Requiem for Jim Jumer, a class act
JIM Jumer, 82, vital statistic … dead Tuesday of a heart attack.
D. James Jumer was not a mere statistic. He was a quiet dreamer who reminded so many of the psyche of Walt Disney. He was an “imagineer,” like Disney, with a dreamer’s touch.
When he strolled into a room, it was like the arrival of a European aristocrat … slender, debonair, determinedly persuasive.
He created entities from a trifling start with a Chicken Delight store that was losing money. Jim took a loser, parlayed his profits to become the shrewd builder of five Midwest hotels and what is about to become the major casino in the Quad-Cities, near Milan. His casino on the Rock Island riverfront is an entity that Davenport rejected and become Rock Island’s gain.
Somewhere along the way, long, long ago, he owned a Howard Johnson, a nightclub in Detroit and a restaurant in Malaga on the Spanish Riviera.
Most of his hotels were Bavarian; one was like a French chateau. All were distinctive. You will find few entrepreneurs today who would gamble on something that looked like a castle on the Rhine — with heavy draperies and a fireplace in almost every room.
Close friends called him a frustrated architect. He was something of an introvert. It’s not that he didn’t have plenty of friends. He did. So it’s always been a puzzle why he picked me as a pal.
The last time I saw Jim Jumer was about a year ago. We were visiting in the guest house of his remarkable chalet, Jumerhof, a woodsy compound atop a “mountain” he owned in Silver Creek, Minn.
We were clearing brush, hacking away at little scrub trees. He liked to do things like that.
“Go back to the house and write a story or you’ll chop off a foot,” he commanded. So I did, climbing the stairs to a little guest house clock tower that he always said he built for me, “to get inspired and write better stories.”
Jumerhof was his joy. The gated compound was built like a little Bavarian village, stocked with antiques he would ship home from annual trips to Europe. He loved his place, high over azure Lake Superior. Over a fireplace was a German plaque, “Mein Haus Ist Meine Welt.” Translated, “My house is my world.”
His Jumer’s Castle Lodge in Bettendorf — now The Lodge — was a true Germanic chateau, where he proudly sat at the head table when the place repeatedly received four star ratings from AAA. On such nights, he’d park his 1930 Packard sedan out front, and after dinner we’d go cruising. Always the gentleman, he would have a bouquet of flowers waiting on the back seat for my wife.
He never thought of his sunset years; he expected that he would live forever. He was everlastingly searching out antiques for his properties, though his immense new casino on the Mississippi will be more of a Las Vegas glitz than a Louis XIV chateau.
“I just can’t get the old world out of my mind,” he once told me. “It must go back to my roots. My great-grandfather was a baron and chief designer for King Ludwig’s Valhalla castle.”
Almost unto his death, he was still collecting. He has a warehouse of antiques in Peoria, where he lived.
He liked to laugh about how his “empire” began with a Chicken Delight in Michigan that was losing $1,800 a month. After a month of Jumer’s ownership, the red ink turned to $3,000 profit.
After that, he became obsessed to build unique European-style hotels in places like Bettendorf, Champaign, Peoria and Bloomington, Ill. He personally designed and decorated all of them.
All of them had the Jumer touch. Always, he was a class act.
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.