A Troubling Turn of Events by Darrell Maloney

Author:Darrell Maloney [Maloney, Darrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-09-27T22:00:00+00:00

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Maria smiled as she told the story of how their hotel was constructed, and it was obvious to John she’d told the tale many times before.

“They built the Palacio Del Rio for the 1968 Hemisfair, which took place right across the street.

“But they were crunched for time. There was no way they could use traditional construction techniques to build a twenty-one story high-rise in less than a year. So they had to try something new and untested.

“Something nobody else had ever done before.

They built the first four floors as a base.

But all the rooms above the fourth floor were built elsewhere, and were brought in on long flatbed trucks.

“I was a little girl at the time, and we lived over on Quincy Avenue. My mom didn’t work, which was okay because back then most women didn’t. Back then it was pretty much standard practice for men to work outside the home and their wives to stay at home and do the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping.

“I wasn’t in school yet, so I would walk with her up to the Handy Andy supermarket not far from Santa Rosa Hospital a couple of times a week.

“I remember one day we saw this huge truck parked and waiting its turn to be unloaded. It was hauling the oddest thing. It looked like a huge pipe, but it wasn’t round. It was square.

“It was open at both ends, and plenty big enough for an adult to stand inside.

“And the kicker was, it was full of furniture.

“Well, we didn’t know what it was, and as you can imagine it caused quite a stir.

“There were several other people looking at it too and a man asked the truck driver what it was.

“He said it was a fully-furnished hotel room.

“My mom didn’t believe him, so we delayed our shopping trip and took the steps down to the Riverwalk about fifty yards away. We walked along the river until we got to the site of this hotel, and sure enough there was a huge crane in the street out front.

“There were several other trucks lined up just like the one we saw, and the crane was picking up the hotel rooms and stacking them onto the building, just as a child would stack up blocks.”

Julio interrupted her and continued.

“It was just like an erector set on a huge scale. The crane put each room into place and workers bolted it and welded it to the steel framework. Then the next room was lifted in.

“They made each section at a site not far from here, and put the furniture and everything else into them before they were moved to save time.

“It was said they even had telephones, ash trays and trash cans in each room as it was lifted up and put into place. And each of the beds was made.

“I heard all they had to do was to go into each room to straighten everything up and to remove plastic they’d placed on the beds to keep them from getting dusty.

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