The Great American Motel By PHIL PATTON The snow had been falling in the West for days, choking the highways, and before long there were fourteen trucks at the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari New Mexico and fourteen drivers in the motel's fourteen rooms. The drivers' poker game went on around the clock. Mrs. Lillian Redmans who owns the Blue Swallow kept the coffee pot boiling. Every now and then she got a hand in herself. The Blue Swallow may be the last, best friendliest motel in the country. It Is right smack an route 66 in the ultimate motel town, a town which once boasted 4B motels, a town best known for being in between, halfway between Oklahoma City and Flagstaff Arizona, and a rough day's drive from each. In the age of the chains, motels like the Blue Swallow is a monument to a fading American institution. For two generations now, staying in a motel has been an almost primal American experience. We all seem to remember our first motel room. It is perhaps, the universal smell that sets off recollection, that elusive but distinctive combination of disinfectant and carpet cleaner, a discount version of Proustian evocation. Many of us tend to become mental "collectors" of motels, seekers of the odd, the Memorable, the ultimate motel, ones we've stayed in and the ones we've marveled at in passing. The gaudiest motel I've ever seen is the Has Haw motel, north of Nashville a crazy country music kind of place, with hyped up blue and orange coloring the masonry of its exterior. Visitors are lured to the Has Haw primarily by its fireworks store out front, all painted up with black cats and bears, and secondarily by its "zoo," which boasts not only a bear but a "live Florida alligator." The loneliest was in Paducah Texas, east of Lubbock, reached after a long drive down a desolate, straight road with coyotes slinking by its edge and even an occasional tumbleweed bounced across it by the wind. In 1926 the word "motel," which outlasted such rivals as "auto-tel was invented by one James Vail, who tagged his establishment on Route 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, the Mo-tel Inn. Vail really invented only the word "motel." His place was much grander than most a+ those with which the term eventually became associated. It was a mail Spanish mission--as if the padres were taking in travelers for the night the way they did in the days of El Camino Real--with a bell tower and a sign that superimposed the I'M" of Vail's now linguistic coinage like a roof over the initial "H" of hotel. The office of the Mo-tel Inn still stands. A curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Roger White, studied the development of the motel. Vail’s coinage, White explains, has come to encompass not only the classic motel, with its rooms arranged under one long, low roof, but its predecessors, the motor court, and its successor, the chain motor inn. In fact, the reign of the classic motel was short--really from the Forties to the mid-Fifties, when the Interstate program and the boom In the chains made it obsolete. The typical motel began as a Me and PA operation, the creation, often, of a retired couple who would turn the front room of their big old farmhouse into an office and put their savings into building behind it a rank of rooms not much more substantial than the chicken coops they replaced. Before the motel, we had the motor court, with its cottages arranged around a mock plaza, and before the motor court we had the tourist cabins, little cottages or "bungalettes" in the field behind a gas station/cafe. Even earlier came the auto camp--a simple field with water and perhaps a couple of outhouses. But the quintessential motel of motels entered our national consciousness by the time at least of Psycho, where it was immediately recognizable. Often our memories of specific: motel rooms blend into each other, like some sort of lap technique in film until the motel room becomes a sort of neutral and abstract space-- much the same and yet slightly different, with the strangeness of a familiar word repeated over and over again. Sam Shepherd used the motel as a sort of existential setting for his play Fool for Love. His stage directions turn it into something that passes beyond any specific locale: "Stark, low-rent motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Faded green plaster walls. Dark brown linoleum floor. No rugs. Cast iron four poster single bed...covered with faded blue chenille bedspread." This was the motel. of imagination, the dreary, down-at-the-boot-heels motel whose associations every motel proprietor was trying escape. The history of the motel has been a constant battle for improvements and against its own bad reputation. The story of the Blue Swallow is not very different from that of many motels of its times. It had been built in the Forties by a Mr. W.A. Huggins as a series of cabins or cottages. Lillian Redman's husband gave her the motel as a wedding present, in 1958. Carports were later added between the cabins. After the Redmans took over, they reconstructed the place in the familiar motel form of adjoining rooms beneath a common roof. And they changed the name from Blue Bird to Blue Swallow--"the bird of happiness." But motels have long had a darker side. In a 1940 magazine article "Camps of Crime," J. Edgar Hoover himself condemned motels and motor courts. Hoover recounted story after story of hardened criminals who holed up at auto camps. To Judge by Hoover's accounts these criminals tended to have female sidekicks of tender years and double names such as "Mary Lou" and "Ima Mae." There was Lester Brockelhurst, for instance, who went an a spree of murder and robbery along with a seventeen year old female accomplice, staying in camps and motels along the way. Hoover had a point; many of the camps were located at the edge of town or in the country, where they escaped close scrutiny by law enforcement officials. And many did have the sort of trade which expected anonymity. Preserving that anonymity involved not being too particular about the illegibly scrawled signatures and the frequency of John Smiths entered in the register. In some cases, however, it involved actual collusion with the criminals Hoover was after. The FBI succeeded in putting at least one operator behind bars. A certain Mrs. Faye Fulbright hid members of the notorious Spargur gang, whose members had made a series of large unauthorized bank withdrawals. This side of motel life, somewhere along the way also became associated with sanitary inadequacy. Like roadside eateries, motels fought an image of uncleanliness that the chains would later exploit in their marketing. Motel owners fought this reputation for- years by such symbolic efforts as the "sanitizing" strip over the toilet and the plastic wrapper around the glasses. Mostly law abiding guests could be irksome too: stealing towels, bargaining for discounts. Clara Keyton in an earlier time, saw things from the other side. She ran the desk, cleaned rooms and pumped gasoline. She complained that by the Depression she had to put up with constant "grouching and miserliness." Patrons tried to haggle the price down from a $1.25 or so with the phrase, "You Just ought to see what we had last night." Then when they left, she said, they would take the towels. Keyton left the business in disgust in 1940. Most motels of course were guilty of little of this. No self-respecting criminal would have ventured, for instance, into the fairy tale world of the replica "Danish village" in Maine, or the many "Dutch Mills" in New York or Pennsylvania. But the prudish Hoover seemed at least as upset that the camps were being used for assignation as that they sheltered criminals. The motel as a locale for sin was a standard part of its image. This side of the business was called "hot" or "Jones trade." It titillated generations of high schoolers. "Kids turn into teenagers, but what do teenagers turn into?" the line went "Motels." People joked about the "No-tell Motel," and there really was at least one called that, on Division Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan. More recently, some once respectable motels in deteriorating neighborhoods have been purchased for "hot bedding." Many of these boast, in their new incarnations, of offering "midday rates," free adult movies and "in room saunas." But the motel owner who looked the other way was an impersonal one. The classic rendering of this side of the motel is Vladimir Nabobov's Lolita. His narrator Humbert Humbert in his travels came to prefer that type of accommodation known as the modern functional motel.." He too observed the historical change from motor court to classic motel, the "tendency for cabins to fuse and gradually form the caravansary. . ." Nabokov, however, noted and recorded much more about motels. In particular, he sketched the sort of adversary relationship that developed between the guest and the owner. He lampooned the guest’s attitude in his caricature of a sign posted inside the in the motel door: "We wish you to feel at home here. All equipment was carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license number is on record here. Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to eject without notice any objectionable person. Do not throw waste material of any kind in the toilet bowl.Thank you. Call again. The Management. "P. S. We consider our guests the Finest People of the World." Beginning with Holiday Inn and others in the early 1950’s, the chains moved in. Hundreds of the old time family ma and pa operations with their colorful names and broken neon signs lie disused now. They stand as shrines to the American cult of mobility, to constant and endless searching, the hopes and dissatisfactions that put us on the road. This American trait was noted early on by Alexis de Toqueville, who with his characteristic insight and prescience, wrote of our national restlessness: "If at the end of a year of unremitting labor the American finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him." It is the pursuit of happiness that is the core of our independence--and our restlessness. And no ice machines, no wall-to-wall carpets, no television dished down from the superstation's satellite, can quite replace the human element of the old motels. Lillian Redman's Blue Swallow s survived the competition of the chains at the Interstate because of the way she treated her guests. At the big chains on the bypass, your wake-up call was likely to be a computerized, recorded voice. Mrs. Redman, by contrast, woke her customers with a friendly knock at the door and a gently spoken, genuine "good morning." And when they left, Lillian Redman gave visitors to the Blue Swallow a blue typed, personally signed greeting sheet. It read, in part, "this motel is a human institution to serve people and not solely a money-making organization. . . Even though we may not get to know you, we hope that you will be as comfortable and happy as if you were in your own house. . We are all travelers. From 'birth till death' we travel between the eternities." The sentiments were old, quaint corny and perhaps obsolete, but they are part of what made the motel an American institution.
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