Why is a teenage girl renting rooms to customers at a motel on South Broadway? Because it’s 1957 and her parents own the place. That girl was me, and I worked at our family motel as counter attendant, room maid, switchboard operator and whatever else was needed.
I was 12 years old in 1956 when my parents bought the Napa Motel. They had no experience in the motel business but were undaunted. Eight years earlier, they had bought a café without any restaurant experience and had run it successfully for several years. Small mom-and-pop motels of that era seem to have enticed many an owner. A 1964 telephone book shows more than 70 businesses in Wichita called either motels, inns, hotels, lodges, cabins or courts. There were 13 motels on South Broadway in the 15 blocks from Kellogg to Pawnee.
Broadway was then also Highway 81 because there was no I-35 through town yet. Kellogg — Highway 54 — did not yet have an overpass over Broadway, so the intersection of the two was a busy one. Our motel was only six blocks south of Kellogg.
We had twelve rooms and we were always happy when we could light up the “No Vacancy” on our outdoor sign. That sign also highlighted our room perks: Air Conditioned, Phone, TV and Room Service. The room service was my mom bringing coffee and donuts on a TV tray in the morning to lodgers who didn’t want to come to the office for the “continental breakfast.”
TV was a small black-and-white sitting on a metal stand. Air conditioning was a noisy window unit they could control themselves. The phone looked normal except it didn’t have a dial. A lodger used it to tell the switchboard operator — often me — the number to be dialed and was then connected.
During the summer, my older sister and I were the reluctant maids cleaning rooms and getting them ready to rent. All day long, someone had to man the switchboard and office counter, waiting for someone to drive up and ask the price of a room ($5 for one person and $6 for two). Parking and ice from our new machine was free. Soda pop was available for a dime from the pop machine between rooms #6 and #7.
Many of our repeat customers were salesmen from Kansas City who stayed all week while they called on Wichita customers. Sometimes we had people in town for job interviews, or searching for an apartment, or in Wichita for a funeral or a wedding or a medical procedure. The mom and pop motels like ours were clean, well maintained and quite respectable.
When the school year was underway, I couldn’t clean rooms during the day. But as a high school freshman, my mom paid me $5 a week to work from 6 to 10 p.m., Monday through Thursdays (weekends were my dad’s job). I sat behind the counter, usually with my Algebra homework, until 10 p.m. Then I would turn off the switchboard, lock up the office and walk four blocks home. This seems to be a lot of responsibility for a 14-year-old, but I didn’t think so at the time. I don’t remember feeling scared or unsafe doing this, which would not be the case today.
My parents sold the motel in 1967 and continued managing different motels along South Broadway before retiring in the 1970s. Nearly 70 years after they bought the Napa Motel, the blonde brick building has been painted red, and the windows are boarded up. There’s a small black and white sign posted, “No loitering — criminal trespass prohibited.” A sad ending to a building once bustling with travelers.
Diana Wolfe is a former board member of The Active Age. She can be reached at dcwolfe2000@yahoo.com.
