Snapshots in the bait shop at Van’s Lakeview Fishing Camp preserve memories of the ones that did not get away. Hundreds of those images fill cardboard boxes and drawers in owners Albert and Collette VanBorkum’s office. The photos show smiling Lake McConaughy anglers holding big walleye, huge stripers and lunker catfish. One special picture captures another Lake McConaughy giant, Albert’s father – Albert “Van” VanBorkum.

The black and white photograph shows Van and three buddies shooting the breeze on the log bench in front of the camp store – an unofficial coffee club of sorts. The bench is still there all these years later. So are some of the men, but not Van. He died in 2017, but his memory remains, as does the family that he and his wife of 53 years, Karel, raised in this fishing camp rooted on a sandy knob on Big Mac’s southern shore.

Collette has a perfect view of sunrise over the lake as the first visitors of the day began trickling in. The aroma of fresh coffee blends with the hopeful anticipation of anglers purchasing lively minnows, wriggling night crawlers, bags of ice and must-have tackle they didn’t know they needed until now.

Rows of Rat-L-Traps, bins of bobbers, stacks of spinners and racks of rods and reels cover one bait shop wall. Preserved fish hang above the counter. There’s a toothy northern pike posed as if striking at a red and white spoon, a chubby yellow perch and a varied school of others.

Today the camp features towering shade trees, providing the perfect rest spot for well-sunned fishermen. There are also long, sandy beaches, warmed by the sun, over 100 camping spots, glowing campfires, a playground and other camping necessities (like a tile shower house). The village general store displays a river-rock exterior, dark brown log benches and concrete keystones above the doors displaying the words “Van” (complete with cowboy hat emblem), “Karel” and “1966.”

Previous owners Andy and Ann Stuart sold the camp – three times. When their buyers couldn’t make it work, the Stuarts would always take the camp back until they found another interested buyer. “Dad had always wanted to do something like this,” Albert said of the camp that at the time included a trailer park, a restaurant and former military barracks repurposed as cabins.

The Stuarts thought they’d surely get the camp back a fourth time after a young married couple, Van and Karel, purchased it in 1966. “We were young, dumb and broke,” Karel said. 

The couple met at Kearney State College – now University of Nebraska at Kearney. Van studied history and biology, and Karel studied home economics and English. They taught school in Dix to supplement their income before moving to the camp full time in 1969.

“Van planted all of these trees,” said Larry Webb, one of the regulars staking claim to a spot on one of the log benches most summer mornings, noting that many are a half century old. “They should charge for the shade.”

Van dragged a hose from tree to tree to keep them alive, as well as requiring new lot owners to plant their own, added Gary “Sarge” Thorson, fellow member of Van’s unofficial Coffee Club. But Van was not an all work and no play kind of guy. “He took Tuesdays off to go fishing and joked that it was work,” Albert said. If Van fished, it meant he could tell customers where the best ones were biting.

The camp springs to life on the first weekend of May and is open through mid-September. The rest of the year, Albert fixes the things that broke during the summer. Van’s Lakeview Fishing Camp includes a repair shop with a hydraulic lift. Albert gets by being a self-trained mechanic and said he learned everything by doing it wrong. One impressed customer told Albert that his “level of redneckery is outstanding.”

Every day is different at the fishing camp. Summer heat brings out the water-savvy and sunbathers. Van’s rents paddleboats, pontoon boats, kayaks and 18-foot aluminum fishing boats. But visitors beware, boat traffic slows to a screeching halt when Sandhills winds blow up whitecaps. Storms force visitors to their campers, or to the store, where bored city dwellers stock up on clothing, children’s toys, cowboy hats and other miscellany.

The VanBorkums’ three teenagers help at the camp. Four local kids work in the store scooping up minnows, stocking shelves and ringing up sales. Five other young workers run the camp’s fleet of tugs – an armada of former government trucks once used to maneuver aircrafts around runways. Lower water levels during irrigation season make the tugs a necessity.

 “Have you ever watched a man and wife put a boat in? With these tugs, Van probably prevented a lot of divorces,” Karel said. T-shirts for sale in the bait shop read, “I’m sorry for what I said while we were trying to back up the trailer.”

 Van called Lake McConaughy an “ABC lake” – fish it after breakfast and before cocktails. But Collette was fishing after midnight when she hooked a striper weighing 36 pounds. “It was as long as I am tall,” she said. Stripers now a rare sight. Due to an unwillingness to reproduce in a foreign environment, the last one was caught in the area around 2008.

“I assume they are gone,” Albert said. “But I guess there could be a Loch Ness monster striper still out there.” The lake is known far and wide for its chunky walleyes, which bulk up on gizzard shad and alewives. “Our fish are a little obese here,” Albert joked.

Van spent his life at the village doing a combination of what he loved the most. He talked, fished, worked and created memories for lake visitors a thousand times over. Also true to his nature, Van knew what he wanted and was firm in letting his family know he wanted to be cremated after his death. And so he was. After the legend’s life came to an end due to a short, but well-fought, battle with pulmonary fibrosis, he was turned to ash.

Further plans have since been made so that one day, after Karel passes too, half of their combined ashes will be reunited with the remains of a trusted dog in their quail hunting grounds in Arizona. The other half will mix eternally in the coarse grains of the sandy shore of the lake they loved so much.

Also something he was sure about, Van made it clear he didn’t want a funeral. So instead, the store was closed, a big tent went up and the VanBorkum family had a party. Generations of customers and employees past and present, friends and some of the VanBorkums’ former school students – easily 1,000 people – descended on this sandy knob on the shore of Lake McConaughy to pay respects and share stories.

The whole scene reminded Karel of the bench outside the general store. Van would sit with his friends for an hour or more before going back to work. He loved to talk. “I’m not sure that those fish stories were always entirely true,” Karel said, laughing, “and, boy, they told some whoppers.”