Ervin Shane and the Sunshine Motel

Summary

“The miracle of loneliness is that sooner or later it makes you act otherwise.”

Illuminated by extraordinary tenderness, Ervin Shane and The Sunshine Motel is a poignant tale about origins and endings told in the plain speak of a man tired of living a hand-to-mouth existence in the racist, post-WWII south.

In 1951, Ervin Shane boarded a Greyhound headed to wherever the winter sun was warmer. A thousand miles later, a layover in a West Texas bus station and a chance browsing of the want-ads led him to curtail his journey and take up as the custodian of The Sunshine Motel - a neon-bathed oasis situated halfway between somewhere and somewhere else, offering wayfarers, “…clean sheets, a warm blanket and a soft pillow for those lost souls bound for nowhere in particular.”

And so begins the chronicle and construction of a humble life; a beautiful and haunting story of classic simplicity; a story of indefinite echoes.

©2023 Mark Warford (P)2023 Mark Warford