SKYVIEW LODGE – VACANCY

In 1944, before the end of World War II, before travel became The Travel Industry, Santa Fe, New Mexico’s only claim to fame was that of being the oldest state capitol in the USA. The influx of weekenders from Los Alamos less than an hour’s drive away may have been the forerunner for the tourist business that turned Santa Fe from a quiet adobe village into a high-priced highbrow mecca for the moneyed traveler, or hideout for Hollywood’s rich and famous. Now it’s advertised as “The City Different in the Land of Enchantment.”

I was nine, my brother a year and a half younger, when my single parent mother began to rent out rooms in the house we leased on Hillside Avenue. Our rented rooms were always full in the summertime. After the war ended people began traveling again, traveling by automobile since gasoline was no longer rationed. At that time Santa Fe had no motels, just a few old hotels downtown, and little parking on the narrow streets.

Our success in renting rooms in our home led my mother to buy a two-story adobe building with ample parking on Cerrillos Road – the main thoroughfare from Albuquerque in those days. After a few renovations we moved to Skyview Lodge which became a “motel” offering two efficiency apartments around the back (one with a double bed, the other with two). In the front off a large entrance hall there was a tiny room with a single bed, another two rooms with a double bed apiece and a shared bathroom up the stairs. My mother’s bedroom was behind the front desk, and upstairs, also sharing the shared bath were another four rooms of various sizes.

My brother and I got the smallest bedrooms in the place in the summertime, and during the busiest weekends even those got rented out. He and I would sleep in the tiny lath house outside the kitchen door, or in bedrolls on the roof (flat and tarpaper-covered). In the wintertime we each got our pick of any bedroom in the place.

Those summers we usually rented out at least ten beds every night. I remember this because every day during the tourist season after the guests had gone it was my job to strip twenty sheets and pillowcases off the beds. I dragged them along with the used towels downstairs to the kitchen where our Maytag washing machine waited for the first load of the day. The machine kept going all morning as I loaded sheets and towels into the washer to agitate, and then, dripping wet, into the separate spin compartment, and finally into the wicker laundry basket. I carried the basket, heavy with wet laundry, into the backyard where I hung them neatly over the parallel rows of clotheslines securing them with wooden clothespins.

After half a dozen loads were flapping in the wind to dry my brother and I would walk down to the corner soda fountain – a limeade for me and a chocolate milkshake for him. Then back to work. Within an hour the sheets had been whipped dry by the wind and smelled of sunshine (with a faint whiff of adobe dust). The sheets usually came off the line as the fluffy white clouds popped up over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains promising a refreshing half hour thunderstorm later that afternoon.
Once or twice each summer the rain came before all the sheets were completely dry and some of them had to be returned to the beds slightly damp as we only had one set of sheets for each bed. It seldom rained at night, but when it did it was my job to knock on the doors of two of the upstairs rooms and apologize to the guests as I physically moved the beds to place cooking pots under the known leaks.

Each afternoon my mother and I made the ten beds together – tucking the pillows under our chins to slide the pillowcases on. My mother usually did some cleaning in the morning and either my brother or me ran the Electrolux vacuum cleaner hauling the awkward machine up or downstairs daily. My brother emptied the wastebaskets while my mother and I folded the fresh towels to stack neatly on the foot of each bed. By four pm when travelers began looking for a place for the night we were ready to flip on the neon sign that announced Skyview Lodge – Vacancy.

Mother showed the first rooms – often renting some, but she usually went to bed around eight pm. Although I was only eleven years old that first year, I attended to the desk in the evening, showed the last few rooms, quoted a price (between $1 and $4) per night, made change, registered them, and hopefully before midnight could turn on the red neon “No” which informed late travelers that we were full. The following morning my mother was often astonished to find out how much money I had charged for the less desirable rooms. “It was late and ours were the last rooms in town,” I’d explain – having obviously grasped the concept of what-the-traffic-will-bear long before I’d heard the term.

My brother and I got a dollar or two each week as allowance for our help. Once a month I got an extra fifty cents for waxing the spacious hardwood entry hall with Johnson’s paste wax. I was supposed to buff it by hand but preferred to do it by foot as it was fun to skate around in my stocking feet until the entry hall gleamed.

Within five years the classic motel business was thriving and Cerrillos road became motel row with King’s Rest, Desert Chateau, Cactus Lodge, and their ilk offering private cabins with carports. Our spartan rooms with shared bath “up the stairs” couldn’t compete. Then my mother got pregnant and remarried when I was almost sixteen, and I stayed on for a short time at Skyview Lodge renting a few rooms each night and doing the laundry each day until school started and I moved in with an aunt.

Skyview Lodge eventually was sold, and became a youth hostel for many years.

After I married and had children our family either slept in the back of our station wagon or in a big canvas tent when we traveled.

Then came the day on a business trip to California when I decided to rent a room for the night instead of driving straight through. So strange to be paying money out instead of taking it in! And the price, even at the budget motels, gave me a stomach ache. I never did get used to paying for a place to sleep at night. The legacy of having grown up on the other side of the desk in the travel industry!