Letter: Lake Tahoe could benefit from a different kind of tourism - health tourism

I was a temp at Paramount Studios in my late teens, so I got to work in a lot of interesting offices. On one assignment, I spent weeks in the CEO suite. I almost did nothing all day but answer the phone and note in a diary who called and what it was about. Then as five o'clock approached, in would burst this group of hotshot movie guys, stripping down to their shirtsleeves saying, “Can you stay a few more hours?” and I’d get overtime when I actually only worked a few hours.

During those slow day times, there were a couple of old guys who’d been working in the studio for decades and now had an office with a view but they didn't have much more to do than I did.

They’d hang around my desk and tell me stories about the old days. “Fatty Arbuckle,”

I remember one guy saying, “They used to sneak him onto a train in Pasadena and send him up to Tahoe. It's healthy up there, and private. They’d spend weeks even months in these convalescent places up there, the press never could find them.”

For some reason that conversation came into my head when I started getting sick about ten years ago, and since I have no roots or ties anywhere, I packed up and moved here, to Tahoe, to quietly and privately convalesce.

So when I read in an editorial that ran in both the Tribune and South Tahoe Now last week, saying sure tourism produces traffic and pollution, but we need the money, I had to shake my head. Several editorials in both pubs claim that no other industry is possible in Tahoe. They're wrong.

The one asset Tahoe has is its beauty and healthy environment. As things get hotter and smoggier in every city in the United States, Tahoe could capitalize on a different kind of tourism - health tourism. The city could even commandeer one of the empty mansions and make it a convalescent home in the tradition of the early 20th-century settling of Tahoe.

So when people say who cares about pollution, tourism is the only industry possible in Tahoe, I want to say, what about Fatty Arbuckle?

- Kay Ebeling
South Lake Tahoe