b'C o m m u n i t yThe original, bumpy road of progress on Padre Island started with Padre Isles. Corpus Christi de-veloper and former partner in Fulton Construction, Ralph Durden, formed Padre Island Development Company and built the first condominiums on the island in 1969. Thousands of canal-front lots were offered for sale in the newly bulkheaded Padre Isles subdivision, and the fabulous Padre Isles Country Club was opened with an 18-hole championship golf course. All the promise of a world-class island resort, on-par with anything seen in Florida, was the aspira-tion of Padre Isles investors.Sadly, economic forces of the early 1970s included a national recession, inflation, federal price controls and one of many historical crashes of the Texas oil in-dustry. Coupled with some level of mismanagement at the developer level, the Durden partnerships as-sets were foreclosed upon and ended up under the control of Westinghouse Credit Corporation. While The Island failed to explode into the Miami Beach-stylevacationdestinationenvisionedbyColonelA Smashing Success with Ample Room to GrowPadre Isles (above) is the original and ongoing name of North Padre Islands first Robertson in the 1920s, Padre Isles has grown to be- canal-front and golf-course-facing residential development. Fifty years on, hundreds of acres remain undeveloped in the north-central come the largest waterfront, residential communitysection of the community, as is the former country club/golf course property that was Schlitterbahn for just three seasons. Packery in the U.S. outside the state of Florida. Channel (below) was completed in 2006 and provides direct and unobstructed boating access to the Gulf of Mexico, but hundreds of These days, families with school-aged kids are mov- adjacent acres that include bulkheaded Lake Padre, once close to becoming an Intrawest resort, remain all but barren 16 years later.ing to The Island to escape the chaotic, big Texas cit-ies, said Cheri Sperling, owner of Coastline Proper-ties and a real estate agent on Padre Island since 1992.The Flour Bluff school district makes a huge differ-ence, when parents find out how well their graduates do after high school, and especially how high the standards are for academics, sports and discipline in the schools, explained Sperling. Out here we have the charter schools for the younger kids, so its really the best public education system in the entire area.And then came Schlitterbahn. Afteramulti-year courtship that came with successive waves of spec-ulation,excitement,disappointmentfollowedby more excitementit was formally announced in May 2012 that Schlitterbahn Corpus Christi would be-come a reality on the site of the Padre Isles Country Club. Negotiations with the City of Corpus Christi as well as with local investors and community stake-holders were conducted by Jeff Henry, whose family founded the original Schlitterbahn on the Comal Riv-er in New Braunfels, in 1979.Henry,whodroppedoutofhighschooltowork buildingthefirstSchlitterbahnfulltime,earneda reputation as the Steve Jobs of the waterpark indus-try, having secured some 60 patents for ride designs and features. He had successively built the worlds tallest water slides, first in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, and then infamously at Schlitterbahn Kansas City, Kan-sas. At the time Henry was directing construction of the new park on Padre Island, he was being followed 38THE COASTAL BEND GUIDE TheCoastalBend.com'