The Pittsburgh Press (March 27, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – For eight years Mrs. Nellie Coffman hung onto Palm Springs like a stubborn dog clinging to a stick. If she hadn’t done so, you never would have heard of the place.
From 1909 to 1917 her effort to run a resort hotel way out here on the desert was a touch-and-go affair. A few people came, but most people didn’t.
Mrs. Coffman worked day and night. She kept books just like a farmer – she had two spikes, one for paid bills, the other for unpaid. At the end of each winter season, the unpaid stack was always the higher.
The Coffmans had some real estate in Santa Monica. Piece by piece this was sold to meet the bills at the end of each unsuccessful season on the desert.
Nobody had any faith in the thing but Mrs. Coffman. Today she gives the bulk of the credit to the two boys. But they themselves admit they couldn’t see it, and anyhow they were away most of those tough early years, in school and then through the war.
Dr. Coffman, who was running the sanitarium end of the thing in a tent colony, also could not vision the day when people would flock to the desert. He held on a few years, and then went back to the coast. Mrs. Coffman was on her own.
Through all those years she wouldn’t give up. Her son Earl says of her today, “I don’t know whether it was Mother’s ability to see ahead, or just her plain stubbornness, that made her hang on. Probably a little of both.”
But hang on she did, and in 1917 things began to break her way. The virtues of Palm Springs had begun to get about the country by word of mouth. People began to hear of the quiet and restfulness of the desert, of the winter sunshine, of Mrs. Coffman’s little Desert Inn.
Not a flu death in World War
In 1917 the new crop of war millionaires looked afield for vacation places, and came to Palm Springs. And eastern families of old riches, cut off from Europe for the first time, also came. But most of all, the flu epidemic filled the place up.
Palm Springs kept itself without a flu death in the World War. Those that did get flu were immediately isolated. Los Angeles physicians sent their families to Palm Springs for safety. Everything was crowded. Everybody worked himself to death. In those days Mrs. Coffman worked until she felt she couldn’t keep going. She was all alone now, too.
That was the toughest time, the crisis. And it was then that her beloved desert sustained her.
Mrs. Coffman is not a dreamy woman, or one given to fancy flights of soul-soaring, but she is a person of fine sensitivities – the kind who can draw courage from a flower or a thunderstorm. And her greatest strength and solace came from her love of the desert.
“In those terrible days in 1918,” she says, “almost every evening just before sunset I’d go to a big sand mound south of town, and just sit there alone for about three-quarters of an hour, feeling the desert. Of course I didn’t go every day, you know, but every time I could, I went. And I think that’s what pulled me through.”
To see her now – always cheerful – always friendly – you’d never guess that she was once a melancholy and depressed kind of person. She was before she came to the desert. Even now, when she goes to the coast on trips, the corners of her mouth go down and she’s a changed person. She is happy only in the desert.
Her feeling for the desert is nothing faddish, nothing she has thought up as an old sentimentalism now that her success is established. It is something as deep as one human’s love for another, and it has been with her every moment since she set foot on these sands.
Uses Hoosier ‘out of whack’ expression
The first auto came to Palm Springs two years after Mrs. Coffman arrived. She says the unreliability of autos was all that kept her going for years.
“Seems like they were always getting out of whack,” she says. (She’d almost have to come from Indiana to use that expression “out of whack.”)
“They’d get this far and then they’d get out of whack. It would take three weeks to get parts out from Los Angeles. The people would stay a few days, then take the train to the city, then in a couple of weeks come back for the machine. That way we got two cracks at them.”
Things started going more rapidly after 1918. The two boys came home from the war, took a look, and saw what was about to happen. They went into business with their mother, and the three of them within the next decade built the tremendous Desert Inn as it is today – an investment of a million and a half.
Mother Coffman calls George the “watchdog of the treasury,” because he handles the book and business end. Earl is the active manager. But Mrs. Coffman is not resting on her laurels by any means. She still dreams and plans ahead. And she works. She spends all forenoon supervising the housekeeping and kitchen departments, and chinning with the workers.
In the afternoons you’ll find her around the lobby or the grounds most of the time. She loves to talk with the guests. She has been doing it for 30 years, and has never got tired of it. “I’ll talk to anybody who’ll listen to me,” she says.