Motel Builders of the Modern West

Abstract

In his “Easy Chair” column in the September 1953 issue of Harper's magazine, Utah native son Bernard DeVoto reported on a newly popular form of lodging growing up all over the West—the motel. To him the word motel was an “awkward word, a coinage out of the folksiness that named the suburb's Kan-di-Korner,” but for the motorist it had conveniences that made it superior to a hotel. DeVoto dubbed the motel “the highway's hotel,” a boon to the motorist who wanted nothing to do with tipping bellboys or crowded lobbies but preferred to carry in his own bags to his spacious air-conditioned room.1 According to DeVoto, motels and their towns sprouted like mushrooms along the highways of the West.DeVoto's commentary is valuable for his accurate description and the signal it sent: motels were here to stay. They were everywhere in the West, along the edges of the highways and lining the town sidewalks. As DeVoto makes clear, motels offered a clean private room, along with the privacy and ease of parking right outside the door. This hybrid form of lodging replaced the old tourist cabins and courts with something new and modern, befitting the postwar era. World War II was over, and the consumer economy was heating up. American families took off in their station wagons looking for the authentic West of cowboys and Indians they saw in movie westerns. Traveling businessmen appreciated the desks, free stationery, and a telephone to the switchboard in every motel room. But the neon lights and the swimming pool were put in to attract the pleasure traveler who chose the motel while driving through what DeVoto dubbed “Motel Town.”The advent of the motel and its impact on Utah and the Mountain West was more complicated than DeVoto suspected. The building of motels at mid-century was spurred by the expansion of the highways and robust consumer spending but could not have taken place without the investment of capital and labor in the family motel business. Three Utah men played prominent roles in the growth of the motel industry in Utah and the Intermountain West: Ray Knell of Cedar City, Bentley Mitchell of Logan, and Ken Orton of Salt Lake City and Phoenix. All three were actively involved in creating business associations that set up the scaffolding for an extensive western hospitality network. The regional lodging associations were a crucial step in the metamorphosis of the lodging industry from small, family-owned motels to the later dominance of the nationwide motel chains like Holiday Inn.These three men helped enable the rapid growth of the motel industry in the modern West by founding affiliate organizations on a state, regional, and national level. For the motel entrepreneurs the organizations created networks of friendship that insulated the owners from the uncertainties of expansion in an era of ascendant Fordism.2 In the postwar era of increasing federal control, notably the expansion of the interstate highway system, the trade associations gave the owners a forum to voice their concerns. Small business associations lobbied for relief from the regulatory apparatus of federal oversight. Those associations would later become lifelines to their very existence as family-owned motels became overshadowed by the expansion of corporate lodging chains.Born in the early twentieth century and reared on farms in Utah, all three of the Utah motel entrepreneurs were embedded in a culture of market capitalism mediated by the Mormon historical experience and values. The Mormon value of cooperation, a hallmark of the faith's approach to capitalism, was reflected in the construction of the associations.3 The Utah motel men drew upon skills gained while serving as missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and through later church leadership experience. Influenced by the Mormon cooperative tradition, they formed networks of business connections to promote tourist lodging. A striking similarity among the Mormon moteliers in their religious practice and family relationships illuminates the cultures of capitalism in the Mormon culture region in Utah and beyond. By seeing the Mormon motel entrepreneurs as embedded in a culture of cooperative and competitive capitalism, we can better understand the forces shaping entrepreneurial tourism in the Intermountain West.4Utah played an important role in luring tourists to the West. Tourists to Salt Lake City on the Union Pacific Railroad in the late nineteenth century sought glimpses of the private life of polygamy, but local boosters turned their attention to the impressive architecture and birds-eye views of new parks and boulevards. Indeed, Salt Lake City was dubbed the crossroads of the West, and the “See America First” movement originated in the state's capital city. The expansion of state and federal highways across the West ushered in the automobile age, and Utah became a proving ground for roadside businesses like the motel.5The history of the distinctively American motel has generally been set within the context of highway travel. Historian Warren Belasco argues that the desire for comfort and convenience powered the tourist court mania and subsequent motel boom. While Belasco's book provides an excellent history of the genesis of tourist courts, it ends in 1945, before the postwar economic recovery gave a boost to motel construction.6 John Jakle and Keith Sculle propose that motels followed the same place-product-packaging marketing strategy as gas stations and roadside restaurants, relying heavily on branding to provide a reliable sameness to their customers.7 This story of a trio of Utah motel men demonstrates the importance of business associations in explaining the sudden rise of motels, the subject of DeVoto's 1953 essay in Harper's Magazine.8The foundation of modern tourism in the West, from highway towns to mountain canyons, began by building places for tourists to stay. The word motel was coined in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1926, but it was not commonly used as a term until the 1950s, at about the same time DeVoto brought it to the attention of his readers.9 The predecessor to the motel was the tourist court, a group of cabins around a filling station with an open court facing the highway. DeVoto did not think highly of the cabins: “A motel may be dingy or uncomfortable but at its worst it is always better than the highway's slum structures, the corn cribs and chicken coops called, offensively to our patriotic tradition, ‘Cabins.’”10 The growth of tourist lodgings in Utah followed the same pattern, of maturing from auto camp to tourist court to motel.11Motels did not “sprout” up, as DeVoto alleged, but many were built on the foundations of tourist courts already on Main Street. Courts changed their painted signs to electric neon and updated the architecture from homey to modern by building a shared roof and raised portico. Newer motels were built on either side of the highways outside town to lure tired motorists before they reached the downtown business district. The tall neon signs beckoned to the highway traveler who scanned the roadside at dusk to find a place to stay. DeVoto complained that his stay in Motel Town was often sleepless because “the whirr, hum, and flick of passenger cars continue all night.” Because of the glow of the colorful neon outlining the windows and eaves, “The tourist closes the venetian blinds, turns out the lights in his room, and may still read the Gideon Bible without eyestrain.”12 His observations help us appreciate the novelty of the both the architecture and the art form of roadside lodging.There was money to be made owning a motel in the West as tourism replaced mining and agriculture as a significant economic contributor in the mid-twentieth century. Motel net profits were reported to range from 36 percent in the late 1930s, to around 25 percent in the 1940s. The profit margins resulted from low expenses and almost no debt with dependence on family labor and capital, and the smaller the motel the larger the rate of profit. In the early 1940s, the Tourist Court Journal, the industry trade magazine, was bullish on the future of motels: “An industry returning 26.80 percent of room sales as net profit . . . has reached a point where it will attract large and substantial investors.”13 Many of those investors were couples who could command the labor of their children, and could rely on extended family for investment capital. These small, independently owned businesses became known as the “mom-and-pop” motels, family businesses that had a low threshold to entry with the promise of a profitable return.The career of Ray Knell of Cedar City illustrates the complexity of building a motel business and developing associations to promote western travel. Born in 1907, Knell grew up on a cattle ranch in Washington County, Utah. In November 1928 he left for a proselyting mission in California, and after his return he married Clara Bentley in 1932. They relocated to Cedar City, and by the time he purchased a small tourist court in June 1944, they had three children.14 The next year he bought adjacent property along College Street to add new wings of concrete block construction with a brick face for a total of thirty-five rooms.15 Knell transformed the conglomeration of apartments into a motel court called the El Rey that met modern standards of motel keepers. By 1950 the El Rey was featured on the front page of Tourist Court Journal, quintessentially modern with its corrugated aluminum sheeting over the marquee entrance. The basements remained apartment-like with kitchenettes, but the upstairs rooms were very much in vogue: fully carpeted, “furnished in modern lime oak furniture,” with venetian blinds at the windows. Bathrooms were “fully tiled with a different color scheme used in each.”16The El Rey was part of a postwar business boom in Cedar City aimed at the influx of automobile tourists. Four other motels in town were expanding to meet demand, including one owned by Ray's brother, Rulon Knell, at First South and Main. The Iron County Record proclaimed in May 1946, “When these centers are completed Cedar City will be able to boast of the finest tourist accommodations in this part of the state, with a sufficient number to provide excellent accommodations for a tremendous influx of tourists.”17 Local newspapers pumped up the coverage of new motels and restaurants to the tourists driving the highways to see the national parks.Cedar City was the gateway to Bryce Canyon and Zion National parks and the Grand Canyon. In the early twentieth century, tourists took the train to the town depot, where the Utah Parks Company transported them by bus to the remote parks.18 With the advent of automobile touring, the number of rail passengers declined, posing a threat to the town's tourist economy. The El Rey staff worked hard to fill the rooms yearlong, not just during the summer rush. To appeal to “the traveling man” they installed telephones in each unit, and they held and forwarded mail for their visitors.19 Aspiring to make money from food service, Knell engaged the services of Errol Woodbury and Anthony Atkins, owners of the Big Hand Café in St. George, to run his “ultra-modern café” on the south side of the motel lot.20 The Cedar City Chamber of Commerce published a handsome booklet touting the town as the “Gateway to the Utah National Parks”; a display of hotels and tourist courts assured the prospective tourist of comfortable accommodations, including El Rey.El Rey was an early member of the Best Western referral organization. The published history of Best Western features M. K. Guertin as the founder, with his daughter and descendants in prime of place. In truth, Best Western was not founded just by Guertin, but by a group of men including Raymond Knell and John K. (Ken) Orton, both from Utah. The motel men hatched the plan for Best Western at a convention of the United Motor Courts held in Las Vegas in 1946 or 1947. They were concerned that United Motor Courts (with 500 members in thirty-two states) was too relaxed in its standards and that “the benefits it offered members were insufficient.”21 So the group of entrepreneurs founded the rival Best Western and established standards of cleanliness and comfort in an era of improving amenities in the motel business.Best Western was a boon to motel owners who wanted to refer guests to a motel of similar quality. A guest at any Best Western motel could ask the management to make a reservation at any affiliated motel for future nights. This was a valuable tool in an era when reservations were made by mail. The first guide advertised: “Why take the chance of getting poor accommodations? Let the manager of any best western motel make a reservation for your next night's stop, and be assured of the best. Your room will be held for you, regardless of the time you arrive. Ask the manager for details.”22Best Western certainly benefited tourists, but it was also critical in creating a network of independently owned motels behind a trusted brand. Knell was in on the ground floor of the rapidly expanding group. As one might expect of a founding member, Knell traveled along Highway 30 as far as Chicago to persuade owners to join the Best Western referral organization. He inspected the properties of other members in the same region to make sure they were meeting Best Western standards.23 He also promoted state and regional lodging associations. By 1950 Knell was the director and then the president of the Utah Motor Court Association.24 He was the longtime president of the Utah Motel Owners Association and organized a Highway 91 Association to promote tourism from Nephi to St. George.25Associational activity offered Ray and Clara Knell the chance to travel widely. As a member of the national board of governors of the American Motor Hotel Association, he and his wife attended conventions in Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Philadelphia.26 In 1964 the couple took a cross-county drive to Chicago, where he received the award of Royal Motelier at the National Convention of the AMHA, to a Rotary convention in Toronto, and to the New York World's Fair.27As his motel business expanded, Ray became a well-known community leader in Cedar City. He volunteered to chair the county chapter of the 1953 March of Dimes, and he urged wide distribution of the polio vaccine.28 Knell was also a member of the Lions Club and the Chamber of Commerce. As a chamber member he selected the local architect L. Robert Gardner to design large signs advertising the town, one at the south and the other at the north entry. He brought business to Cedar City, including state conventions of motel owners and the Utah Lions Club.29 He also served his church as a leader in local Mormon congregation from 1956 until 1961, proof of his devotion to his faith and a sign of his natural leadership abilities.30Knell was an early entrepreneur in the motel industry, who kept his base in Cedar City yet played an important role in launching Best Western and promoting state tourism efforts. The support of his wife and children allowed him to expand and modernize the business and to better the fortunes of his community. He was content to operate one motel and stay in a highway town, but his work to found and serve in trade associations had an impact on the success of motels not only in the state, but in the western region.Like Ray Knell, Utah motel man Edgar Bentley Mitchell remained in his local Cache Valley to build his future. Born in 1911, Mitchell served a Latter-day Saint mission to Tahiti from 1930–1934, where he gained a facility in the Tahitian language and became proficient enough to translate church scripture.31 Upon his return he attended Utah State Agricultural College; there he met Ruth Maughan. They married in 1936, and he worked on the family dry farm in Hansel Valley. In 1944, he was called back to Tahiti to serve as president of the mission. Ruth, who had lived in New Zealand as a child, joined him with their three small children in early 1945.32 Mitchell directed the construction of the first substantial Latter-day Saint meetinghouse and a new residence for the mission president in Papeete. Church dignitaries traveled from Salt Lake City for the dedication in January 1950, and the event was attended by three thousand Tahitians, some from as far as 400 miles away.33 While in Tahiti, Mitchell gained managerial skills and public relations savvy, in addition to his missionary work there.The stint as mission president abroad emboldened Mitchell to undertake grander schemes than to stay on the family farm. Upon his return to Cache Valley in 1949, Mitchell left ranching to build a career as a motel owner. In 1950 he opened the twenty-three-unit red brick Mitchell Motel on Highway 89 near the college campus. The motel's low profile fit the landscape and allowed guests to drive cars up to the doors of their rooms. Later a second story was added which featured ornamental white wrought iron balconies. A tall neon sign with “Mitchell” stood at the roadway, with m-o-t-e-l spelled out in a sign atop the office wing. A fine combination of traditional materials and modern design, the Mitchell Motel was one of two leading motels in town, along with the Baugh Motel.34Mitchell was active in many professional associations, and was elected an officer of the Utah Motel Association, Best Western, and the American Motor Hotel Association (AMHA).35 In his brief motel career, Mitchell was more than a regional big wheel. He served as chair of the Board of Governors of the American Motor Hotel Association out of Kansas City, Missouri. In this role he sought feedback from state governors on industry issues such as the newly approved federal highways and the advisability of affiliating with credit card companies. He heard from owners of motor courts and motels from Reno, Nevada, to Alexandria, Virginia.He was instrumental in having the convention of the AMHA, which had nearly five thousand members, held at the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City in September 1956.36 The Fourteenth Annual AMHA Convention featured panels such “Protecting Motels in Highway Development,” and “How to Hold Your Guest without a Rope.” Tinged by the distinctively Mormon local culture, the opening day luncheon featured a visit to the Salt Lake Tabernacle for its Thursday organ recital and a Grey Line Bus tour of the city. Saturday evening the convention highlight was a Hawaiian luau with entertainment by the Hawaiian Club of Brigham Young University.37 By the time they left Salt Lake City, the conventioneers would have had a thorough exposure to not only Mormon culture in Utah, but also Pacific Islander dances, as performed by BYU students.Mitchell was a founding member of the 89’ers International Highway Association, a group of hospitality professionals along Route 89 from Mexico to Canada.38 The 89’ers was organized at the Chamber of Commerce in Flagstaff, Arizona, in September 1955 by a group of hospitality professionals, including owners of motels, cafés, and car dealerships. The center of the 89’ers membership (about 450 people) was Arizona, with about half of the 245 members, and forty-five members in Utah, twenty-nine in Idaho, and thirty-six in Mexico. A month after organizing, the board of directors met at the Hotel Newhouse in Salt Lake City, a hint that many of the directors might have been Utah Mormons.39The founding meeting in September 1955 generated ideas for publicity, including the making of a record of two songs, “Treasure Trail” and “Beyond the Border.” The plan was for the records to be played in juke boxes and on radio stations, netting the association royalties. Reportedly the record, “I Get my Kicks on 66” had increased the volume of traffic on Highway 66 by 670 percent. In the first few years of the association, the sky was the limit on plans to expand the 89’ers. They forged ahead with the recordings, sent on consignment to Texas, and waited.40The 89’ers board of directors met annually in October, rotating its location from Kanab, Utah, in 1956 to Jackson, Wyoming, in 1957. Those assembled confronted the dispiriting fact that members were letting their dues lapse and local 89’ers clubs were not attracting sufficient new members.41 Mitchell chaired the brochure committee, the hoped-for remedy to the declining membership. Mitchell proposed “a 10 point, two year schedule of continuous promotional activity built around the brochures,” from one end of Highway 89 to the other. He sent out letters to members, soliciting their membership renewal.42Members of 89’ers gathered at the third annual meeting in Jackson, Wyoming, where they took excursions through the Tetons, enjoyed a chuck wagon buffet supper, and spent a day in business meetings capped off by a banquet of prime rib and “Grand international ball,” all for “just ten bucks.”43 While the businessmen and their wives socialized, the officers kept up the drumbeat of soliciting advertisements for the brochure and reminding members to send in their dues. An infusion of capital would be needed to finance the printing of 50,000 full color brochures, estimated by Paragon Press to be close to four thousand dollars.44 But there were signs of trouble: the postponement of a motor cavalcade of 89’ers to Alberta in June and the cancellation of plans for a movie promoting Highway 89.45 Exactly when the 89’ers folded is unclear, but it appears that the organization collapsed in 1958 or 1959, a victim of declining membership and a nationwide recession.The death of Bentley Mitchell may have played a part in the failure of the 89’ers. An experienced pilot, he was returning from picking up a new Cessna 157 in Wichita for a local aviation firm when his plane crashed in bad weather on December 18, 1959, with fatal results.46 His widow, Ruth, was left to rear their six children and manage the motel.Mrs. E. Bentley Mitchell, as she was known, sustained the success of the Mitchell Motel. Due to its location, the motel won a large share of business from Utah State University. The need to accommodate academic visitors challenged the racial discrimination practices of small town Utah. In 1963 Professor George E. Bohart had reserved rooms at the rival Baugh Motel for the expected guests for an apiculture conference, only to discover a few days before their arrival that the motel refused to rent rooms to African Americans. Indeed, according to Bohart, Mr. Baugh remarked that “negroes were personally repulsive to him.” Disgusted by the motel owner's bigotry, Bohart cancelled the reservation at the Baugh Motel and arranged for the group to stay at the competing Mitchell Motel, where they did accept guests of color but only if sponsored by the university.47 Ruth Mitchell's years of missionary work in the Pacific Islands might have made her more welcoming to persons of color; whatever the case, her actions in this incident provide further proof that she was a shrewd businessperson.As a motelier, Mitchell promoted tourism in the state. She headed a local committee to welcome a group of thirty-four French tourists on a “Visit USA” tour in 1962. She arranged visits with the mayor and the university president, and the tourists were treated to a picnic, square dance, and marshmallow roast. Their efforts won the praise of Jim Cannon, director of the Utah Tourist and Publicity Council, who said of the Cache Valley locals: “They put into excellent use that good old Utah hospitality we're always hearing about.”48 The business career of Ruth Mitchell indicates the importance of the men's wives to the success of Utah's motel builders.Bentley Mitchell and his wife, Ruth, used the Mitchell Motel in Logan as the base for promoting motel growth through the West. In his activity as an officer in 89’ers and the AMHA, Mitchell was embedded in national lodging networks that allowed him to influence national trends in motel keeping. Indeed, his influence seems far out of proportion to his actual stake in the industry, but his ability to work within organizations and promote their goals enabled him to wield outsize power within the industry. Bentley's untimely death ended a promising career, but Ruth carried on his legacy.Before Knell and Mitchell built their motels, Utah native John K. “Ken” Orton inauspiciously launched his career in hospitality. Born in 1906 in Sandy, Utah, his interest in travel began when he served a Latter-day Saint mission in Tahiti. Orton was one of ten missionaries in all of Tahiti charged with bolstering the faith of the “Saints” and finding more converts. The elders translated gospel tracts and scripture into the native language and sold copies of the mission newspaper throughout the islands. He was released in November 1927 after nearly three years of service.49 His mission activities gave him valuable experiences in publishing and exposed him to global tourism.After Orton's return home, he married Frankie Graves, and they had two sons, Ken Jr. and Russell. He attended a local business college, and in 1930 he joined the staff of the Improvement Era, the major magazine of the LDS church. Within several years he became its manager.50 He got into motels as a sideline. Frankie later recalled, “My husband, by working hard at extra jobs such as keeping books at night, selling old cars, etc., had saved enough money to buy a small café on Main Street. He operated it for a short time, then sold it and bought two homes which he later sold to purchase the property on South State Street.”51 By the late 1930s he operated two small motels on South State Street in Salt Lake City, the thirteen-room Ken-Ray and the seventeen-room Travelers Motor Lodge. The Ken-Ray was a joint venture with Ray Sudbury, who was married to his wife's cousin.52 Family capital was vital to getting in on the ground floor of owning a motel.In 1942, Orton founded Bookcraft Publishing Company, upon the advice of church president Heber J. Grant, who wanted to see a competitor to Deseret Book owned by the prominent Cannon family. The company's first publication, Gospel Standards, was a collection of Grant's conference talks. The second book, The Gospel Kingdom, a collection of talks by early church president John Taylor, became a staple of the church's curriculum for men. Bookcraft found success in selling its books and magazines to the Mormon reading audience. Orton's son later recalled, “‘It was a real family business in those days. . . . Dad made the publishing decisions, mother processed the orders and my brother and I helped with the packing and mailing after school.’”53 Orton appears to have been firmly embedded in the center of Mormon business and culture, but he had set his sights on a future as a motelier.During World War II, Orton was among those individuals from seventeen states who organized the American Motor Hotel Association in Denver in 1943. He was selected as President of AMHA with the goal of lobbying more effectively in Washington, DC to fight rent control regulations that did not allow motel owners to raise rates.54 As president he stated that in addition to promoting the “motor-hotel industry,” the AMHA was also seeking “a solution to some unfair, and unworkable regulations of the rent control program.” Regulation 9A stipulated that a guest who had stayed longer than sixty days had to be offered a monthly rate, a regulation that did not apply to hotels. In a news article in the Tourist Court Journal, Orton explained they needed members to supply funds to open an office in Washington, DC to lobby for their needs. Orton was ultimately unsuccessful in that fight, and motels remained limited in profits because of the regulation that they had to provide cheap housing for the many returning soldiers, and were prevented from raising their rates. It was not until 1947 that the regulations were lifted; still the importance of AMHA as a voice for motel owners was undeniable.55Orton's travel for the AMHA broadened his perspective. The story is told that during the war Ken went to Tucson to watch his nephew play in a football game for the University of Utah. It might have been the climate, but more likely he was attracted to Arizona by the business possibilities emerging in Phoenix.56 By 1946 he had sold his Utah motels for a profit, resigned from the Improvement Era, and found a partner to run Bookcraft, Marvin W. Wallin. The family moved to Phoenix, where Ken bought the forty-six-room El Rancho Hotel at 1300 West Van Buren Street and enlarged it to seventy units.57 His profits from Bookcraft were channeled into his hospitality business at a propitious moment, but he needed more capital for expansion.58Orton found a business partner, Al Stovall, a transplanted Midwesterner who owned manganese mines. Stovall was originally from a farm in Kansas, a descendant of Scots Irish migrants. He took banjo lessons and formed a traveling band that performed throughout the Midwest at dance halls and theaters. He married, bought a small oil field in eastern Kansas, and invested the profits in his first motel, The Planets, in Ellinwood, Kansas. It was while touring Arizona with his band in 1939 that Stovall shrewdly realized that the world war would require steel. He sold The Planets and put the proceeds into manganese mines in Arizona, expanding to over thirty manganese mines in the West. His businesses supplied a major part of the nation's mineral supply during World War II, and he reportedly became known as America's “Mr. Manganese.”59Millionaire Stovall and motelier Orton were well-matched partners in supplying rooms for the tourists who came to Arizona to enjoy the winter sun. Their motel empire expanded rapidly: Mission Motel on East Van Buren (1946), Royal Palms Inn on Camelback Road (1947), and El Rancho motels in Yuma, Arizona, and Needles, California. But it appears they did not have enough capital to expand a