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My father and stepmother owned and operated the Holiday Motel, Florence,
Kansas, for ten years. Dad was seventy years of age when he purchased the
motel. They lived in a suite behind the office.
The motel featured eleven rooms and a three-room suite. Hungry guests could find food at which ever of the town’s two restaurants happened to be open. After hours, the selection narrowed to microwave burritos at the convenience store in the gas station next to the motel. The Holiday Motel stands on the outskirts of Florence. Two highways cross within sight of its front windows. US Highway 50 runs west from Ocean City MD to Sacramento, California. US 77 begins in Sioux City, Iowa, and ends in Brownsville, Texas, as far south as you can get in the Lone Star State. Trucks loaded with cattle and hogs, new cars and new furniture, gasoline and milk roar past the town day and night. As in Bethlehem, hope and fear meet in Florence. People of all sorts and conditions pass through. Many are transients, workers looking for jobs, people in old, battered vehicles. Some may be desperate. Timothy McVeigh drove his rental truck down US 77 on his way to Oklahoma City. Construction workers, truckers and traveling salesmen filled the motel Sunday night to Friday morning. People like me, who had returned to visit relatives and attend reunions, occupied the rooms on weekends. One summer I stayed on business in a Ritz Carleton Hotel, then spent the next week cleaning rooms at the Holiday Motel. Transients come through year-round. These drifters arrive with hopes and fears ... hopes that their cars will get them home ... fears that they won’t have enough money for gas and food ... hopes that the kids will grow up and have lives better than theirs had turned out ... fears that they won’t be able to find work. A family once traded a still-warm necklace for a night at the Holiday Motel. The local clergy – the Methodist minister, the Christian preacher and the Catholic priest – maintain a fund to help people fix their broken-down cars, get a hot meal, or stay a night at the Holiday Motel. ~ ~ ~ The Holiday Motel provided rooms in Jesus’ name, quietly. Dad wouldn’t turn anyone away if he had a room available. He joked that the motel was a mission in disguise. Dad died a month after selling the motel. I cherish many loving memories of Dad, especially those from his years at the Holiday Motel. These memories help me understand the anonymous proprietor of the original Holiday Motel at the crossroads of hope and fear in Bethlehem. The inn was full of paying customers. Maybe one or two people who were guests of the local synagogues. Like my father, the proprietor got out of bed, saw the dilemma of the young couple, and offered what he could ... the stable out back. “No charge.” |
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