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By Root 377 0

for $1.25 a night. The concept proved nearly as popular as the automobile itself, and soon motels of all shapes and sizes were springing up along roadsides from coast to coast. Even the Depression couldn’t stem the tide. In 1933, according to The Architectural Record, the construction of motels was “the single growing and highly active division of the building industry.” By 1940 there were twenty thousand motels in the United States. Nearly all were family-owned, with spectacular neon signs and quirky names like the Linger Longer, the It’ll Do, the Close-Inn, and the Aut-O-Tel. To attract guests, some incorporated kitschy elements of popular culture into their design, such as giant replicas of teepees or spaceships. No two motels were exactly alike.

It wasn’t just weary travelers who frequented motels. Their remoteness and the relative anonymity they afforded made them perfect for illicit assignations. Bonnie and Clyde hid out in motels. So did John Dillinger. In 1940, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover denounced motels as “camps of crime … a new home of disease, bribery, corruption, crookedness, rape, white slavery, thievery, and murder.” But the negative publicity didn’t hurt business. Motels continued to proliferate after World War II. By 1960 there were sixty thousand. But by then the era of the independent, family-owned motel was already fading.

In the summer of 1951, a Memphis businessman named Kemmons Wilson, his wife, and their five children took a family vacation to Washington. Along the way they stayed in motels, most of which Wilson found grossly inadequate—or just plain gross. Many were dirty. None had air-conditioning. And all imposed a surcharge of two dollars per child, a practice that, for obvious reasons, Wilson resented. “My six-dollar room became a sixteen-dollar room,” he remembered. “I told my wife that wasn’t fair. I didn’t take many vacations, but as I took this one, I realized how many families there were taking vacations and how they needed a nice place they could stay.” The motel business, Wilson determined, was “the greatest untouched industry in America.”

As soon as he got back to Memphis, Wilson hired an architect to design a new kind of motel. Every room would have air-conditioning, a television set, and a telephone. There would be a swimming pool, vending machines, and free ice. And children under twelve could stay in their parents’ room for free.

Wilson didn’t know what to call his new motel, so his architect suggested the name of a popular Bing Crosby movie: Holiday Inn. (Wilson would eventually be required to pay royalties to Irving Berlin, the composer of the movie’s title song.)

In 1952, the year after Kemmons Wilson’s disappointing family vacation, the first Holiday Inn opened along a busy stretch of Highway 70 outside Memphis. The gaudy, fifty-three-foot green and yellow sign out front was designed by Wilson himself.

Wilson’s goal was to build four hundred Holiday Inns scattered across the country, all exactly alike, none more than a day’s drive from another. Within twenty years there were more than one thousand. Clustered around them were countless other motel chains, not to mention fast-food restaurants, all piggybacking on Wilson’s phenomenal success.

In 1972 Kemmons Wilson was on the cover of Time magazine. “Wilson,” said Time, “has transformed the motel from the old wayside fleabag into the most popular home away from home.”

And so it came to pass that idiosyncratic, independently owned motels were replaced by sterile corporate cookie cutters where, in Kemmons Wilson’s opinion, the best surprise is no surprise. In 1962 less than 2 percent of all motels were affiliated with a national chain. Today more than 70 percent are.

The Parkview, the motel where the Trumans stayed in Decatur, is still around. Only now it’s a prison. The Illinois Department of Corrections bought the motel in the late 1970s and converted it into a correctional facility for work-release inmates. Officially known as the Decatur Adult Transition Center, or ATC, it houses more than a hundred convicted felons,