A ‘Holy Trombone’ Took Down The Slide In Winona Lake

Homer Rodeheaver, beginning in 1910, was the music director, choir conductor, and platform manager for the Billy Sunday evangelistic crusades for 20 years.
With Sunday having relocated to Winona Lake from Chicago in 1911, Rodeheaver also decided to make Winona Lake his home base. Consequently, he bought a small two-story Gothic Revival cottage built around 1900 on the Winona lakefront. Located on McDonald Island near the south mouth of the canal, the home was added to frequently. Rodeheaver rebuilt the dwelling to look like a ship. Between 1939 and 1941 its distinctive “steamboat” style was achieved by flattening and surrounding the roof with iron railing. A 23-foot recreational slide enabled swimmers to soar from the roof down to the lake below.
Spacious enclosed verandas surrounded Rainbow Point on three sides. French doors led to the living and dining rooms, where a built-in window seat and corner cabinets were found. The central stairway featured a custom-made “art deco” balustrade of oak. Upstairs featured five bedrooms and a pine-paneled sunroom.
Rodeheaver’s business cards, dishes, glassware, living room rug and bathroom towels featured rainbows, a reference to a line of a frequent theme song, "Every cloud will wear a rainbow/If your heart keeps right." His record company was named Rainbow Records, and his beloved lakeside house became Rainbow Point.
Rodeheaver was a bachelor and a perpetual traveler, so initially his stepmother, Bettie, lived in the house and was the resident hostess. Later his half-sister, Ruth, and her husband, James Thomas, joined Rodeheaver’s music publishing company and moved from Roanoke, Va. to Winona Lake to work at the company and to live in Rainbow Point.
Many famous personalities visited him at this home. Among them were J. Edgar Hoover, Will Rogers, Cecil B. DeMille, John D. Rockefeller, Billy Graham and many popular gospel hymn writers. Large parties on the porches and lawn were often given by Rodeheaver with as many as 200 guests in attendance.
The most widely-accepted version of the story behind the gospel song “Beyond the Sunset” has the hymnwriters, Virgil and Blanche Brock, deriving the song’s title from a blind cousin who was enjoying a sunset dinner at Rainbow Point with the Rodeheaver family.
One of Winona’s lakefront attractions was the famous sliding board at Rodeheaver’s Rainbow Point home. Katherine Carmichael, noted pianist and Rody’s neighbor, was often seen entering the water down the slide on a toboggan. For the privileged, the highlight of a visit to Winona Lake was a trip down Rodeheaver’s slide. It extended from the upper level of Rainbow Point’s veranda and stretched out to the lake. Visitors could sail out and land in the lake more than 20 feet below.
Will Rogers (1879-1935), America’s best-loved humorist, newspaper columnist and social observer, spoke at Winona in 1928 after relaxing for the day with Rodeheaver at Rainbow Point. Shortly thereafter Rogers wrote a newspaper column titled “You Can Hear a Holy Trombone at Winona,” which was syndicated widely by the McNaught Syndicate.
“They are all living there, just as happy as can be, and a finer bunch of folk you never saw or played to,” Rogers wrote, referring to local Winona residents. “You all know Rody,” he wrote, “the great slide trombone player, who always led the music in the Billy Sunday revivals. Rody has slip-horned more sinners into the kingdom than any of the old-timers with their trumpets,” he opined.
Rogers continued, “He has a lovely house there right on the lake, with a slide that goes right from the roof of his house down into the water.”
That sentence was the death knell for the slide. As a result of Rogers featuring the slide, the crowds of people wanting to enjoy the slide became so great that Rodeheaver feared it might collapse the house. The slide was taken down for safety’s sake, much to the disappointment of all.
After Rodeheaver’s death at age 75 in 1955, the Thomases continued to live in Rainbow Point. After the death of the last family member, most of the contents of Rainbow Point were sold at a highly-publicized public auction on June 25, 1980. Many artifacts from Rainbow Point are on display in the Winona History Center in Westminster Hall, 105 Ninth Street in Winona Lake.
Today the house is in private hands. It stands proudly on the Winona lakefront, facing southwest — but without its 23-foot slide.