October 2006 Archives

6:35 p.m. Oct 24
The idea of the swinging Mexican hideaway was born at the Hotel Los Flamingos in Acapulco, Mexico. That idea sounds good about now. Its cold in Chicago and I'm thinking of returning to Acapulco, where during the 1950s and 60s the hip went to sip and flip.
In the 1950s Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller and a bunch of his Hollywood cronies bought Los Flamingos, a shocking pink 45-room shangrila atop a 450-foot cliff, one of the highest points of Acapulco.
Weissmuller died in in 1984 in Acapulco. He spent the last four years of his life in a secluded two-bedroom roundhouse that still stands at Los Flamingos. Its still affordable to rent out Tarzan's home and if I ever get married again, this is high on my list of honeymoon locations. There's a quiet mountainside pool surrounded by banana trees and an outdoors bar and gazebo. Current hotel owner Adolfo Santiago was a Los Flamingos bus boy in the 1950s and he recalls Weissmuller yelling his "Tarzan Cry" late at night in the roundhouse while fighting the advancing stages of dementia.
AAAAAhhhhh as in Acapulco..............

BY DAVE HOEKSTRA
APRIL 2, 2006
[Archived from Chicago Sun-Times; this is one of my top three favorite hotels in America]

MADISON, Wis. -- The best hotel creates a community within a borrowed city. You are no longer a stranger in town. You have arrived. This was not lost on the Elvis Presley entourage, who knew something about weird road trips.

Anyone who has paid attention to a tour of the Lisa Marie airplane in Memphis will notice a closet that has a wooden hanger from the Edgewater Hotel in Madison. During the mid-1970s Elvis and his pals took over two floors of the Art Deco hotel on the shores of Lake Mendota.

Someone wanted to keep this borrowed moment.

BY DAVE HOEKSTRA
SPRING TRAINING, 2006
(Archived from the Chicago Sun-Times)

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- In 1956, parents of both teen idol Natalie Wood and actor Robert Wagner stayed at the Hotel Valley Ho in downtown Scottsdale. When Wood and Wagner got hitched on Dec. 28, 1957, the elder Wagners suggested they have their reception at the Arizona hotel to escape Hollywood paparazzi.
"They had a private train car to go to Colorado for their honeymoon," recalled former Hotel Valley Ho general manager Mike Doherty during a recent conversation in the hotel lobby. "They stayed a little long at their reception. Of course, trains don't wait. The train took off -- and Wood and Wagner got in a car and started chasing the train through Phoenix."
The kids were after dreams in the sun.

Updated,
6 p.m. Oct. 17

The soul of America could be heard in the searching tenor of Freddy Fender. The popular country balladeer died Saturday of complications from lung cancer. He was 69.