An anonymous donation will enable the neon sign of the historic Boots Motel in Carthage, Mo., to be restored by “early next year” — including its original color scheme and original “Boots Court” name.
Debye Harvey, co-owner of the Route 66 landmark that dates to 1939, explained what happened in a Facebook post on Wednesday:
Thanks to a generous, anonymous donation, the famous Boots Motel neon sign will be totally restored early next year! In fact, it will be restored to its earliest configuration, when it said “BOOTS COURT”! The sign will be re-painted in the original red and white as shown in the photo, and the new letters spelling out COURT re-fabricated by the company that made the original sign, out of Joplin, Missouri, Wilhite Signs. […] Information on a sign-relighting party to follow once we know more about the timetable of the sign restoration.
This is the original configuration Harvey is referring, as shown from a vintage postcard:
After a nearly 10-year hiatus, the Boots Motel reopened to overnight travelers in May after Harvey and her sister Priscilla Bledsaw bought the once-endangered property. Just five rooms are available for travelers now, but the sisters plan to use revenue to restore the landmark to its circa-1949 heyday. One of the plans is to remove the gabled roof and bring back its original flat roof.
This fall, Emily Priddy, with help from Boots Motel property manager Ron Hart and me, repainted the weather-beaten sign so it could be more easily seen:
Alas, the wiring inside the sign was too jerry-rigged and deteriorated for the neon to come back on after the face-lift. But we knew the repainting job was temporary, and that Harvey wanted to eventually restore the sign to its original “Boots Court” configuration, which we caught a glimpse of during the project.
Thanks to the anonymous donor, the Boots Court sign will come back to life more quickly than anticipated. And we couldn’t be happier.
That’s fantastic!
That looks to be “Television – BOOTS COURT – Air Conditioned – United Motor Courts – Bell telephones” on the postcard, which would date this to the 1950’s.
United Motor Courts was a referral chain; a group of independent motels which printed a free directory listing all motels in the group that met some minimum standard, so that each was promoting the others. According to Wikipedia’s [[motel]] article, “United Motor Courts, founded 1933 by a group of motel owners in the southwestern US to co-operate in upgrading properties, printed an annual guidebook until the early 1950s”. This was how independents promoted themselves in the days before Best Western and the Quality Courts (the latter is now a franchise chain).
The original television stations locally were KOLR (KTTS, CBS 10 Springfield, March 14, 1953), KOAM (CBS 7 Joplin, December 13, 1953) and KODE (NBC 12 Joplin, 1954, now ABC). KYTV (NBC 3, Springfield) first signed on October 1, 1953.
That pretty much forces the United Motor Court with the TV in Carthage into the mid to late 1950’s. It’s very possible the UMC signage was left up after the original referral chain stopped printing a guidebook (Burma-Shave signs had to be removed from rented farm land at the end of the campaign in 1963 but the UMC sign was on land the motel keeper owned).
I’d be curious to know if there were photos from 1949, the specific point in the “radio in every room” era targeted by the sisters in restoring this motor court. That would’ve been the time the Carthage Drive-In movie park opened (with the neon signage, original 4:3 aspect ratio and speaker poles, a design to which “Radiator Springs Drive-In” looks suspiciously similar)
Now to see if they raise the money soon enough to “raze the roof”… wasn’t there an April 2013 deadline for the federal matching grant?