Horrible travel tale: I feel like we've done this one before, but, oh, well. It was, IIRC, 1964 and my father was President of the SLC Lion's Club. The national Lion's Club convention that year was in LA, so we all went with the ultimate goal (at least to my extremely young way of thinking) of "doing" Disneyland. The Lion's Club had pre-booked us at a downtown hotel called the Normandy Wilshire. We drove to LA and got to said hotel, where we were met by a very small Oriental bellhop who removed our luggage from the trunk and promptly shut his tie in said trunk. My father was not paying attention and started to pull away from the curb with the bellhop still attached to the car. This should have been our first clue, but NOOOOOO.....we went inside.
To say that the Normandy Wilshire had seen better days was a bit of an understatement. It evidently had become a "residential hotel," and its residents were not exactly royalty. There was the lady in the straw hat on the folding chair outside who moved her chair up and down the street each day to follow the little bit of shade made by the awning. There was the elderly gentleman with the "talking dog" (it barked) named Earl who would run onto the elevator with anyone coming into the lobby so that he could make Earl "perform." There were many others, but time is short and memory is long, or maybe that's the other way around.
Anyhoo, we got up to our room where my Mother, not exactly a tee-totaler, announced she needed a drink. She just so happened to have her bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Seven-Up in her bag. She had unfortunately forgotten to bring a bottle opener for the Seven-Up. So she inserted the bottle into an open drawer of the chest of drawers, using leverage in the time-honored technique. The entire facade of the chest of drawers splintered off and fell into the room.
She then, in going into the bathroom to throw away pieces of wood, discovered that the sliding glass shower door was not made of frosted glass but was completely transparent.
In the meantime my sisters had discovered that they could identify cars passing below on the street by looking up at the ceiling, whose ancient (undoubtedly led-based) paint was so glossy it was virtually a mirror.
I had decided to do some exploring and found a door at the end of our hallway with steps leading downward. Of course I descended, going down two or three flights and finding another door. You may think I am kidding and/or exaggerating when I tell you this, but I am not: in opening the door, I discovered it was on what may have once been a mezzanine, only:
there wasn't a mezzanine any longer. The door opened into thin air about 30 or 40 feet above the lobby! Had I been wise, I would have jumped then and there, but NOOOOOO....I went back up to the room.
Because we were all staying in one room, my parents had ordered a rollaway bed for me. It was delivered and we unfolded it. I decided to pull back the blankets and we discovered (gross-out alert): wadded up bloody kleenex.
At this point, even my usually unflappable father decided this was probably not the place for us, so he made reservations starting at the next night for the Sheraton at Huntington Beach, IIRC.
In attempting to leave the next morning, we discovered a fascinating quirk of the elevator--it responded instantly to any call button even if it were in the midst of another "delivery." How did we discover this, you may ask? Well, we were loading our bags on the elevator, when it suddenly departed without us. When we finally got on it, we then took a merry trip through the several floors of the Normandy Wilshire, going up, going down, sometimes seemingly going both directions simultaneously, all evidently based on someone pressing the call button on any given floor. Luckily someone in the Lobby must have pressed the call button because we finally got down there.
Some other day, I'll tell you about the Sheraton at Huntington Beach.
