Free Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip by Matthew Algeo Page B

Decatur, Illinois, June 19, 1953. Harry rejected the suggestion that he be photographed reclined in an easy chair with Bess placing a pillow under his head.
     
    Harry signed a few autographs in the parking lot and sent a note to a child who was ill at the motel. He agreed to be photographed for the papers, as long as the pictures wouldn’t appear until the next day—after he and Bess had left town. One photographer suggested the Trumans pose in their room, with Bess placing a pillow under Harry’s head while he reclined in an easy chair. Harry vetoed that idea, offering to be photographed taking luggage out of the trunk of his Chrysler instead. Then he asked everybody to back off. He and Bess were exhausted from the long drive in the heat, he explained. They had traveled 350 miles in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees. Now they were going to lie down and take a nap.
    By the 1920s it was possible for the first time to drive an automobile long distances over paved roads. But if you did, you had to be prepared to rough it. Hotels were concentrated in city centers, usually around train terminals. Outside urban areas just about the only accommodations available to travelers were squalid campgrounds or flophouses. Then, in 1925, an architect named Arthur Heinman opened what he called a “mo-tel”—a motor hotel—along Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Heinman’s motel was the first in the world. It consisted of a series of two-room bungalows with attached garages that rented 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