irememberjfk_l6fq3c – Page 14 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

See Rock City

In the summer of 1967, we traveled to Montreal to see Expo 67. On the way back, I got to see some pretty amazing stuff, including Niagara Falls, the Great Smokeys, and about a million painted barns and roadside signs imploring me to See Rock City.

Well, guess what. It worked. My father was relentlessly hammered by me to take us to Rock City. He continued to be pelted with requests until he finally relented, and our big Plymouth was aimed at Chattanooga, TN.

As we drew closer to the eastern Tennessee burg, the signs got more numerous. By the time we arrived at Lookout Mountain, I was ravenously ready to See Rock City!

As hungry as I was to check it out, I really don’t recall too much of the actual experience. I remember standing at a high point where I could See Seven States, and a big balanced rock. That’s about it, really. But I remember that it was a very, very fun day, and even my staid parents seemed to enjoy it.

Rock City was founded by a man named Garnet Carter. The area atop Lookout Mountain had long been known to locals as “Rock City” because of unusual rock formations that formed “streets.” Evidently, Native Americans had long earlier enhanced natural formations to create them. Carter obtained the land, then began making plans to build a residential neighborhood called Fairyland, as well as a golf course.

The golf course was a bit too ambitious, so Carter instead built the world’s first miniature golf course.

His plans for Fairyland, which would be modeled after Imaginary European cities, also proved impractical. In the meantime, he and his wife had built winding paths around the massive rock formations and also planted wildflower gardens.

They had sunk a lot of money into Rock City. Now what?

Carter realized that the public would pay a modest fee to experience the immaculate botanical garden that he and his wife had created. So in 1932, in the height of the Depression, Frieda’s Rock City Gardens opened to the public.

Carter knew that it would take advertising to get the public to show up. But times were hard. He really didn’t want to shell out bucks to newspapers that would be read today, forgotten tomorrow.

So he enlisted the help of a sign painter named Clark Byers. He hired Byers to travel the nation’s highways and offer to paint farmers’ barns in exchange for letting them paint three simple words: See Rock City.

Many a farmer took Byers up on his offer, and the painter would make certain that whatever side of the barn was best exposed to the (always) nearby highway would be brightly and boldly emblazoned with the words “Rock City” and as much of a sales pitch as he could finagle from the farmer. As the painted barns multiplied, so did the crowds. By by 1940, Rock City barns were spotted as far away as Michigan and Texas. And the crowds kept coming.

Rock City was known as a honeymooner’s retreat. It was also a great place to take the kids. National media writeups added to the success. Carter and Frieda’s dream of a European-styled neighborhood never came true (and the world’s first miniature golf course didn’t last too long either, although the Tom Thumb Golf chain that it became certainly has), but untold numbers of kids across all generations, including Boomers, have fond memories of making the long climb to the top of Lookout Mountain and checking out what Rock City has to offer.

The numbers of the painted barns have dwindled, but Rock City continues to thrive today, still owned by the Carter family. It’s nice when some things DON’T change.

Saigon Falls

We Boomers have a wealth of pleasant memories from growing up in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Those are memories that we wouldn’t trade for a million dollars. But, like all generations, we have our share of bad memories as well.

One of the most pervasive unpleasant memories that touched each and every one of us was the war in Vietnam. In this blog’s early days, I wrote a column about that subject. War seemed normal to Boomer kids, sadly, there is a whole new generation to whom it feels that way as well.

What made the Vietnam war so hard to deal with was that all of the deaths, the maimings, the psychological scarrings that happened to our nation’s youth were, it appears, all for nothing.

By 1972, the country was sick of Vietnam. The protesters had found many allies in the “establishment,” it seemed that there wasn’t a soul who wanted to spend any more lives to try to make a nation located on the far side of the world a place safe for democracy. The 1972 Presidential election featured a lot of talk by all candidates concerned about ending the mess once and for all.

Nixon really didn’t face much competition, though, and after his re-election, he set about getting America out of SE Asia.

Vietnamese tank breaches US embassy wall in Saigon

On January 27, 1973, the governments of the US, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam all signed a treaty effectively ending the war. It was a noble document, to be sure, calling for the US forces to withdraw, all POW’s to be returned, and an international military force protecting and enforcing the truce.

It was also a death sentence for South Vietnam.

Nixon called the withdrawal of troops “peace with honor.” That feel-good phrase belied the actuality, that as Americans withdrew, the Viet Cong rapidly moved in and took over.

The average American, eager to never hear the word “Vietnam” again, simply didn’t care. What was important was getting out of there ASAP.

What further sealed South Vietnam’s fate was the fact that the Watergate scandal had broken, and the news media were relentlessly covering the juicy story, to the detriment of the seemingly endless unrest in Indo-China.

Once Nixon’s resignation was a done deal, Gerald Ford continued to oversee the withdrawal, even accelerating it, despite the fact that South Vietnam was obviously being systematically devoured by the North as American troops departed.

Nobody seemed to care, except the increasingly desperate South Vietnamese, seen as traitors by the Communist North.

By spring, 1975, the withdrawal took on the appearance of a hasty retreat. North Vietnamese forces were pouring over the land like hungry locusts, and Saigon was the last “free” place left in the country. On April 30, Ford ordered Ambassador Graham Martin and all remaining American personnel to leave at once.

South Vietnamese civilians scale the 14-foot wall of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, trying to reach evacuation helicopters.

There were about 1500 hundred South Vietnamese loyalists at the American embassy, all of whom had been guaranteed protection, and they were looking more and more like they were to be tossed to the wolves.

The marines guarding the embassy perimeter were called inside the building, and an angry crowd outside the walls began to tear down the gates.

Refugees had been in the process of being evacuated, but as things got uglier, the directive was changed to transport American citizens only. Finally, at 0500 local time on April 30, the last helicopter took off from the embassy. Approximately 400 loyalists were left on the grounds, an angry crowd in the process of swarming over them.

Thus ended “peace with honor.”

The whole Vietnam mess put such a bad taste in the mouths of the American public and their elected officials that it looked like the country might never go to war again. Indeed, some 35 years later, SE Asia, despite continuing unrest, is far off the list of potential areas in which the US might get involved.

No, problems exist elsewhere, and once again, a war has drug on for many years, one that the public has grown very weary of. The helpless feelings of seeing body bags and knowing that the enemy is still very much in power is getting to have a sense of deja vu about it.

And while that feeling of having seen something before can often be pleasant, this time, it’s very much the opposite.

Playing Indoors (Temporarily!)

One of the crazes that came after my childhood that never caught my attention was the video game in its various incarnations.

Pong showed up when I was fifteen, followed closely by Space Invaders when I was eighteen. If I was going to get hooked, those were the primo ages to do it.

It never happened. I always preferred pastimes that required physical involvement of real objects, rather than those electronically produced.

I guess that’s why I’m so baffled by the generations of kids who followed mine who would gladly curl up with a Colecovision, Nintendo, Wii, or Atari (lots of years just covered there!) on a perfectly beautiful day rather than go outside and enjoy the real world.

I know that if such a thing as the gaming console would have existed circa 1967, and if it had managed to grab my attention, its use would have been STRICTLY for rainy days in the Enderland house. My mom would have insisted on it.

I grew up with the idea that the outdoors was for play. The indoors was for play if the weather didn’t allow for outdoors play. And sometimes, on a warm rainy day in the summer, f’rinstance, it was a blast to play outdoors in decidedly indoor weather!

My mom had an aversion for me laying around inside when the weather was nice outside. That principle has stuck with me all the way into middle age. If it’s a nice day outside, and if I’m not working, I feel guilty doing something inside. So I make my way outdoors and do yard work, or mess with my car, or even slip off for eighteen holes of idiot ball, AKA golf.

But there were those days when a kid simply had to play inside. Frequently, the weather would be so bad that he was on his own, his friends also temporarily locked in their indoor prisons.

Needless to say, we didn’t yack on the phone. Mom might miss a call. Another thing about the younger generations that baffles me is how they can talk for hours on cell phones.

So, it was time to get the Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, or GI Joe out and set up the indoor entertainment on the bedroom or living room floor.

But mom would keep a wary eye on the weather. And once the sun came out, it was time to get outside.

What would she think of kids who go without sleep in order to compete in online games that completely remove them from the real world? Some serious online gamers will emerge from a session absolutely unaware of what time it is, or what DAY it is.

My own kids did catch the video game bug. It began with Commander Keen on my very first PC back in 1993. I must admit, Jurassic park (the game) hooked the whole family, including Yours Truly, a year later. But once again, I only played at night or when the weather was bad.

For better or worse, (I strongly suspect the latter), kids today spend many, many more hours indoors than we Boomers did. The idea of hanging out with neighborhood kids all day long like we once did is foreign to many of them. In many cases, this is because parents are simply afraid to let them do so. After all, the world that was ours was a much safer place than the one our grandkids possess.

But even if that’s the case, I still think it’s a good idea to get the kids and/or grandchildren away from the various electronic forms of indoor entertainment and get them OUTSIDE, even if dad or grandpa has to go with them to keep an eye on things.

Playing in the Country

I grew up in Miami, Oklahoma, classic small-town America. I had lots of freedom to go play all over town all day. But a special treat was getting to go play in the country.

My father owned a truck garage. One of his mechanics lived out of town a few miles on a farm. The mechanic was a good guy and his wife was sweet, too. Once in a while I would get to play all day long on their farm, loaded with woods, open pastures, hills, a little creek, cows, horses, and a big barn with a hayloft.

For a “city” kid to get to spend all day in such nirvana was a highlight of the summer.

I would be dropped off early in the morning. I would head out and spend the entire day doing cool country things that I couldn’t do in town.

The first thing I would do was head down to the creek with a big glass jar. Then, the hunt would begin. I would capture whatever little critters my hands could outwit. “Crawdads” (more properly known as crayfish) could be apprehended by sweeping the jar through the area formerly occupied by a rock. Lifting the rock would reveal one of the clawed crustaceans hiding, staying out of the sun. We had brown “mud craws” in town that would dig vertical tunnels in damp dirt marked by chimney-like towers of mud around them, but these beautiful creek craws with their red-tipped claws were more highly prized by juvenile hunters.

After a few hours of crawdad catching, I would empty my jar and head out to the pasture . The jar would now sport a lid with holes punched through it to allow ventilation for its next captives.

If there were clover flowers, it was bee catching time. All you had to do was drop the jar over a flower with a bee attached and wait for it to fly. Then you slapped the lid on and gazed with wonder at the insect’s detail, the pollen that covered it, and the swelled sacs on its legs that held nectar.

Now, off to the hayloft.

A hayloft was a truly magical place filled with aroma, ambiance, and dander. It had a smell that was heavenly, but which would instantly stuff me up if I inhaled it with my allergies that appeared many years later. This getting old crap has its drawbacks.

Just getting into the hayloft was cool. You climbed up a ladder that was permanently attached to the wall through a trap door. Once in the open confines of the loft, lighting was brilliant sun shining through small cracks between oak boards. It was dim, yet blinding. And there was hay EVERYWHERE! you could climb over it, jump in piles of it, make forts out of it, or whatever else the shining imagination of a child could come up with.

You would sweat gallons, inhale vast amounts of pollen and dust, have every area of your skin that persistently touched the hay get covered with little red scratches, and have the very time of your life.

At the end of the day, mom or dad would pick me up and would take my exhausted, stinking self home. I would be asleep in the car before we had traveled a mile.

The bath I got when I got home would likely reveal bloodsucking little creatures patrolling my skin looking for a place to drill. An itching sensation meant a tick had hit paydirt.

But any inconveniences were massively outweighed by the sheer exhilaration that a city kid would feel when he got to spend a day in the country.

Picking Up Pop Bottles

Those two nickels I used to get every day as an allowance were sufficient for most of my needs as a child. After all, it would provide two candy bars, two Popsicles, or could be combined to buy a can of Shasta.

But occasionally, a young man might need a bit more cash in hand. You could go ask mom or dad for more nickels. Yeah, right. THAT would work.

No, if you needed more moolah, you had to earn it. And there just weren’t that many job opportunities for a seven-year-old kid.

But there was always a source of income for the industrious: picking up pop bottles.

Pop bottles were frequently tossed out of car windows by the wealthy (i.e. those who didn’t mind tossing two cents into the ditch). And there they lay, awaiting youngsters (and winos) needing to make some pocket change. All they had to do was seek, find, and lug.

18 cents, if you can find a store that sells them all!

Moonwink Grocery was happy to take them off of my hands. And at two cents apiece, all it took was scoring five lousy pop bottles to double my daily allowance! How much easier could it be to get rich?

I remember spending many a summer day prowling the ditches of Miami, Oklahoma seeking the glass commodities that fetched legal tender at ANY market that happened to be close. Of course, sometimes we had to take certain brands of bottles to specific stores that sold them. Not everybody sold Canada dry, as I recall, and you would hack off store owners who didn’t by attempting to unload them at their places of business.

I guess there are still states that mandate returnable bottles. And I guess kids in those states (and winos) pick up the bottles to cash them in. But most of the U.S. youngsters have never even heard of making money by picking up the spent soft drink receptacles.

That’s too bad. There was something nicely satisfying about trading a valuable commodity for cash. It made the candy or pop taste better, somehow. And it was also good for the environment.

For some more great pop-bottle-picking-up memories and photos of classic bottles, check out http://tulsatvmemories.com/pop.html

Palisades Park

If you were looking for the 7-14 year old demographic for advertising purposes in the 1960’s, all you needed to do was place an ad in a DC comic book.

The items I saw advertised there were bewildering in their numbers. And they are also firmly lodged in my now forty-seven year old memory banks. Today’s piece is about a place that was too magical for me to imagine as a child (and, sadly, a place I never actually visited): Palisades Park in New Jersey.

How great was this place? SUPERMAN HIMSELF endorsed it! He even offered you a free ticket to go visit it for yourself!

There were many advantages to growing up in Small Town America. There was no need to lock the house. The neighbors would keep an eye on things for you. You could walk to school, or anywhere else in town your young legs could take you, with no fear (or even any concept) of the possibility of violent crime. And you knew every single family who lived on your street, and many others in the area as well.

But we had to sit and read about magical places like Palisades Park in New Jersey with no hope of ever going there ourselves.

Palisades Park was born in 1898. Its original incarnation was as a trolley park. Are you as confused by that term as I was? Well, to clarify things, here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

In the United States, trolley parks, which started in the 19th century, were picnic and recreation areas at the ends of streetcar lines, created by the streetcar companies to give people a reason to use their services on weekends. These parks consisted of picnic groves and pavilions, and often held events such as dances, concerts, and fireworks. Many eventually added features such as carousels, ferris wheels, and other rides. However, with the increasing number of automobiles in use, trolley parks gradually declined and some disappeared. Others survived and developed into amusement parks.

And Palisades Park was perhaps the most shining example of the latter in the country, at least in the 1960’s.

Sitting on a mere 38 acres, this piece of real estate was visited by untold millions of delighted customers from its birth to its closing in 1971. Home to some of the most magnificent roller coasters ever created, these included several versions of the Cyclone (one, being built prior to 1920, was so frightening that it was demolished due to low usage), the Lake Placid Bobsleds, the Jetstar, the Wildcat, and the giant wooden coaster that was pictured in the comic book ads.

Palisades had lots of other stuff going on, too. It was the home of the Little Miss America contest, the largest saltwater pool in the world, and loads of barkers at games designed to separate your quarters from your pocket.

When I was researching this article, I found this site full of the memories of those who visited the wonderful piece of heaven on earth. It’s a bittersweet read, for, alas, the park is no more.

Hugely successful until its closing day, it was a victim of its prime location. It turns out that Palisades Park, like so many of the drive-in movies we grew up with, sat on some primo real estate. When rezoning allowed condominium development, Palisades was sold in 1971 to a company which chopped up the immortal rides, sold them a piece at a time, and bulldozed everything down for multifamily dwellings.

And, BTW, they DON’T advertise in DC comic books.

OK, readers, I want to see comments from you who were fortunate enough to take Superman up on his invitation to pay a visit to Palisades Park.

Naptime in Kindergarten

When we were kids, kindergarten was an option, not a requirement. And if our parents opted for it, it cost them cash.

At least that’s the way it was in Oklahoma. That’s how I ended up going to Mrs. Adams’ big yellow rock house every day.

My mom, a schoolteacher, was familiar with Mrs. Adams and her teaching program. She was using something relatively new at the time: phonics. Mom saw the value of learning how to spell, read, and pronounce phonetically. The public schools had not yet committed to the teaching method. But mom had.

I don’t remember too much about kindergarten except for a few things. One was that Mrs. Adams was a fan of cooked cabbage. It wasn’t unusual for the fetid stench of cooked cabbage to foul the air of that big yellow house in the afternoons.

Another thing I remember was naptime.

We would eat lunch (thankfully, she never fed US cooked cabbage!), then spread out our thin cotton mats and crash. At first, a few of us protested, but resistance was futile. Mrs. Adams’ word was law in the big yellow house.

After a while, naptime was welcomed, rather than resisted. And, 42 years later, may I say that it still is.

I don’t know how we slept so well on those flimsy mats on that hard wooden floor. But sleep well we did. Then, we woke up, ready to attack stuff like phonics.

What I remember about that kindergarten class is that practically every one of us learned how to read. We also learned how to recognize tricky combinations of letters like ph = f, sch = sk, etc. We all, with no exceptions that I recall, entered first grade as full-fledged readers.

I remember that it was pretty dramatic in my case. I recall Mrs. Adams going over the basics of phonetic reading, and I picked up the ball and ran. When I got home that day, I was delighted to read out of a Bible story book whose pictures I had always enjoyed, but whose words were, to that point, a mystery. I remember the thrilled look on mom’s face as I read to her out of it.

Of course, this made first grade a tad boring for Mrs. Adams’ graduates. “See Dick, see Jane” just didn’t cut it when you were used to pronouncing words like Jeremiah and Solomon. So, some of us were given more advanced reading material.

There has been a growing movement to cut naptimes from kindergarten. This has caused no little controversy with medical experts who say that 3-5 year old kids need more sleep that older ones. I’m inclined to agree.

The local public school kindergartens also spurn teaching phonics. However, my daughter, who was home-schooled her first two years, did learn it through a tutor that we hired. Like me, she was reading at an advanced level at age five. My son went to conventional kindergarten at the elementary school. He did learn phonics a little later, and caught up quickly.

Some enlightened employers have also seen the benefit of a brief afternoon nap greatly enhancing employee productivity. While I’m happy with my employer of twenty years, I’m sad to say that they aren’t among that group. But I think Mrs. Adams was on to something with those compulsory naps after lunch.

I just wish I could get that smell of cooked cabbage out of my mind.

Moving Day

I was a fortunate kid. I spent the first eight years of my life living in the same home. In kid years, that’s about four entire lifetimes.

But just before I turned nine, we packed everything up and moved seventy miles away.

It might as well have been seven thousand.

My parents had lived in our modest Miami, Oklahoma home since the early 1950’s. Dad had a yearning to move out to the country. So in 1968, he sold his truck garage and our house and bought a 250 acre farm in southwest Missouri.

We went from comfortable small-town life, where a milkman would bring us fresh dairy products two mornings a week, to living three miles up a rough dirt road without a telephone.

Now, mind you, I’m not complaining. I had 250 beautiful acres to run around on. Perhaps 150 were in thick woods. There were also caves, a creek, and I even had a horse to ride all over the spread.

And it was great. But after a few months, I started missing my little house in my little neighborhood. I also missed my friends.

It was a strange experience, to be sure, packing up everything that we owned and loading it all into boxes. This was stuff that had been in place literally since I could remember. And now it was being removed from the places where it had long sat and packed.

It also seemed strange that I would be saying goodbye to the only home that I had ever known. The yard where I had spent countless afternoons playing baseball, football, tag, army, and even golf with my dad. His eight-iron (which I am proud to still own) would fit nicely under my right arm as I took mighty cuts at Titleists that were really in little danger of ever being contacted.

Incidentally, my golf game hasn’t improved much over that even today. 😉

But that June morning, we packed up the makeshift beds we had slept on the night before, and the house was empty. As we pulled out of the driveway for the last time, home now lay ahead of us.

It was all very strange to a kid.

When the homesickness reached critical mass, perhaps six months after the move, we went back to Miami for a visit.

To say I was shocked was an understatement.

They had changed nice straight Main Street to some sort of obstacle course! Planters and other concrete structures were in place that forced dad to weave in and out in our 1965 Chevy pickup.

At least my best buddy, Van Rucker, hadn’t changed. He was the same, as were most of the rest of the old neighborhood gang.

Strangely, by the end of the day, I was missing our Missouri place.

I moved again within a couple of years, then one more time a couple of years after that. Each move was stressful, exciting, arduous, and strange.

But the first move we made was by far the most significant of the bunch. There no stranger feeling than leaving the only home you’ve ever known.

“It Has a POOL!”

Postcard from the Anchor Inn, Branson, Missouri, late 50’s

We traveled a lot when I was a kid. We took all-day trips to Iowa and central Texas from northeast Oklahoma every year to visit my two sets of grandparents. Those trips didn’t involve motel stays, but we stayed in a myriad of them on other, less time-intensive treks.

My dad was old-school Norwegian stock from Minnesota. That meant dollars didn’t fly out of his wallet. He looked for the best value for the buck. And, quite often, that meant staying in a clean motel with no place for a kid to swim.

But, not too rarely, he would splurge an extra five bucks a night and give me the ultimate thrill: staying in a motel that HAD A POOL!

I have been able to relate very closely to my father’s quandaries as I have reached middle age. For instance, the idea of getting a good cheap motel that looked squeaky clean as opposed to a more expensive chain franchise that came complete with a pool for the kids was always very tempting. But then I would remember the unbridled joy that I would exude when dad would pull into a motel parking lot that had within its expanse a gorgeous, blue, sparkling-in-the-sunlight swimming pool.

Another way I can relate to dad is in not giving a whit whether a motel has a pool or not. Out of the last 100 hotel/motels I’ve stayed in that had pools (in other words, that had been built since 1980), I actually swam in perhaps five of them. I was too tired from traveling to consider suiting up and jumping in.

But kids who have been sleeping in the back seat all day long are another matter. And when my kids were small, that meant dragging my tired bones down to the pool to watch them.

That’s okay. It was easy work.

In my childhood, I became quite adept at turning flips and such from motel diving boards. I was a natural swimmer, so the eight-foot-depths were no sweat to me.

Nowadays, of course, we live in litigious times that insist that pools be idiot-proof. That means the shallow concrete reservoirs are suitable for little else but floating around upon on an air mattress.

But we Boomer kids can remember when our fathers’ pulling into a motel parking lot that also housed a pool meant that we were in for an unbridled afternoon full of joy jumping off a board and eventually getting ourselves as tired as our traveled-out parents.

Holiday Inns

Ah, life on the road circa 1967. Where would we spend the night? Would dad pull an all-nighter and get us somewhere early in the morning? That was known to happen. Or would we stay at a nice, clean, cheap, joyless motel without a pool?

Or, would dad, feeling flush after a particularly profitable week fixing diesel trucks in his garage, spring for the ultimate experience in lodging? That would, of course, be the Holiday Inn!

Once in a while he did take the splurging plunge, and it was a moment of ecstasy for this kid when he did.

After all, Holiday Inns not only had pools, they were huge, fancy, illuminated, gorgeous pools!

And that wasn’t all. Most of them had very nice restaurants, as well. No greasy spoon experiences when we stayed at the motel with the big, friendly green sign outside!

And we kids weren’t the only ones who were thrilled. Our moms greatly enjoyed the occasional positive change in the overnight stay experience.

Holiday Inn got its start in Memphis, Tennessee in 1952. That was the year that Kemmons Wilson opened the first one. His idea was that American travelers needed standardized, clean, predictable, family-friendly, and readily accessible places to stay. The architect that he hired to design the building jokingly suggested that he call it Holiday Inn, after a Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire movie that had been released ten years earlier.

Wilson thought that was a splendid idea.

His idea was radical for the times. Wilson had recently traveled to Washington, DC, and was disappointed by the quality of the various motor courts that he stayed at. He envisioned a chain of 400+ Holiday Inns, each one as nice to stay overnight in as any other. So his first motel was built with the idea that it would be far from the last.

Within six years, there were 50 Holiday Inns. Ten years later, in 1968, there were a thousand. In 1972, Wilson appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and the count was up to 1,400.

By then, Holiday Inns had become a part of folklore. On his 1971 album Madman Across the Water, Elton John featured one of my favorite songs, Holiday Inn. It’s a good-natured poke at the chain, which was one of his commonest places to crash on long road tours early in his career.

One of the things that Holiday Inns had going for them was a far-ahead-of-its-time reservation system known as Holidex. Many years before the internet, you could reserve your next night’s stay at another Holiday Inn several hundred miles away. And you knew that it would be just as nice as the one that you had stayed in the night before. Holiday Inn also boasted that they had no “No Vacancy” signs. If they were booked up, they would help you find another room somewhere else, which was also a pretty radical new idea in customer service.

By the late 70’s, some of the original Holiday Inns had begun showing their age. I remember staying in one in Oklahoma City about 1979 (the year that Wilson retired) that was in pretty poor shape, as far as worn-out carpets, stains, and dated decorating were concerned. The chain could have foundered at that point, but it showed that there was still life left in the name.

The corporate entities that took over from Wilson changed the look of the venerable signs that had long stood outside the motels. They also laid down the law as to the condition of any affiliate that would continue to carry the name. Interestingly, there are a few examples of Holiday Inn’s original signs that had been repainted by the motel’s owners who chose to end the affiliation..

There continue to be about 1,400 Holiday Inns worldwide, and a staggering 1,700 Holiday Inn Expresses. So even though the familiar green signs are gone, the pleasure of staying at a nice, comfortable, clean Holiday Inn is still with us.