'Ye-es. And throw out those long tables in the dining-room--did you look in there from the office?--and put in small ones, and make that waitress I saw in there wash her hair,' considered Effie May.
She had, for the first time, become an hotel-man's wife.
Candy of the Week Club. Picture of ideal customer: She's old lady in New Eng village. Loves candy, but no place there to buy it, except stale quarter a lb. stuff. Her son in NY well to do. Sends her subscription to C of W club. Each week she gets lb absolutely fresh--mailed from factory, not over week old--and different kind for ea wk of yr: not only standard brands but Chink candy from S.F., those famous chocolates, what do they call em, from Victoria, B.C., cactus candy fr Mexico, even foreign imports, those swell Swiss candies I had in Paris, on which be willing to lose $$ for that week, to advertise. Ad: 'Make yr prest last fifty-two weeks'
In redecorating the Commercial Hotel, when he had bought it, Myron deliberately kept it as heavily simple as it had been. 'I guess probably the greatest lesson I ever got in hotel-keeping was when Ora razzed me for making the American House into a tea room,' he meditated. The bedrooms he changed as he had planned. It was surprising what a coat of white paint and ten minutes tightening up joints and a new mattress and eiderdown did to a greasy pine bed. He added six bathrooms. The office he kept much as it was--except that he had the chairs re-upholstered and the floor and walls actually washed. It was in the matter of food that he went revolutionary.
He had always believed, the more so after peering at Europe, that American country food could be at least as good as French country food, provided that the proud ladies who earned their living by it took the trouble to learn to cook. No country in the world had better raw meats and fruits and vegetables than America. And a good many years ago he had learned the apparently occult fact that there are guides called 'cook books'.
He could not afford a Gritzmeier. (He would have forgiven old Otto completely, and have given him a partnership, if the red-faced scoundrel had suddenly appeared!) He would have to depend on the local talent.
He picked out for cook not the most experienced lady in Lemuel who offered herself, but the one who seemed least resentful at being told that there were things she could learn. She was the skinny widow of a farmer West of Town; she did sing hymns, but she took chervil seriously, once she had heard of it. While he was redecorating the hotel, Myron closed it for four weeks, and during that time, he stood beside his cook, evening after evening, showing her precisely what to do . . . She even got over the notions that it was very comic indeed for men-folks to think they could cook and that cook-books were all written by crazy Easterners.
When he had bullied her into shape, the Commercial Hotel began to serve steaks, chops, roast beef, roast pork, soups, coffee, pies, fresh-water fish that would have enchanted Brillat-Savarin.
Myron's chief woe had been in persuading the local butcher shop that he really wanted the cuts he wanted. He solved that. He bought the shop.
His one complete innovation was to persuade the considerable number of old Lemuel couples who were tired of housekeeping to board at the hotel, in a special private dining-room made out of the frowsy billiard-room, and to persuade the few comparatively rich people in town to give their parties at the hotel, with special supper-menus prepared by himself.
For motorists he had daily new information about every road out of town. When he could not get it from the drivers themselves, he or his clerk or Luke--suddenly a man, and not discontented that if he had not become a glamorous cowboy, he was known as the 'best doggone automobile driver for a kid of his age in town'--drove out to inspect road-repairing and detours for a hundred miles around.
He had the greatest praise that any country hotel-keeper could have: The travelling-men told him that his was he best hotel in their territory, and they planned their routes so that they could spend Sunday there.
Effie May was elected president of the Ladies' Aid of the Lemuel Presbyterian Church, and a committee of citizens waited upon Myron to ask him whether he would care to run for Alderman of the First Ward this year, and for Mayor in another couple of years. He overheard a heavy chair-sitter outside the office say, 'Best thing ever happened to this burg was when Weagle came here and put a lil pep into it. Say, in less 'n a year, that fellow has become the most prom'nen' citizen in town!'
It was, by chance, on this same evening that his brother Ora saw him and wept over him as night-clerk of a country hotel.
36
Young Luke Weagle, sixteen years old in 1933, had never, in the east or in Milwaukee, been allowed to drive a car. On the swooping straight section-line roads of Kansas, he became a demon driver, and he viewed thereon the Tourist Camps.
He spoke to his father.
'Say, dad, listen.'
'Uh-huh'.
'You know how you're always talking about these darn old English Inns, and how they were the real thing, without any fake?'
'Yes.'
'Well, why ain't these tourist camps the same way? They furnish dandy beds and pretty good grub and don't put on any side?'
'Well, I suppose they are sort of the same.'
'Why don't we run one? Listen, Dad, I bet you could run a better one than anybody!'
'I sort of thought we had a job here!'
'Aw, this! Aw, thunder! You got this licked! It's going like a prairie fire! You're making money on it, aren't you?'
'Well, yes.'
'Well then, I guess you won't be interested in it much more, and you'll want to start something new!'
'Maybe that's so, Luke, but what about my going back east and being manager of a big hotel in New York again?'
'Oh, them Easterners . . .'
'Those Easterners!'
'Those Easterners, they like everything so fancy! Gee, dad, I'd hate to think of going back to those swell-heads in Westchester County! I like it here, where you got room to move around! Look, dad, would you come out with me and look at Kit Carson Park? That's a tourist camp only a hundred miles west. Gee, it's a swell place!'
'Only a hundred miles? You must remember I'm an old-fashioned Easterner. Will you drive?'
'Sure, you bet!'
And indeed Kit Carson Park, to which that intrepid Wild Westerner driver Luke Weagle, took them in three hours, was to a professional hotel-man a study of the newest thing in the world. It was honestly and completely devoted to the needs of the million tourists, from unemployed workmen in third-hand Fords with the bird-cage and the radio hung outside the body, to Santa Barbara villa-owners in Cadillacs, who had as a matter of course given up railroad travel and who motored, three hundred, four hundred, six hundred miles a day, from Minnesota and Illinois and Ohio and Pennsylvania to California or Oregon. Kit Carson Park had eighty cottages, each with shower-bath and roofed shelter for a car, a community store for groceries and automobile accessories, a community restaurant and dance-hall. The cottages were clean, the grass between them was crisp, and the paths were outlined with white-washed stones.
'Well, what d' you think of it?' demanded Luke, as they drove homeward.
'I don't know,' grumbled Myron . . . Fathers have to grumble every so often, for otherwise they would have no chance at all in the clear-eyed world of children.