「经济学人」Over the Rainbow

From joyrides and drugs to economic dynamism

IT IS RARE for crickets to drone out pickup trucks. But off a country highway, Texas’s oldest motel is anything but common. The grit of a typical roadside stop is replaced by an oasis that tells the story of a changing South.

Rainbow Courts “follows the history of the automobile”, says Joan Ratliff, its owner. When her great-uncle Monroe Bullock bought land in Rockdale in 1918, cars were new. Since many models didn’t have windscreens and roads were unpaved, holiday-goers would arrive in the boonies spattered in dirt. Mr Bullock reckoned they would rather drive up to the door of their room than track mud through the lobbies of the town’s hotels.

He furnished some small cottages on a four-acre plot, planted irises between them and started renting rooms. By the mid-20s the place was touristy: a newspaper suggested driving past at dusk to see it lit up by a constellation of campfires. During the second world war it was majors and lieutenants whose names filled the guestbook. Tennessee Williams, a playwright, stayed one night.

In the 1950s Alcoa, an aluminium-smelting firm, moved in and Rockdale’s population doubled to 5,000. Restaurants opened to entertain cosmopolitan executives and locals got good jobs at the plant. The motel boomed.

When the hippie movement captured the hearts of America’s urbanites, Ms Ratliff’s parents, the new owners, put in orange shag carpets and fake wall-panelling. Rates were cheap and though credit cards were hip, the motel took only cash. It became a druggie party joint and local teens sold sex to guests.

In 1992 Ms Ratliff moved back from a stint in the Midwest to run the business. Within a year she had straightened the place up and Alcoa’s big shots came to stay. But when the plant closed in 2008 the town slumped into a depression.

These days travellers come for weddings and an annual rodeo. A bitcoin mine helped Rainbow Courts survive the pandemic and an article on the Thorndale Meat Market in Texas Monthly brings barbecue buffs to town for smoked sausage. Ms Ratliff, now in her 70s, is keen to sell the motel. She reckons business will only get better. Samsung is building a $17bn chip factory in Taylor, half an hour’s drive down Highway 79.

Sitting in one of the cottages, Ms Ratliff recalls chasing the maids as a little girl. A Coca Cola machine, which broke just a few years ago, has sat by the check-in desk since the 1930s. She plans to take it with her. “They don’t make appliances like that anymore,” she says.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Over the Rainbow”(Aug 29th 2024)

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