|
Nothing
like a 1,000-plus mile road trip to give you some time for reflection.
Heading home to Austin from
Amarillo recently,
by way of Borger, I began
my southward journey from that one-time oil boom town on State Highway
207 to connect with U.S. 287. After hitting the more-traveled U.S.
highway at Claude,
the next county seat town I passed through was Clarendon.
That’s where I saw a local overnight place called the It’ll Do Motel.
The It’ll Do is a small version of the classic 1950s Mom and Pop (which
is to say pre-chain ownership) motel, an arrangement of rooms with
outside-only entry. The sign also notes that “Color Cable TV” is available. |
Bartlesville
Travelers Motel Old Neon
TE photo, 2009 |
| Needing to be
well down the road before bed time, I didn’t have a chance to see
if the It’ll Do lived up to its name when it came to being a suitable
place to spend the night, but the old motel did get me to thinking
about how staying on the road has changed over the years. |
| When I traveled
as a young child, my family tended to overnight in downtown hotels
(which even small towns usually had at least one of). That’s mainly
because my granddad was used to staying in traditional lodging, not
tourist courts. In his salad days tourist courts—or tourist camps—still
had a somewhat unsavory reputation with his generation. (The outlaw
couple Bonnie
Parker and Clyde Barrow, for example, favored tourist courts when
they didn’t opt to sleep in their car.) |
Hotel Campbell
- Downtown Nowata, Oklahoma
TE photo, 2009 |
 |
But as more and
more Texans hit the state’s ever-improving highway system in the 1950s,
motels proliferated and lost most of their shadier image. In fact,
they became so common, and so affordable, that many of the traditional
high-rise hotels started going out of business.
The first generation of motels were home-owned operations with varying
designs as well as distinctive names displayed on often-memorial signage.
Then the chains came along, most notably Holiday Inn, which was the
pioneer in the field.
Well, times are changing once again. While Texas
still has plenty of traditional motels to accommodate travelers, the
landscape along the interstates and major highways is beginning to
look different.
Anyone wanting to stay in the Clarendons of Texas will have to settle
for the locally owned places like the It’ll Do (which actually looked
like a pleasant enough place). But cities in the 20,000 and up population
range are beginning to sport at least one and sometimes three or four
lodgings that are a semi-throwback to old times: Motels that look
like hotels. |
 |
Muskogee Hotel
Old Neon
TE photo, 2009 |
Nomenclature
has changed along with architecture. The word “motel” (motor plus
hotel) is beginning to disappear like the glow from a leaky neon light.
Now overnight spots are being called “inns” or “suites” or simply
by their brand name, as in Holiday Inn Express or Hawthorn Suites.
On my recent trip to the High
Plains, I spent three nights in two of these new-fangled “inn-tels,”
which slowly began entering the market in the 1990s. In recent year,
the pace has accelerated greatly. Both places I stayed offered free
wireless internet (not to mention “cable color TV”) and “free” breakfast,
though the cost of the morning meal is surely calculated into the
room rate. But most of these places don’t cost much more than an “old-fashioned”
motel dating from only a decade or two back.
At these newer places, you don’t have to worry as much about some
bad guy lurking outside your room, since there’s only one way in and
out—past
the front desk. And you’re better protected from the weather. Of course,
just like in the old days, now you have to cart your luggage into
the lobby and up an elevator.
From a cultural history perspective, the downside is that all of these
places pretty much look alike. Unless the wind is blowing in from
the feedlots, it’s possible to wake up in an Amarillo
suite and think for a second you’re in Houston.
Well, then you’d smell the refineries. Better to say Waco.
|
 |
In
a brief note of remembrance, I had gone to Amarillo
for the funeral of my 95-year-old step mom, Nina Ingram Laney. Though
born in Illinois, she came to the Panhandle
with her family during the 1926 oil boom and never left.
Starting in the 1950s, after getting three kids mostly raised, she
taught herself to type and got hired as the Phillips correspondent
for the Borger News-Herald. The newspaper paid her a dime per published
inch of type to record the comings and goings in that now-vanished
oil company town in Hutchinson County. At that pay scale, more names
and news equaling more dimes, she did not miss much that went on in
that small town.
By the time she retired in the mid-1970s, she had risen to city editor
of the Borger paper. She and my late dad, Bill G. Cox, himself a newspaper
man, married in 1977. |
| Books
by Mike Cox - Order Here |
|
|
HOME
