I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page B

cluster of gas stations, fast-food outlets, and other, more modern motor inns.
    Once, however, it was a famous stopping place on the coastal highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A Pasadena architect named Arthur Heineman gave it its exuberant style, but his most inspired legacy lies in the name he chose for it. Playing around with the words
motor
and
hotel,
he dubbed it a
motel,
hyphenating the word to emphasize its novelty.
    America already had lots of motels by then (the very first apears to have been Askins’ Cottage Camp built in 1901 in Douglas, Arizona), but they were all called something else—
auto court, cottage court, hotel court, tour-o-tel, auto hotel, bungalow court, cabin court, tourist camp, tourist court, trav-o-tel.
For a long time it looked like
tourist court
would become the standard designation for an overnight stopping place. It wasn’t until about 1950 that
motel
achieved generic status.
    I know all this because I have just been reading a book on the history of the motel in America called
The Motel in America.
Written by three academics, it is a ponderously heavy piece of work, full of sentences like “The needs of both consumers and purveyors of lodging strongly influenced the development of organized systems of distribution,” but I bought it and devoured it anyway because I love everything about motels.
    I can’t help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open. It is just one of those things—airline food is another—that I get excited about and should know better.
    The golden age of motels was also, as it happens, the golden age of me—the 1950s—and I suppose that’s what accounts for my fascination. For anyone who didn’t travel around America by car in the 1950s, it is almost impossible now to imagine how thrilling they were. For one thing, the national chains like Holiday Inn and Ramada barely existed then. As late as 1962, 98 percent of motels were individually owned, so each one had its own character.
    Essentially they were of two types. The first type was the good ones. These nearly always had a welcoming, cottagey air. Typically, they were built around a generous lawn with shady trees and a flower bed decorated with a wagon wheel painted white. (The owners, for some reason, generally liked to paint all their rocks white, too, and array them along the edge of the drive.) Often they had a swimming pool or swings. Sometimes they had a gift shop or coffee shop, too.
    Indoors they offered measures of comfort and elegance that would have the whole family cooing—thick carpet, purring air conditioner, a big TV, nightstand with a telephone and a built-in radio, gleaming bathroom, sometimes a dressing area, Vibro-matic beds, which gave you a massage for a quarter.
    The second kind of motels consisted of the appalling ones. We always stayed at these. My father, who was one of history’s great cheapskates, was of the view that there was no point in spending money on... well, on anything really, and certainly not on anything that you were mostly going to be asleep in.
    In consequence, we generally camped in motel rooms where the beds sagged as if they had last been occupied by a horse and the cooling system was an open window and where you could generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek, the sound of splintering furniture, and a female voice pleading, “Put the gun down, Vinnie. I’ll do anything you say.” I don’t wish to suggest that these experiences left me scarred and irrationally embittered, but I can clearly remember watching Janet Leigh being hacked up in the Bates Motel in
Psycho
and thinking, “At least she got a shower curtain.”
    All of this, even at its worst, gave highway travel a kind of exhilarating unpredictability. You never knew what quality of comfort you would find at the end of the day, what sort of small pleasures might be offered. It gave road trips a piquancy that the