LET'S GO FIRST CLASS across America: Part 7

I think it's pretty obvious we've now moved away from first class travel. This is not The Broadmoor.

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Welcome to the Town House Motor Lodge, circa late 1950s. This is a place I stayed as a child. I don't know which year, but this is the very first post card I ever saved. Strangely, of all the times I took post cards from motel desks I actually now have very few. I don't know what happened to them. It's possible that anything from the 1950s got thrown away when my family moved to Hawaii or simply, along with a lot of other stuff, never came out of storage.

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Doing a quick search of the Town House Motor Lodge, I find that it still exists at the same address. Alas, it no longer has the charm it once had. It is drab looking with a hideous sign. The old sign was wonderful with the flashing arrow pointing to what awaited you. Times have been hard for the Town House.

Google Street View

You can see from the post card that at the time a selling point was a telephone and tv in every room. That was a big selling point back then because you still ran into a lot of places without tv. Telephones were getting pretty common. Nice old black heavy dial phones with a rumpled yellow pages on a shelf or in a drawer.

These days, according to the online Yellow Pages, the Town House offers:

Free Internet

Cable Television

Refrigerators

Weekly Rates

Aging takes a toll on all of us and if you don't change you don't survive.

Tomorrow: another oldie

LET'S GO FIRST CLASS across America: Part 6

I think we need to redefine what's first class.

We've been touring around looking at large hotels, all claiming to be first class locations. Now, if you're a hotel kind of person that's great. If you need someone to carry your luggage, order room service at all hours, and maybe have a view of the big city, a hotel is what you're looking for.

Me...not so much. Though hotels can be interesting, I'm just not the sort of person who gets jazzed about them. I like the open road, out-of-the-way motels, and campgrounds. The fewer people the better.

Raise your hand if you ever stayed at a motor court. Not a motel, a motor court. If you have to ask the difference you haven't stayed in one. These days most motor courts are gone. If they're still standing they've been turned into run-down apartments or left to gather amongst the native weeds. It's all pretty sad, because I have fond memories of motor courts as a kid. I loved the fact that it was a little bungalow, sometimes attached to other bungalows by an open front garage. My favorites were the detached bungalows, especially those that looked like log cabins.

As cars got larger the little garages were too small to accommodate what was coming out of Detroit. These days my little car would fit fine and dandy into one of those snug garages.

I recently found this brochure at an estate sale. I've not been able to find anything about Best Camps other than that this brochure is in some archives at UCLA. The brochure was valid until the end of 1933.

Best Camps was an organization extolling the virtues of motor courts and lodges up and down along the Pacific Coast from Canada to Mexico. They provided various listings along various highways; all the courts were individually owned, no chains. There are actually 7 pages of listings.

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Click here to see a wonderful article in the November 1936 Modern Mechanix about motor courts.

Click here to see Wikipedia's entry about motels.

And stop in at Vintage Roadside to see some wonderful articles about motor courts and motels, diners and drive-ins, and roadside attractions; all the things that made cross country travel in the US so wonderful.

Or try Motel Memories or visit Motel Americana.

Give me a two lane road and plenty of time!

Tomorrow: Who knows? We're on the open road and we stop when we stop.

Mom and Pop MOTOR COURTS

These vintage post cards most likely date from the mid-1940s to mid-50s. Back when you could stay at simple little Motor Courts. Remember those places with the little garages attached to each room? Or even separate little cottages? Usually there was a lawn somewhere around the office where you could go and sit on a warm summer night. And those metal chairs that sort of bounced with the seashell inspired back, various colors, but usually white metal for the curved base. Hot as all-get-out midday. Long before swimming pools were included with your stay.

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Most of these places are gone or so run down that communities want to condemn them. Sometimes I see them in nearly abandoned towns with weeds growing everywhere. Ghost motels. I'm glad I've got memories of when you got a bed and a bathroom, a Gideon Bible, maybe some stationary and a post card. That was it. No air conditioning. You hoped the heat worked in the winter.

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And oh my the signs. The lovely neon signs. Surprisingly I have not found any books, old or new, about the old signs. It's a shame because now so many of them are gone or in disrepair that it would be difficult to to even put together a book.

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Can neon possibly look better than on a rainy night when the flashing reflects off a wet highway, beckoning you to stop. My favorite signs were of the Mexican fellow sleeping next to a cactus with the neon "Z...Z...Z..." floating above him. And every town seemed to have a Flamingo Motel. Now it's all corporate and boring. I know, I'm old, but I miss the creativity that existed. It's all just too tiresome now.

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One more ephemera book I highly recommend is See the USA: The Art of the American Travel Brochure by John Margolies and Eric Baker.

A trip back in time to the romance of travel. Another book that I can sit and look at over and over again and always find something new each time. Good and bad design, beautiful and mediocre illustrations. You'll find all of them interesting if you love ephemera. And who knows, you might just decide to start a collection of your own.

The following pages from the book See the USA are all copyrighted ©2000 John Margolies.