoes. A worker would accompany customers upriver, then drive their vehicle back to the point where they planned to finish their float, leaving the key in a predetermined hiding place.
Eventually, the business moved closer to the river. That changed everything.
“We were renting all of our boats in a day,” Wright said. “But once we moved down here into town, we were double-renting our boats.”
Customers were entitled to keep a canoe all day, but some finished their floats early. When that happened, the Wrights would immediately rent the returned canoe to someone else hoping to get on the river that afternoon.
The workdays could stretch late into the evening.
“We had to make the money while we were making it,” Wright said. “Summertime is the only time that you can make the money.”
At its peak, Wright said the company could rent 250 or more canoes during Memorial Day weekend. Canoes rented for $25 a day.
The business was seasonal, so both continued working other jobs. Steve was an electrician and also worked at a slate mill. Deena continued her banking career at what is now Diamond Bank while spending weekends working at the canoe rental.
“It was a hard job,” she said.
OTHERS SAW AN OPPORTUNITY
It did not take long for other people to notice the visitors and revenue being brought into Glenwood.
“Locals started seeing that,” Wright recalled. “Some of them started talking to me like, ‘Man, y’all sure are bringing the money in.’”
Other canoe rental businesses opened, including Arrowhead and Caddo River Canoe Rental.
Wright Way also became a starting point for young people who worked there. Wright said one of the things she remains proudest of is providing teenagers with their first jobs. Among them was Thomas Kerberskey, who repeatedly told the Wrights that someday he wanted to own a canoe rental business of his own.
He eventually did. Today, Kerberskey co-owns Lucky’s Caddo River Canoe and Kayak Rental.
As visitors increased, Wright said she developed partnerships with restaurants and motels to provide visitors with what they needed while mutually expanding the tourism industry.
“We would just work with each other,” she said.
She believes expanding recreation on the Caddo River helped change the direction of Glenwood, “because I know what the town looked like when I used to come through.”
For all the recreation and economic activity the river provided, the Wrights also learned how quickly the Caddo could become dangerous.
In May 1990, torrential rains caused the river to flood its banks. The Glenwood Herald reported at the time that up to 18 inches of rain fell in the Ouachitas over a two-day period, flooding roads, highways and city streets. The U.S. Highway 70 bridge at Glenwood was closed because of the high water.
Steve Wright was away in Gainesville, she said, leaving her and their daughter at home as the river rose rapidly.
Friends helped her move the company’s canoes and vans to higher ground near the former Glenwood school property. By the time they finished, she recalled, floodwater was swirling around their feet. Wright stuck a broken paddle into the ground as a makeshift river gauge so she could tell whether the water was continuing to rise.
Police had stopped traffic from crossing the nearby highway bridge, and an officer told Wright that she and her daughter needed to leave.
“Honey, you’re going to be an island,” she remembers him warning.
But Wright had spent years watching the river and believed the water had stopped rising.
“This is my life. This is everything I have,” she said she told him.
She promised that if the officer returned and the water had moved beyond her marker, she and her daughter would leave. It didn’t. The Caddo began receding.
She soon learned that a large group of cattle had been swept into the river. She was warned to keep her daughter away from the riverbank because carcasses could be a grim sight as the water fell.
THE LEGACY
After 16 years of operating Wright Way Canoe Rentals, the couple sold the business. Wright said they do not miss the exhausting work.
“It was very hard on your body,” Wright said.
But the couple remains connected to the Caddo River, living in a home alongside it. They also know the role they had in helping develop what has become one of Glenwood’s largest industries.
“Tourism is what helped Glenwood grow, and it continues to thrive because of the beauty of the Caddo River,” she recently posted on Facebook. “I’m grateful to have been a small part of Glenwood’s story.”
PHOTO CAPTION: The Caddo River as seen in October 2013. Photo: Mike Lewis/Flickr
