I was fortunate to grow up at The Roping Cowboy Motel in Kingman during the halcyon years of the late 50’s and early 60’s. We had recently emerged victorious out of World War II. The resultant booming economy, in the late phases of its transformation from an agricultural base to an industrial base, provided Americans additional discretionary income and they spent much of it in their cars driving from coast to coast. It was a wonderful time to be a young boy, and Kingman, a town of 3,500 back then, was a wonderful place to grow up.

My youth at the motel helped define who I am today. It was at the motel, following my Dad’s lead, where I learned how to shake a stranger’s hand, where I learned how to really listen to what the customer was saying so they would come back for another stay and where I developed my presentation skills by putting on magic shows for our customers as they sat on the old Stagecoach chairs on the motels patio. It is also where I developed a strong work ethic for my Mom was a great role model for how to work hard but never stop laughing.

It all felt so exotic when we would have cars from Ohio, Minnesota or Arkansas arrive and kids would pile out. Who were these young people with their nasal accents or southern drawls? Where exactly was Ohio or Minnesota? And if someone came from Vermont or New Hampshire they might as well have arrived from Mars since to me, they seemed equally far away. I remember showing these kids around the motel. They could not believe how my brother and I had our bedroom in a closed in carport and used swamp coolers to mitigate the hot Kingman days. I am certain our Levi’s with the brightly colored flower print cowboy shirts and our cowboy boots seemed as strange to them as their clothes did to me. These kids actually wore shorts. We would never, even in the hottest summer days be caught dead in something as “sissyish” as shorts. My parents would let me buy them a “Pop”. So we would put a nickel in our 7-Up machine, which resembled a four foot high square box with a lid that lifted up. In it were rows of different flavors of Sun Crest (lime, orange, strawberry and grape), Squirt, Dr. Pepper and Royal Crown. We would scoot the bottle along the metal row and pull it through a turnstile and then use the opener that was on the side of this machine. We had never heard of screw-tops or diet drinks back then.

I would take them out behind the motel, these greenhorns from Delaware or Alabama. We would march across the wash and up into the hills. I would warn them of the rattlesnakes and Gila Monsters with a great deal of bravado, even though I was likely more afraid than they were. I would show them lizards and horned toads and laugh as they squealed when a covey of quail or a jackrabbit suddenly took off from a bush in front of us. I learned so much about interacting with others from my Roping Cowboy years as I led our young guests into the wild western hills.

We had radios in each motel room that could be played for ten cents for a half hour of KAAA, the only station we could tune into. Since we had no TV in town, we had no TV in the rooms. At least once a month someone would break into the cash box of one of the radios and pilfer the 40 or 50 cents that was in there. The customers would drive into our driveway in their Packard, Studebaker or Nash Rambler. Each would have one or two burlap bags filled with water hanging from their front bumper as an insurance policy to help them cross the desert. My Dad had a couple of old cars that didn’t run parked at the motel that he called “decoys” so that potential customers would think the motel was busy and they better pull in and grab a room while they lasted. We had a 1955 Ford Station Wagon the size of a small Sherman tank as our family car. It was the brightest shade of lemon yellow one could imagine and I have always surmised my Dad bought it so it would be seen from the highway as our “prospects” drove by.

I don’t think we ever sat down for an entire dinner as a family since the supper hour was the same time most customers were pulling off the road for the night. But I thought it was normal to have customer registering in front of you as you ate your green beans. I just assumed every family functioned that way. Nor did it seem odd to me that we had two refrigerators and one was used just for the freezer part where we had stack after stack of tin ice cube trays. When a customer arrived, we would pull the handle on one of these trays and dump the ice cubes into a little container for them. Either no one had invented an ice machine for motels yet, or my parents couldn’t afford one.

We had one phone in the motel for all of the 14 guest rooms and our family. The number was Red 272. When the customers wanted to call home they would have to come into our living room or office (they were one and the same). Our family might be playing cards or doing a jigsaw puzzle and the customer would have to sit down with us on our couch next to the phone and call home. I would pick up the phone and Mary Lou, the operator at the phone company would answer and I would tell her the number the guest wanted to call and ask her to call me back with the “T & C” (Time and Charges). We all sat there listening to every word while pretending we were not doing exactly that. I still remember the time a customer called and spoke in another language. I had no idea what the language was, but I knew it wasn’t Spanish, English or Native American (We just called it Indian back then), Kingman’s three languages. It was amazing to learn that there might actually be a different way to talk other than the town’s three languages. I remember that night feeling so lucky to have heard this other language and it made me feel quite worldly. To this day I remember the man was wearing a red checked flannel shirt like a lumberjack and he had a long beard.

The memories are many, a few sad, many funny and all fill a warm spot in my heart and in my head. We had a dog named Shamrock that had the exasperating habit of lifting his leg onto the luggage of some of our customers, a tactic that did not contribute to my Dad’s quest for repeat business. Once, one of our customers reported a rattlesnake in the corner of the carport of room #10. These carports were made of concrete floors and ceilings and three concrete walls with the only opening being where you drove the car into it. With my self-image of being a budding Wyatt Earp I quickly came to the rescue. I loaded my .22 rifle, took careful aim and shot at the snake. Of course, I was so nervous I missed. The bullet hit the cement floor and in a micro-second, ricocheted off of a couple of walls and hit the dirt about an eighth of an inch from the customers’ shoe. They promptly asked for their money back and checked out.

Another time I was going to use the Boy Scout skills learned from Scoutmaster J.C. Moore and the St. Mary’s Boy Scout troop. I felt my little brother Steve needed a lesson in fire safety. It was early July, right before the monsoon season (always a funny term for a town that gets less rain in a year than most places do in a month), and right after several months of no rain. I was explaining to him that to build a campfire safely, you needed to find some dry brush and put it under the mesquite or catclaw branches you were going to burn. Behind the motel we had an acre or two of brittle dry grass about 8 inches high. So, to demonstrate my prowess to my eager student, I lit a match and held it on some of the dry grass “to see if it was dry enough to start a campfire”. Needless to say, it was definitely dry enough and within 15 seconds the entire field behind the motel was burning ferociously. If it wasn’t for Bill Casson, Jim Cox, Lee Williams and all the others from the Volunteer Fire Department, the motel would have burned to the ground within an hour. My parents suggested I take up stamp collecting instead of campfire building after that.

Then there were the chores. We would have to “strip” the beds. There is nothing like taking the linen off of motel beds and picking up the dirty towels to further the education of a young boy on what goes on in the world. As we stripped the rooms, we would gather all the used little hand soaps that all motels had back then. We would grind up these bars in an old hand cranked meat grinder out in our tin “Washhouse” and then use that soap to wash the sheets before ironing them on a contraption called a mangle. I was always a little suspicious that there might be health issues surrounding taking used soap and washing the linens with it, but given my fire department experience, I wasn’t in a position to be questioning my parents’ judgment.

Our motel was on Highway 93 along with eight other motels. In addition to The Roping Cowboy, there was the Kit Carson Motel, the Angel Motel, the Loma Vista Lodge, the Western Motel, the She-Kayah Courts, the Diamond H Motel, the Williams Court and the Saguaro Motel. Later the Holiday House was built across from the Diamond H. Every evening my Mom would load us into the car and we would cruise up and down Highway 93 and count how many cars were at each motel (we knew which ones were their decoys) and report back to my Dad who kept a record of the competitions vacancy rate. At the north end of the string of motels was the Gateway Lounge. I never go to Kingman without passing that old dilapidated building that is still standing without remembering that this is where I received one of my first business lessons.

I had a paper route for the Mohave County Miner, which back then was printed only every Wednesday. The papers sold for a dime and I got to keep a nickel of it. I had a regular route of houses that included the Boyetts, the Brocks, the Dueys the Kuykendalls, the Leons and the Pinkertons as well as several others. But after delivering to the homes, I would go to the Gateway Lounge to sell my papers. There, all the men (and back then it was only men) would be having a beer after a hot day in the sun. They would often give me a quarter and tell me to keep the change. One day I showed a couple of them a magic trick and they paid me a dollar for my ten cent paper. I may have been naïve, but I wasn’t stupid. I quickly figured out that if I would go each week to the library at St. Mary’s school and read up on a new magic trick, I could make a 95 cent profit per paper instead of the nickel profit. A couple of years ago I was made a member of the Order of Merlin, a special designation of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, where I have been a member for decades. When this occurred, I thought back to my beginning as a magician. As strange as it sounds, it all began in a bar-the Gateway Lounge, and on the patio of the Roping Cowboy where I would do my first shows.

Over the last three and a half decades since I left Kingman I have been blessed with a career in business that has taken me and my family all over the world. I’ve learned where Ohio, Minnesota, Arkansas and Vermont are along with all the other places where our customers at the motel traveled from. I am honored and humbled to be the CEO of a company with thousands of employees whose careers are entrusted to me. When I think back to what was the one thing in my upbringing that enabled me to be prepared for this leadership role, I realize that it was what I learned about business, about making presentations and about interacting with strangers from my days at The Roping Cowboy. That, coupled with the values I learned from my parents to always be humble, to treat others with respect and to always have fun and laugh no matter what you do has resulted in a wonderful life. If I had it to do all over again, I would grow up at The Roping Cowboy Motel.

J. Grover Thomas, Jr.

Lake Forest, IL

May 15, 2004