Sep 15, 2005 - 06:01:30 CDT
Bismarck Tribune
By LAUREN DONO By LAUREN DONOVAN
MOTT - Not every town has a place so vital it's a beating heart that everything flows to and from.
Mott did, until fire destroyed the Holiday House Hotel on Nov. 6, 1989. It was a grand name for a grand three-story, verandah-style structure that anchored the community's downtown for eight decades.
A river of brown coffee was poured into white ceramic cups for card parties, civic clubs, wedding receptions, baby showers, Friday fish fries and Sunday smorgasbords.
Grownups gabbed and drank coffee in booths alongside teenagers blowing their week's allowance on salty french fries and Coca-Colas. Guests from all over and a lot of custom combiners rented the rooms upstairs with their iron bedsteads and oak trim.
The memories of a busy lobby, restaurant and rooms weren't extinguished by fire. They'll come to life Saturday and Sunday, in a production called "Memories of the Hotel."
In the words of director Joyce Hinrichs, the production is a collage of music and comedy wrapped in memory that started from the work of a writer's group in the area.
Performances are at 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in the high school auditorium in Mott. Proceeds will go toward Mott's new Gallery of History and Art, which has moved into the former Commercial Bank building.
Nothing can bring back the Holiday House. But 32 singers and actors from Mott are having a lot of fun trying. The cast isn't young anymore. Some are in their 70s and 80s, still game to put on a costume, or belt out a solo.
The hotel owners, Frank and Loraine Masad, now of Bismarck, will get front row seats for both productions. The Masads owned the Holiday House from 1958, until it burned that autumn night 16 years ago.
It survived decades of old furnaces and hot stoves, only to succumb to the bad wiring of a space heater by one of the renters upstairs. The Masads'oldest daughter, Deb, was pulled from the second story that night into the bucket of a utility truck. A guest escaped by sliding down an extension cord.
The Masads' younger daughter, Val Albrecht of Hazen, said her folks are looking forward to the show. "This is really going to be something," Albrecht said. "The folks are really looking forward to seeing what they make of all this."
The Masads are portrayed on stage and Ray Bieber, who's taller by a foot and fairer by half than the real McCoy, plays Frank Masad. But Bieber's got the laugh down and the hand that wielded a fly swatter all summer long. Helen Green of Mott plays one of the female card players. She's in her 80s now, but she remembers when.
"The hotel was our hangout," she said at rehearsal this week. "It was so sad when it burned, one of the saddest days Mott has ever had."
The production promises a lot of laughs, especially by anyone who recalls the very real trauma that happened whenever Frank and Loraine Masad raised the price of a cup of coffee. Customers swore they'd never be back, but who could resist watching all that life come and go?
Lanny Johnson, of Mott, who's helping with backstage production and still in his 40s, said even he remembers "what a fiasco that was," when coffee went up nickel.
Urban Gratz, for years the school's band instructor, is directing the musical parts of the production - and there's a lot of music. He said he hopes the audience can keep track of the production, which is written so that groups like wedding parties, Lions Club members and Halloween partiers, are constantly meandering in and out of the hotel. That's the way it really was.
"It was the center of activity - activity was coming out its ears," he said.
Good thing the hotel didn't really have ears, because would've heard some doozies over the years. And for some, there might be tears.
Gratz said he's run through the finale a hundred times and it still chokes him up. But no fair spoiling the ending.
Hinrichs said she thinks people will enjoy the production, which strives mightily to bring back what was lost to Mott when the grand old hotel went up in flames.
"It was such a strong center," she said. "People are so pleased to see it come back."
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