Letom

Chickee Hut

First things first. Soon after we bought the Sea Cove Motel we had a chickee hut built by the Seminole Indians of cabbage palm fronds and cypress logs. Some Indians still live in similar structures in the Everglades. This hut was the most important thing we added in the motel to encourage business. We were to repeat this statement many times over the years we were in business when we took our drinks out to the bar after a weary day. It was designed to show the public that we wanted to be friendly - as simple as that. Besides being the symbol of our intentions it was our fun and relaxation. It was our way of building our clientele and a place for a fairly quiet cup of coffee in the early morning and the scene of our cocktail hour in the evening. It was a place for us to keep memorabilia and for the guests to leave an old tennis shoe or old hat or appropriate sign to remember them by. The guests gathered at the hut and read the paper or discussed the last night's escapade. During the day they could escape the sun under the shady hut and enjoy the breeze that the structure seemed to somehow trap. We decorated it for the holidays and parties. I sculptured it in plaster for sale in the office. Pictures were painted of it in oil or water colors or crayon. Poems were composed about it.

To mention a few things left under the hut - a kite with a 50 foot tail that had flown with our motel wash cloth tied to the end of the tail 2,000 feet in the air. The kite flyer said he was helping us advertise. When someone down at the beach would say, "What the hell is that way up there?" He would tell them it was a wash cloth from the Sea Cove Motel. Can't say we got much business from that, but it sure put the wash cloth out of commission. There was a huge sign saying, 'Try Us You'll Like Us" and We Did", which was put up by some favorite guests. A huge post card with a Barbara and Gordon commemorative stamp on it also was presented to the hut. Many empty bottles of liquor hung there and told their own stories. An old teddy bear was left by a caring little girl. A sign that read, 'This is our OOL - notice that there is no P in it - please keep it that way," an electric bug catcher that never worked hung there but then we had few bugs, a marker of the Corps of Engineers that told the level of the hut and a pair of black lace trimmed panties left by a sexy blonde with a sign saying, "Hand washed by Gordon". I never laughed too loudly about that one. Don Sagorski left a poem which appropriately said, "I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in the world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I and if by change we find each other, it is beautiful." As it did for Don, the hut acted for many people like that psychiatrist couch and we suggested to those guests that they could write off their trip to the Sea Cove as a medical expense or get Medicare to finance it.

Chickee hut talk was usually trivia (and we are talking real trivia) - just a mixture of this and that. The hut heard Gordon tell of his dream of falling ,and the next day he jumped in the dumpster to compact the trash with Jay Card and he bounced right out and broke his wrist.

Hut talk was often of the "danger days" for the motel when Coral Springs High School kids tried to rent rooms for just one night, telling us that they were going to celebrate a birthday with just a few friends. Several times we rented to them not realizing what would happen and not knowing they were so young as they always sent the older kids to register. Then hundreds of teenagers would arrive during the evening as the youth grapevine is amazing. Gordon would chase them out of the front and they would come in at the back and sides - even through the bushes of the adjoining property. We would call the police and that would help as long as the officers were there, but the police often treated it as a joke - they should try to run a motel. The beer that young bunch consumed was evidenced by the beer cans we had to clean out of the rooms, the littered yard, and hut bar. . We slept little those nights. Later, we lost rentals as when a young person would come in the office and put down Coral Springs as an address, we would return their money and ask them to try another motel. Some tried to rent the chickee hut and others wanted to set up a bar and sell drinks to the public, but we wanted it just like it was and it worked well that way for everyone.

Motel Kids

Some motels will not take children, but we like kids, have kids of our own, and did not feel it nice to discriminate against them. But we almost changed our policy with just one family. The Blakes arrived one early morning to check into a large one bedroom apartment at the Sea Cove. They awakened us and all our guests as all three kids were whooping and yelling. They put their luggage into the apartment and went right to the pool even though posted rules said there was no swimming until 10 a.m.. So this awoke any guests who might have returned to sleep after the arrival noises. We got them out of the pool, but it only increased their coming into the office every five minutes to see if it was 10 a.m. yet. Gordon finally went and put his chemicals in and swept the pool to get them swimming and out of the office. The mother joined us for our coffee at the hut and interrupted our newspaper reading to explain how bright one of her children was and how he could spell well and do many other wonderful things. But while she was talking, he was opening the sugar packs for the coffee, destroying the bar and ruining the shrubs.

The other son, who was a large boy and quite retarded had found his first love - valves. He just loved to turn on valves of any sort. Since his mother paid no attention to him he spent most of that week turning on valves. The guests finally came to the office and told us that if he turned on our sprinkler system once more and got all the sunbathers, readers and relaxers in the yard wet, they were going to kill him.

We watched the next morning. There was the setting - all the guests relaxing in the sun with their dry towels, books, cigarettes and shoes. The big boy arrived, took one satisfied look and turned on the valve. The guests all rose screaming at him and Gordon was on the run to explain to the mother that she must do something. Her reaction when anything happened was to say with a smile, 'Oh, my God, Bobbie, don't do that," and then go on with whatever she was doing which was usually lying by the pool. Gordon explained that if her son did it again they would be evicted. So he never turned that valve again.

The next time he turned off a valve, it stopped the water to my only washing machine where we did all the linens for the motel. Gordon was gone at the time so I could not wash for hours and got far behind as I did not know the reason it had stopped working. When Gordon came home he found it was the valve and by this time the guests in the cottage had complained that their toilet would not work. Gordon found that valve had also been turned off.

We were desperate to rent, but not that desperate as we could hear daily hammering and banging in the unit of this problem family and we figured there would be little left of it that would not need repairing.