I used to enjoy watching Bill Geist's entertaining reports whenever he covered off-beat and quirky subjects for CBS. When I saw that Geist had written a memoir, I figured that his book would be just as fun and just as interesting as his television pieces had been. It is. It lives up to his standards.

Geist grew up living mostly in Champaign, Illinois. But his Uncle Ed and Aunt Janet ran the Arrowhead Lodge at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, more than 300 miles away. This is where Bill worked during the eight summers of his high school and college years, in the 1960s. So this is the time and the place where he leads us. It's a coming-of-age story: about not only his first job, but also about his first time away from home and away from his parents. While he's working, he's hanging out with kids in his own age range, and he's answering to a number of odd though somewhat responsible adults. Naturally, adventures and escapades ensue.

We soon meet the cast of main characters. In addition to Ed and Janet, we meet the kitchen staff, the waitresses, the bellhops and the desk clerks. We get to peek behind the curtains of hotel management. We learn what the young folks do on the clock, and how they entertain themselves when they are off duty. We are reminded of just how much people smoked and drank inside buildings and on the job, back then. Oh, yes. The 1960s.

Alas, the Arrowhead Lodge is now gone. Geist knew this fact when he recently re-visited the site. He uses this contemporary prompt to lightly frame these stories from the past, from beginning to end. We too knew going in that the place would never again be the way he remembered it. It's a good thing that Bill Geist is a good writer, and especially one who knows how to find the funny in any given situation. This book was probably a labor of love for him. We get hints that he tracked down some of his Arrowhead colleagues to ask what they too recalled about the people and the place. I'll bet this was a fun yet wistful project.

As usual, I chose to listen to the CD edition of this book, after I spotted it on a public library shelf. I was a bit disappointed at first. Even though the cover says, "Read by the Author," Geist reads just the first chapter and the last. (Maybe his Parkinson's disease prevented more involvement?) Narrator Allan Robertson -- acknowledged only in the production credits printed on the CDs themselves -- covers the rest of the text. The saving grace is that Allan's pitch and animated delivery somewhat mimic Geist's. And even though this is a memoir, with a lot of "I did this," and "I did that," references, it gradually became easy to suspend one's disbelief and to translate the stories into those that were uniquely attached to Geist. Kudos to Robertson for stepping up and in.

The stories that Geist shares in Lake of the Ozarks will have many a reader calling up their own memories. Memories of what they were doing in the 1960s. Memories of their own first teenage jobs, or of their stints at summer camps, or of family vacations to similar tourist resorts and destinations. We can relate to a lot of the scenes here, even if we've never visited the Lake of the Ozarks. Where HAS the time gone? Thanks, Bill, for taking us back "there."