Recalling Tourist Homes

 

When I was young, my parents, probably in an effort to instill some geographic and historical wisdom (my brother Jerry adds 'around a vivid, touchable place') into their children, took us all on an annual road trip for our vacation.  Before I was in high school, I had been to Cape Cod, the upper Hudson Valley (Saratoga, Lake Placid, Saranac Lake, Lake George, Fort Ticonderoga) and central New York (Corning Glass Works), Niagara Falls, Montreal and Quebec for the Shrine Church of Ste-Anne de Beaupré, Detroit to watch Ford automobiles being constructed on an assembly line, and Colonial Williamsburg.  My Aunt Alice once remarked that I had been to more places in a half-dozen years than she had been in her entire life.

To fund these trips, my father would take a loan from a bank or Beneficial Finance or Household Finance or something similar.  The loan would be for what we now think of as 'a small amount', $500 or $600, but which was then quite a pile of loot.  (Recall that gasoline in those days was 29 cents per gallon and nobody cared that cars only got 12 miles per gallon.  That's only 4½ cents per mile.)  The loan was methodically repaid over the course of the next year so that those lenders were happy to see Dad when he needed his next vacation loan.

Of course traveling as a family meant we needed to be frugal about how that money was spent, and that generally meant our overnight lodgings would be in 'tourist homes'.  Such things are rare-to-nonexistent these days, probably because our over-regulated society makes them administratively infeasible.  A tourist home is exactly what the name implies:  someone with a large house rents rooms to travelers for short-term stays, typically a single night but occasionally for longer stays.  The price was always 'peanuts' — a few dollars at most — for which you got a clean, comfortable bed and a place to wash up before hitting the road again in the morning.  Breakfast was rarely, if ever, included, but there was always a diner just down the road.  While we travelers were barreling toward our next stop, some tourist home owner was doing laundry, making beds, spiffing up the bathrooms, and restocking them with fresh towels and cute little bars of soap, getting everything ready for the next arrivals.  I don't think we ever made reservations.  For one thing, there wasn't any such thing as a national directory of tourist homes.  We just rolled into town and looked for signs saying "Tourist Home — Vacancy", or we asked the waitress at the local restaurant.  My brother, Jerry, adds parenthetically that the more modern tourist homes had their 'vacancy' sign in neon.

Before there were Holiday Inns, before there were Motel 6s, there were only Howard Johnsons'... and tourist homes.

I do recall that the omnipresent AAA Trip-tik was our guide to getting wherever we were headed, and in those days the ring-bound custom-made planner also had pages for keeping track of trip expenses: gas, food, lodging, and entertainment.  My mother kept meticulous records of everything in that regard.

These trips took place (for me, at least) in the late-40s to mid-50s, before there were interstate highways.  The routes were always US highways and secondary roads that bisected every major city and town along the route.  When the Interstate Highway System began in the late 50s, it doomed the small-town mom-and-pop tourist home industry, not least because major highways now bypassed most of those cities and towns.