The Boots Motel of Carthage, Mo., a Route 66 landmark once endangered by redevelopment, at last will reopen for overnight stays starting Tuesday, reported the Joplin Globe.
The motel already has its five rooms available for guests booked for that night. The property isn’t fully restored, but the new owners — sisters Deborah Harvey and Priscilla Bledsaw — plan to use the revenues from those five rooms to bring the Boots back to a circa-1949 glory. That includes removing the gabled roof and restoring its original flat roof.
The Globe reported:
Bob Boots, son of original owner Arthur Boots, will be among the guests. The first-night room rate will be $2.50, the same as when the motel opened. After that, rates will be $66 for one-bed units and $71 — as in Highway 71 — for those with two beds. The rooms available include No. 10, where Clark Gable once stayed, Harvey said.
“We have a waiting list for that first night, and we have reservations all the way out to Maple Leaf,” she said, referring to the community’s October festival.
The rooms will have a radio but no television, and those who want ice will get it delivered from the front office. Wireless Internet will be available because it can supplied with no visible evidence of the amenity, said Harvey, who has a degree in historic preservation.
“We want people to be able to be immersed in the 1940s,” she said. “We’ll also have board games in the office they can borrow.”
The sisters gave a lot of credit to Ron and Barb Hart for their work. Ron is the founder of the Route 66 Chamber of Commerce, and the couple was hired as property managers for the motel.
Carthage Hometown Bank bought the motel for $101,000 during a foreclosure sale in June 2011, after the motel was on the market for $225,000. The Boots had no longer operated as a motel, but as apartments. The sisters bought the motel and took possession of it in August.
Nearly 10 years ago, the Boots was sold, then reportedly would be razed to make way for a Walgreens. Outcry from the Carthage Press newspaper, preservationists, and Route 66 fans scared away the drugstore chain.
Its fantastic to hear a good news story like this. Wish them all the best!
It was a great event. Bob Boots paid in 1939 currency. Four of the five available rooms were taken by Route 66 roadies and one by a lady who lived behind the Boots Drive In. She saw Clark Gable when he stayed in room 10, her mother met Mr. Gable. The rooms are beautiful. Debbie,Priscilla and Ron have done a wonderful job.
One interesting take on the “radio in every room” era: with only about a hundred TV stations nationwide in 1949, many communities had no viable television signals at all so drive-in cinemas filled the gap.
There is a “66 Drive-In” restored in Carthage, described at http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/route66/66_drive_in_carthage.html – it opened in 1949 and converted to widescreen to better compete with TV soon after the first local stations came to Joplin-Springfield in 1953. According to the National Park Service itinerary, “Drive-in theaters offered millions of (pre-television) motel guests an opportunity for affordable evening entertainment without having to leave the car or wander too far from the road. The number of drive-in theaters nationwide surged from a mere 52 in 1941 to 4,500 by 1956.”
Perhaps this is where Boots Motel visitors got much of their entertainment in 1949?