Twenty Years at the Creede Hotel

A couple of patterns have emerged over the decades that the Creede Hotel has been bought and sold. First: when it’s for sale, it is usually decrepit. Second: if you’re lucky, and if you decide to give your whole life to it while it’s in your hands, you might leave it a little better than you found it. That pattern is the exception rather than the rule, but happily it was the case when the hotel was in my family, starting in 1946.

Casing the joint. R to L: Dixie, OK Hargraves, Jim Skelly (Dixie’s last husband). Others are unknown.