Made In America - Bill Bryson [114]
As motorists required frequent infusions of food, so they also needed a place to sleep from time to time. Throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s cabin camps or tourist courts – free-standing wooden huts, usually ranged in a semicircle and often given affectionately illiterate names like U Like Um Cabins, Kozy Kourt and Para Dice39 – began to appear on the landscape until by 1925 there were some two thousand of them, generally charging $2 to $3 a night, a price with which downtown hotels couldn’t compete. Variations on cabin camp and tourist court began to appear – tourist camps, motor courts, even at least one autel – but the first place to style itself a motel was the Milestone Motel, on Route 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, which opened its doors on 12 December 1925. (It is still in business, though operating now as the Motel Inn.) The term itself first appeared a few months earlier in Hotel Monthly magazine, in the same article in which motor hotel made its debut.40 By the 1940s, motel had largely driven out the older court and camp almost everywhere.
Very early on, it became apparent that not every customer was coming for a good rest. The FBI’s ever-vigilant J. Edgar Hoover gravely announced that America’s motels were ‘assignation camps’ and ‘hotbeds of crime’.41 That may have been overstating matters, but if they weren’t hotbeds, they certainly had them. A rather sneaky study by Southern Methodist University sociology students of the comings and goings at Dallas motels over one weekend in 1935 found that of the two thousand customers who used the city’s thirty-eight establishments most were registered under fictitious names and at least three-quarters were deemed to be having illicit sex. (What, one wonders, was the remaining one-quarter up to, and how did the researchers determine that it wasn’t sex?) Terrific money was to be made in the ‘hot bed’ or ‘Mr and Mrs Jones’ trade, as it came to be known. One establishment was noted to have rented out a particular room no fewer than sixteen times in twenty-four hours, or once every ninety minutes (clearly they don’t waste time in Dallas).
By 1948 America had 26,000 motels. Unfortunately, a good many of them were a shade sleazy. Kemmons Wilson, a wealthy Tennessee businessman, had been disappointed by the standards of motels he had encountered during a family vacation and decided to do something about it. In 1952 he opened a bright, clean, respectable establishment on Summer Avenue in Memphis, charging $4 for singles, $6 for doubles. Carefully avoiding the seedy connotations inherent in motel, he called it a Holiday Inn. Before long, Holiday Inns were going up at the rate of one every two and a half days. In 1954 Howard Johnson got in on the act, and soon big hotel chains like Hilton and Sheraton were pushing their way into the market.
But it was also a golden age for individually owned establishments – ‘ma-and-pa motels’ as they were known in the trade. The 1950s saw a wave of good-quality, privately owned motels, often L-shaped and generally built in the sleek style known as moderne. Increasingly they offered swimming pools, air-conditioning, ice machines, king-size beds with soothing coin-operated Vibro-Matic massagers, and other luxuries that made them considerably nicer than most of their patrons’ own homes. Often they were given names that were at least as soothing as the massagers: Sleepy Hollow, Restwell Motel, Dreamland Inn, Memory Lane Motel.
In 1925, at about the same time