Neflie's Boarding House

The little old lady in the crisp white Mother Hubbard and blue gingham sunbonnet looked out of place in Palm Springs, California's gold-plated winter playground for Hollywood stars and Eastern industrialists. So did her horse-drawn buckboard with its "Nellie's Boarding House" sign. Nevertheless, as she rode along Palm Canyon Drive with her two middle-aged sons by her side, the towns people lined the street to wave. They were well aware that without Nellie Coffman the town might not have been what it is today.

As Palm Springs's biggest winter season began last week, Nellie Coffman celebrated her 80th birthday by riding out to a picnic at the base of towering (10,831 ft.) Mount San Jacinto. There she got 82 birthday cakes ("two to grow on") from friends, some of whom had watched Nellie transform her boarding house into the swank Desert Inn. The story of Nellie had become local history: how she had set herself up as a sort of self-appointed Chamber of Commerce to bring tourists in, keep gamblers out, double as preacher at burial services, and occasionally help neighbors.

The Vision. When Nellie opened her place in 1909 there was not much at Palm Springs but a run-down hotel, eleven dilapidated houses and a handful of settlers.

But Nellie had wanted to settle there since 1897, when, recovering from pneumonia, she spent a summer at a rest camp high up on San Jacinto. The camp owner had pointed to the scrub-covered desert below and said: "There's the place to spend the winter." Her father, a hotelkeeper in Santa Monica, laughed at Nellie's notion that Palm Springs would boom if it had a good boarding house; you couldn't even get to it on the railroad. Nellie reminded him that they had come West from Indiana by ox-wagon. "All the place needs is comfortable accommodations and good food," she said. "The auto roads will follow." Nellie went to Palm Springs and bought 1 1/4 acres and a bungalow on the lee (east) side of San Jacinto for $5,000. She set up a tent for herself, rented the three bedrooms in the house to guests, usually folks with tuberculosis or asthma. Gradually she expanded the house, but it took her until 1919 to show her first profit. As a village grew up around her inn, she bought another 35 acres of land.

The Reality. In 1924, as Nellie had predicted, the paved highway came, not long after she and her sons, George Roberson, now 60 (by her first husband) and Earl Coffman, now 55, had borrowed $35,000 to build the first concrete buildings which are now part of the rambling Desert Inn, with its tile-roofed guest houses, swimming pool and tennis court. They continued expanding through 1930, when the depression caught them $675,000 in debt. Not until 1945 did Nellie manage to pay off all her debts.

Since V-J day, the inn and Palm Springs have boomed as never before. The 115 assorted hotels, luxury auto courts and apartment hotels will take care of between 40,000 and 50,000 guests between now and next May. The inn alone, which charges from $15 to $25 a day for a single room with meals, hopes to gross $800,000 to $900,000.

Yet the inn does not go after business from movie stars. They go to newer places like the Racquet Club and the Lone Palm Hotel. Says the inn's majordomo: "They are here today and gone tomorrow. Our guests are people whose incomes keep on going."

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