5 fascinating facts about motels, from murders and movies to Magic Fingers
Here are five facts and phenomena from the century of history.
From the late 1950s into the '80s, thousands of motels proudly advertised their Magic Fingers — a little collection of vibrating electric nodes under your mattress that would give you a 15-minute 'massage' for 25 cents, inspiring creators from Kurt Vonnegut to Frank Zappa. Alas, their moment passed. But not everywhere. Morro Bay's Sundown Inn, which gets two diamonds from the Auto Club and charges about $70 and up per night, is one of the last motels in the West that still features working Magic Fingers, offered (at the original price) in most of its 17 rooms. 'We've owned the hotel for 41 years, and the Magic Fingers was here when we started. We just kept them,' said co-owner Ann Lin. Ann's mother- and father-in-law immigrated from Taiwan and bought the property in 1983.
Many motels and small hotels are longtime family operations. Sometimes it's the original owner's family, and quite often it's a family named Patel with roots in India's Gujarat state. A recent study by the Asian American Hotel Owners Assn. found that 60% of U.S. hotels — and 61% of those in California — are owned by Asian Americans. By one estimate, people named Patel own 80% to 90% of the motels in small-town America. The beginnings of this trend aren't certain, but many believe that one of the first Indians to acquire a hotel in the U.S. was Kanjibhai Desai, buyer of the Goldfield Hotel in downtown San Francisco in the early 1940s.
There's no escaping the motel in American pop culture. Humbert Humbert, the deeply creepy narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel 'Lolita,' road-tripped from motel to motel with his under-age victim. Edward Hopper gave us the disquieting 1957 oil painting 'Western Motel.' In the film 'Psycho' (1960), Alfred Hitchcock brought to life the murderous motel manager Norman Bates. When Frank Zappa made a movie about the squalid misadventures of a rock band on tour, he called it '200 Motels' (1971). When the writers of TV's 'Schitt's Creek' (2015-2020) wanted to disrupt a rich, cosmopolitan family, they came up with the Rosebud Motel and its blue brick interior walls. And when executives at A&E went looking for a true-crime series in 2024, they came up with 'Murder at the Motel,' which covered a killing at a different motel in every episode.
The 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made the Lorraine Motel in Memphis globally notorious. But before and after that day, the Lorraine played a very different role. Built as a small hotel in 1925 and segregated in its early years, the property sold to Black businessman Walter Bailey in 1945. He expanded it to become a motel, attracting many prominent African American guests. In the 1950s and '60s, the Lorraine was known for housing guests such as Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Roy Campanella, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Aretha Franklin, Lionel Hampton, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and the Staples Singers. After King's assassination, the motel struggled, closed, then reemerged in 1991 as the National Civil Rights Museum, now widely praised. Guests follow civil rights history through the building, ending at Room 306 and its balcony where King was standing when he was shot.
In 1980, a Colorado motel owner named Gerald Foos confided to journalist Gay Talese that he had installed fake ceiling vents in the Manor House Motel in Aurora, Colo., and for years had been peeping from the attic at guests in bed. The man had started this in the 1960s and continued into the '90s. Finally, in 2016, Talese spun the story into a New Yorker article and a book, 'The Voyeur's Motel,' sparking many charges that he had violated journalistic ethics.
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The Hill
20 minutes ago
- The Hill
US flight attendants are fed up like their Air Canada peers. Here's why they are unlikely to strike
At the end of work trips, Nathan Miller goes home to a makeshift bedroom in his parents' house in Virginia. The 29-year-old flight attendant is part of a PSA Airlines crew based in Philadelphia, but he can't afford to live there. Miller says he makes about $24,000 a year staffing multiple flights a day as a full-time attendant for the American Airlines subsidiary. To get to work, he commutes by plane between Virginia Beach and Philadelphia International Airport, a distance of about 215 miles. 'I've considered finding a whole new job. It's not something that I want to do,' Miller, who joined PSA two years ago, said. 'But it's not sustainable.' His situation isn't unique. Frustrations among flight attendants at both regional and legacy airlines have been building for years over paychecks that many of them say don't match the weight of what their jobs demand. Compounding the discontent over hourly wages is a long-standing airline practice of not paying attendants for the work they perform on the ground, like getting passengers on and off planes. Air Canada's flight attendants put a public spotlight on these simmering issues when about 10,000 of them walked off the job last weekend, leading the airline to cancel more than 3,100 flights. The strike ended Tuesday with a tentative deal that includes wage increases and, for the first time, pay for boarding passengers. In the United States, however, the nearly century-old Railway Labor Act makes it far more difficult for union flight attendants like Miller, a member of the Association of Flight Attendants, to strike than most other American workers. Unlike the Boeing factory workers and Hollywood writers and actors who collectively stopped work in recent years, U.S. airline workers can only strike if federal mediators declare an impasse — and even then, the president or Congress can intervene. For that reason, airline strikes are exceedingly rare. The last major one in the U.S. was over a decade ago by Spirit Airlines pilots, and most attempts since then have failed. American Airlines flight attendants tried in 2023 but were blocked by mediators. Without the ultimate bargaining chip, airline labor unions have seen their power eroded in contract talks that now stretch far beyond historical norms, according to Sara Nelson, the international president of the AFA. Negotiations that once took between a year and 18 months now drag on for three years, sometimes more. 'The right to strike is fundamental to collective bargaining, but it has been chipped away,' Nelson said. Her union represents 50,000 attendants, including the ones at United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and PSA Airlines. On Monday, she joined PSA flight attendants in protest outside Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, near where an airliner operated by PSA crashed into the Potomac River in January after colliding with an Army helicopter. All 67 people on the two aircraft were killed, including the plane's pilot, co-pilot and two flight attendants. The airline's flight attendants also demonstrated outside airports in Philadelphia, Dallas, Charlotte and Dayton, Ohio. In a statement, PSA called the demonstrations 'one of the important ways flight attendants express their desire to get a deal done — and we share the same goal.' Flight attendants say their jobs have become more demanding in recent years. Planes are fuller, and faster turnaround times between flights are expected. Customers may see them mostly as uniforms that serve food and beverages, but the many hats attendants juggle include handling in-flight emergencies, deescalating conflicts and managing unruly passengers. 'We have to know how to put out a lithium battery fire while at 30,000 feet, or perform CPR on a passenger who's had a heart attack. We're trained to evacuate a plane in 90 seconds, and we're always the last ones off,' said Becky Black, a PSA flight attendant in Dayton, Ohio, who is part of the union's negotiating team. And yet, Black says, their pay hasn't kept pace. PSA flight attendants have been bargaining for over two years for better wages and boarding pay. Alaska flight attendants spent just as long in talks before reaching a deal in February. At American, flight attendants began negotiations on a new contract in 2020 but didn't get one until 2024. Southwest Airlines attendants pushed even longer — over five years — before securing a new deal last year that delivered an immediate 22% wage hike and annual 3% increases through 2027. 'It was a great relief,' Alison Head, a longtime Southwest flight attendant based in Atlanta, said. 'Coming out of COVID, where you saw prices were high and individuals struggling, it really meant something.' The contract didn't include boarding pay but secured the industry's first paid maternity and parental leave, a historic win for the largely female workforce. A mother of two, Head said she returned to work 'fairly quickly' after having her first child because she couldn't afford to stay home. 'Now, new parents don't have to make that same hard decision,' she said. Many of her peers at other airlines are still waiting for their new contracts. At United, attendants rejected a tentative agreement last month, with 71% voting no. The union is now surveying its members to understand why and plans to return to the bargaining table in December. One major sticking point: boarding pay. While Delta became the first U.S. airline to offer it in 2022 — followed by American and Alaska — many flight attendants still aren't compensated during what they call the busiest part of their shift. Back in Virginia Beach, Miller is still trying to make it work. To report for duty at the Philadelphia airport on time, Miller says he wakes up at around 4 a.m. Once his commuter flight lands, it could be hours still before he is officially on the clock and getting paid. His work day sometimes ends at 2 a.m. the next morning. Depending what time it is when Miller returns to Philadelphia, he might spend the night at what's known as a 'crash pad,' a shared housing unit for flight crew members who commute to their base. Miller says his crash pad is a two-bedroom apartment with 10 beds in it. On family vacations during his childhood, Miller said he was fascinated by flight attendants and their ability to make passengers feel comfortable and safe. Now he's got his dream job, but he isn't sure he can afford to keep doing it.
NBC News
an hour ago
- NBC News
U.S. flight attendants are fed up like their Air Canada peers. Here's why they are unlikely to strike
At the end of work trips, Nathan Miller goes home to a makeshift bedroom in his parents' house in Virginia. The 29-year-old flight attendant is part of a PSA Airlines crew based in Philadelphia, but Miller says he can't afford to live there. He makes about $24,000 a year working full-time for the American Airlines subsidiary. Despite often staffing multiple flights a day, Miller commutes by plane between Virginia Beach and Philadelphia International Airport, a distance of about 215 miles. 'I've considered finding a whole new job. It's not something that I want to do,' Miller, who joined PSA two years ago, said. 'But it's not sustainable.' His situation isn't unique. Frustrations among flight attendants at both regional and legacy airlines have been building for years over paychecks that many of them say don't match the weight of what their jobs demand. Compounding the discontent over hourly wages is a long-standing airline practice of not paying attendants for the work they perform on the ground, like getting passengers on and off planes. Air Canada's flight attendants put a public spotlight on these simmering issues when about 10,000 of them walked off the job last weekend, forcing the airline to cancel more than 3,000 flights. The strike ended Tuesday with a tentative deal that includes wage increases and, for the first time, pay for boarding passengers. In the United States, however, the nearly century-old Railway Labor Act makes it far more difficult for union flight attendants like Miller, a member of the Association of Flight Attendants, to strike than most other American workers. Unlike the Boeing factory workers and Hollywood writers and actors who collectively stopped work in recent years, U.S. airline workers can only strike if federal mediators declare an impasse — and even then, the president or Congress can intervene. For that reason, airline strikes are exceedingly rare. The last major one in the U.S. was over a decade ago by Spirit Airlines pilots, and most attempts since then have failed. American Airlines flight attendants tried in 2023 but were blocked by mediators. Without the ultimate bargaining chip, airline labor unions have seen their power eroded in contract talks that now stretch far beyond historical norms, according to Sara Nelson, the international president of the AFA. Negotiations that once took between a year and 18 months now drag on for three years, sometimes more. 'The right to strike is fundamental to collective bargaining, but it has been chipped away,' Nelson said. Her union represents 50,000 attendants, including the ones at United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and PSA Airlines. On Monday, she joined PSA flight attendants in protest outside Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, near where an airliner operated by PSA crashed into the Potomac River in January after colliding with an Army helicopter. All 67 people on the two aircraft were killed, including the plane's pilot, co-pilot and two flight attendants. The airline's flight attendants also demonstrated outside three other U.S. airports. In a statement, PSA called the demonstrations 'one of the important ways flight attendants express their desire to get a deal done — and we share the same goal.' Flight attendants say their jobs have become more demanding in recent years. Planes are fuller, and faster turnaround times between flights are expected. Customers may see them mostly as uniforms that serve food and beverages, but the many hats attendants juggle include handling in-flight emergencies, deescalating conflicts and managing unruly passengers. 'We have to know how to put out a lithium battery fire while at 30,000 feet, or perform CPR on a passenger who's had a heart attack. We're trained to evacuate a plane in 90 seconds, and we're always the last ones off,' said Becky Black, a PSA flight attendant in Dayton, Ohio, who is part of the union's negotiating team. And yet, Black says, their pay hasn't kept pace. PSA flight attendants have been bargaining for over two years for better wages and boarding pay. Alaska flight attendants spent just as long in talks before reaching a deal in February. At American, flight attendants began negotiations on a new contract in 2020 but didn't get one until 2024. Southwest Airlines attendants pushed even longer — over five years — before securing a new deal last year that delivered an immediate 22% wage hike and annual 3% increases through 2027. 'It was a great relief,' Alison Head, a longtime Southwest flight attendant based in Atlanta, said. 'Coming out of COVID, where you saw prices were high and individuals struggling, it really meant something.' The contract didn't include boarding pay but secured the industry's first paid maternity and parental leave, a historic win for the largely female workforce. A mother of two, Head said she returned to work 'fairly quickly' after having her first child because she couldn't afford to stay home. 'Now, new parents don't have to make that same hard decision,' she said. Many of her peers at other airlines are still waiting for their new contracts. At United, attendants rejected a tentative agreement last month, with 71% voting no. The union is now surveying its members to understand why and plans to return to the bargaining table in December. One major sticking point: boarding pay. While Delta became the first U.S. airline to offer it in 2022 — followed by American and Alaska — many flight attendants still aren't compensated during what they call the busiest part of their shift. Back in Virginia Beach, Miller is still trying to make it work. On family vacations during his childhood, Miller said he was fascinated by flight attendants and their ability to make people feel comfortable and safe.
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
Target's brand crisis, a new Disney, hidden moon discovery: Catch up on the day's stories
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