Broken Dreams in Country Boom Town

Karen Hunt and her boyfriend came to Branson dreaming of a country music career. Now they live in a shantytown of campers at the $5-per-night Oak Hill park, a few miles north of this neon-lit boom town.

“I’ve got my birthday coming up next month. I didn’t want my 23rd birthday to be like this,” said Hunt, who came from Durham, N.C., with musician Jimmy Ray.

She got a waitress job after arriving in October but soon lost it because her broken-down car left her stranded.

“If I don’t get a job soon, it’s going to get worse,” she said.

Branson is challenging Nashville as the place to hear live country music. More than 4 million people visited Branson last year to catch shows by such stars as Willie Nelson and Mel Tillis.

The town’s growing reputation has also lured people like Hunt, people in search of a better life who instead found a shortage of housing and of permanent, full-time jobs.

Mike Weatherly, 32, packed his wife and four children into a rickety pickup and moved here from San Diego in October for construction work. Still jobless, his family is bracing for winter at Oak Hill.

“I think it will take a while to get established,” Weatherly, a tile layer, said optimistically. “I’m not going to give up.”

Park owner John Brown worries that many residents of the site’s nearly 50 campers will have trouble paying for food and heat this winter.

“As work slacks off, more and more of them are finding it harder to make ends meet,” Brown said.

Relief groups aren’t sure how many people are in inadequate housing at campsites and run-down motels around this town, which has grown from a population of 2,500 in 1980 to around 3,700.

Pastor Howard Boyd of Branson Hills Assembly of God Church said his congregation was seeking donations to set up a homeless shelter this winter.

“I don’t think you’re really going to know how many there are out there until you hit those zero-degree days and advertise a shelter,” Boyd said.

Charities say they have seen new faces seeking help every week since the Branson received national TV exposure beginning in January.

The CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” for example, showed entertainers chuckling on a golf course about how the recession never touched Branson. Tillis told the program that, by doing two shows a day, he could make $6 million in six months.

Those images contrast harshly with the other reality--people sleeping in their cars and campers. Many stayed in tents until a few hard freezes in early November.

“It’s definitely something that’s not in the brochures,” said Jeff Hurst, a Baptist missionary who’s helping supply camp dwellers with clothes and blankets. “They are good folks. They want to make it. They just live from crisis to crisis.”

During the summer, newcomers routinely rolled into town and found jobs within days, sometimes hours. But finding an affordable apartment was impossible for many, said Josh Young, director of programs for a Christian relief group.

Despite the hard times, Danny Raney, 36, said he prefers life at the campground--where he occasionally cooks squirrel dumplings or a venison neck roast--to his hometown of Sallisaw, Okla.