The Pittsburgh Press (March 26, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – Life really began after 40 for Nellie Coffman, the extraordinary woman who owns the Desert Inn here, and who is the founder of the entire institution of desert vacationing.
She is almost 75 now. She was 42 when she came to Palm Springs. She was a mature woman then, twice married, mother of two grown sons. She brought with her to Palm Springs a fanatical love for the desert, a complete lack of business experience, and a laughably small amount of money.
At the end of her first season as a resort proprietor she had $65 in the bank. She paid $50 of that on some land. She had to get through the fall and start her second season on $15. That was in 1909. Today you couldn’t buy her out for two million.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
Like practically all important people (ahem), Mrs. Coffman sprang from Indiana. She was born in the village of Patoka, on the banks of the Wabash. But she remembers little about it, for her folks moved to Texas when she was a child.
Her father was a contractor. Nellie Orr, as she was then, was brought up in Dallas. She married and had one son – George Roberson. Her first husband died. Later in California she married again and bore another son – Earl Coffman. Both are here with her today.
The history of the Orr family had been one of moving onward to new lands where there was more room. Theirs was the blood of pioneers. Down through the generations they had followed the new places from North Carolina to the Midwest to Texas and finally to California.
Money! What’s that?
After Mrs. Coffman’s second marriage, she and the children were alone, because her husband was in medical school in Philadelphia. Unfortunately the commodity known as money was something they hadn’t much of.
Then suddenly ill health came to plague her. That was in the days when doctors treated incipient tuberculosis with altitude, and lots of it. They told her she had to get above 5000 feet, and stay there.
So she took her little money and her two boys and went up on old Mt. San Jacinto, where she got cheap accommodations in a private home.
She stayed up there four months, and her tuberculosis was cured forever. Also up there her entire career was mapped, although she didn’t know it at the time. The family cook did it.
This cook kept talking about a village down on the desert called Palm Springs, where she went every winter when it got too cold on the mountain.
The cook was an uneducated woman, but her powers of description were so vivid and her enthusiasm was so catching that Mrs. Coffman took a vow that some day she would see this fabulous little village. The year was 1898. She didn’t see Palm Springs until 10 years later.
She came down off the mountain a well woman. Her husband finished medical school and set up practice in Santa Monica. For a decade Mrs. Coffman was a mother and a housewife.
But gradually the dampness and “gray days” of the coastline began to get on her nerves. It finally became an obsession with her, and once more she had to get away to preserve herself.
Long-delayed trip
Finally she made her long-delayed trip to Palm Springs. As soon as she saw this desert, she knew she was here forever. Here the sun shone, both out of the sky and within herself.
She made a plan. She would start an inn or boarding house, for people on holiday from Los Angeles. She went back and laid the plan before her father, who had moved to Los Angeles in the 80s.
Her father couldn’t see it. “Nobody will ever go out there,” he said. “It’s too far and there’s nothing on the desert for people.”
“You believe in Los Angeles, don’t you?” she asked her father. He did indeed. He sat that day and told her that some day Los Angeles would grow until it was solid city from downtown clear to the ocean. It’s that way today.
“All right,” said Mrs. Coffman, “I think it will too. And when that day comes. I’m going to have the sandpile in Los Angeles’ backyard for people to play in!”
And so in the fall of 1909 Mrs. Coffman and her husband and her two boys came to Palm Springs. The village consisted of 13 houses, 11 white people and 56 Indians.
It would be two years before the first auto arrived. It was six miles to the railroad, and they made the trip to the depot or supplies in a spring wagon.
There was no water pressure in the town, no electricity, no gas, no phone. Everybody had his own cow, including the Coffmans. People did their own washing.
“You could have bought 10 square miles, including the town, for $50,000,” Mrs. Coffman told me. Today there are single lots you couldn’t buy for that.
Mrs. Coffman opened her establishment for guests on October 16, 1909, she had seven rooms. Three were in a frame house; four were in a converted barn. They weren’t much, but they were clean. She waited a whole month before her first guest came.
She charged him $5 a day for room and board, and she did most of the work herself. Today a single guest pays from $12 to $20 a day, and Mrs. Coffman hires 200 people to see that he is properly pampered.