Roadside Rest

Motorists speeding east on U.S. Highway 80 near Fort Worth last week slowed down and gawked at a cluster of ranch-like buildings on the right-hand side of the road. The buildings looked like a motel; but no one had ever seen a motel like Western Hills. When it opens next week, it will offer road-worn motorists 200 air-conditioned rooms and super-suites (many with balconies and wood-burning fireplaces) and a kidney-shaped swimming pool surrounded by bamboo-trimmed cabanas. Guests will be able to get free ice cubes from refrigerators scattered around the motel, have meals delivered to their rooms in motor-driven carts.

The lobby, paneled in glass and wood, has a rug with little colored dots woven in. Explained the proprietor: "We've got built-in food and ink spots and cigarette burns; now we don't have to worry." In the dining room, an enormous oak pedestal will be loaded with raw steaks so that each guest can select his own and brand it with a hot iron--"R" for rare, "M" for medium, "W" for well done.

Western Hills was conceived by Fort Worth Manufacturer Hank Green, a onetime hotelman, who persuaded his brother and three friends to put up $400,000. By the time they got through they had run up the cost to $2,000,000. Despite the big overhead, Green wants to keep prices modest ($4 for a single room, $25 for a "penthouse suite"), thinks he can gross $560,000 a year at full capacity.

"Pile of Bricks." Western Hills is a dazzling example of the vast change which has taken place in the hotel business. Although few big city hotels have been built in the U.S. in the last eleven years, motels and motor courts have mushroomed from 13,521 in 1939 to more than 30,000 in 1950. Said the American Automobile Association: "Everybody who has a pile of bricks and a vacant lot puts up a motel." Often the business consists only of a man & wife who have invested their savings in a few cabins, built up a comfortable living within a few years. The average income of a U.S. motel operator last year was $14,862; all motels grossed $250,000,000, a whopping 650% increase in eleven years.

The motor court business was officially launched in 1913, according to the Tourist Court Journal, when a Douglas, Ariz, operator prettied up six tiny mining cottages, rented them out to passing tourists. Thus the hotel business reached the end of a full-circle swing. In Revolutionary days, the inns dotted the highway as way stations for stagecoach travelers. When railroads were built, the inns moved into the cities. When the U.S. took to the road in automobiles, "tourist homes" and motels opened up in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and other vacation states, gradually spread to all the other states.

In a motel, a traveler got comfortable lodging without battling city traffic, a parking place for his car and dodged the tip-hungry parade of hotel doormen and bellboys. As Miami's Motel Keeper David Lingo put it: "In Florida we have 29 varieties of palms--including the outstretched."

Home of Crime. By 1939, the U.S. motel business had a $37-million-a-year gross and a rough reputation. During the 30s, such gangsters as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd leased entire motels, used them as hideouts; many a motor-court operator reckoned the difference between profit & loss in the "two-hour-tourist" or "hot-pillow" trade. FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover blasted the entire industry: "The tourist camp is today a new home of crime in America, a new home of disease, bribery, corruption, crookedness, rape, white slavery, thievery and murder."

But the respectable motor-court operators banded together in such organizations as the United Motor Courts and the American Motor Hotel Association, quickly cleaned up the trade. Now, the good motels bar local Romeos, offer special features to attract not only overnight travelers, but vacationing families who prefer informal, inexpensive living to dressing up in a hotel. Max Mosko's Hi-Way Motel in Denver has a fenced-in playground for children and a day nursery with a free doll-lending service. Many Florida motels greet customers with a free glass of orange juice; in Dallas, the Town House gives guests a taste of Texas hospitality by serving them breakfast in bed. In California's desert areas, air-conditioning is routine equipment in the best motels.

Motels have detoured thousands of customers from downtown hotels, have taught the hotels some sharp lessons in good service. They have also taught them how to get business back. Many hotels are now building their own strings of "highway inns" and "motor inns" along the open road.

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