Mrs. George Palmer Putnam
Peg Putnam’s sixteen years, 1950–1966
Margaret Haviland came from Salina, Kansas. During the war she served with the USO there, met a major stationed at Smoky Hill Army Air Field who happened to be George Palmer Putnam, and married him in San Marino in June 1945; she was thirty-six and he was fifty-seven. When he died in January 1950 she had been a hotel-keeper for a little over two years. Within eleven months she had the hotel in the classifieds of Desert Magazine and then the San Francisco Chronicle: “Late George Palmer Putnam’s famed Stove Pipe Wells Hotel… Physical assets exceed $200,000.00. Offered at much less… $100,000.00 annual gross can be accelerated… Most direct (5 hours) paved highway Los Angeles to front door.” It is the only valuation and the only revenue figure in the post-Eichbaum record, and it is the resort’s whole argument in one line of classified copy: five hours of pavement where there had been two days of dirt. Nobody bought it. She stayed sixteen years, longer than Bob and Helene together, longer than anyone who has run the place before or since.
Randall Henderson, the editor of Desert Magazine, stopped in during the summer of 1952 and described what running it alone meant: “She maintains a power plant for light and air-cooling, hauls spring water in tank trucks for her guests.” She told the San Bernardino Kiwanis that autumn that the Putnams had bought the hotel “and then life began,” and that the operation was “completely self-contained”: its own electricity, its own water, an airstrip and a service station. A Kansas paper filled in the rest in 1956. Laundry went out by airplane to a laundry eighty miles away. Drinking water came ten miles from a mountain spring. The postman doubled as grocery boy. There was no telephone; to make a call she drove a seventy-mile round trip. The hotel could be reached only through a Los Angeles office whose number, VAndike 2937, it had kept since the Bennetts. She was, the paper said, probably the only woman running a national park hotel by herself, and the only private landowner in the monument.
What she did with those years was make the hotel the center of something. When the Death Valley ’49ers held their first encampments in 1949, 1950 and 1951, everything happened at Furnace Creek; the hotel appeared in the programme only as full. In the spring of 1952 she was elected a director. In May the board met at her hotel and moved the encampment from December to the weekend of Armistice Day, where it still sits, and that November the first Burro-Flapjack Sweepstakes was run “near Stove Pipe Wells,” the only event not at Furnace Creek. A prospector packed a burro fifty yards, unpacked, built a fire, cooked a flapjack and fed it to the burro, with the last ten points “if the burro ate the hotcakes. They all did.” In 1954 she was first vice-president and the hotel had one event. In 1955 it had three, and she chaired two of them. In 1956 she was president, the first woman to lead the society, and the encampment was officially “at Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells,” with square dancing, a chuck-wagon luncheon, Indian dances and the burro race all on her side of the valley. Eichbaum had won a county board in 1925 by working the committee. Thirty years later his hotel’s owner did the same thing to a different committee, and the Village still works around the date she set.
Her advertising, when she bought any, sold two things: “Home of the Famous Annual Burro-Flapjack Contest,” a tradition two years old, and a husband four years dead, “owned and operated by George Palmer Putnam, renowned author and explorer.” Eichbaum appears nowhere in it. The name was a marketing asset aimed at Los Angeles, and it was a name with a history: Amelia Earhart, the second Mrs. Putnam, had written to the New York Times in 1932 to make it stop calling her Mrs. Putnam at all. The fourth Mrs. Putnam put the name in her hotel’s advertising. In the Inyo papers and the Los Angeles Times she was simply Peg. She worked the off-season as the hotel’s travelling saleswoman, with illustrated talks to church clubs in Pomona and senior citizens in Highland Park, and from those lecterns she told the stovepipe story with none of the hedging of the men who had actually seen the well. Her manager, Earl Driskill, wrote a Death Valley Scotty book that sold 17,500 copies in the lobby. When Scotty died in January 1954, the Associated Press filed the story from Stovepipe Wells, because that is where the reporters were, though the hotel had no telephone. The legend business ran at both levels of the house.
There were hard years inside the good ones. In July 1953 the water heater at the Whitney Portal cabin exploded while she was lighting it, the house Father Crowley had begun and George had finished burned to the ground with his collections in it, and she drove herself down the grade with burns on her hands, arms, face and legs. Two weeks later she was receiving guests. In May 1954 a meteor flashed over the hotel at half past eleven at night, damaged the buildings, and she flew the search herself with a Lone Pine pilot. That November her partner R. R. Henderson of Lone Pine, who owned most of the Dow Hotel and a share of hers, died at fifty-one. In January 1955 a little white burro called Miss Stovepipe stood tethered outside the lobby with a coffee pot, collecting for the March of Dimes, “a hee haw guaranteed for every contribution.” By 1959 the hotel was spending more than $100,000 a year with San Bernardino suppliers, hauled 195 miles over Eichbaum’s road, and a Los Angeles Times writer could say in 1960 that she and a handful of others had made “one of the most desolate spots on earth” into “a cultural mecca,” naming Stovepipe Wells first.
She built the pool, wedge-shaped, in place by November 1964, when the hotel’s last advertisement of her tenure offered “dancing every evening to a real old time western trio,” women cooks, Death Valley movies and a trading post of Navajo rugs. In August 1962 she married Willard J. Lewis, a Beverly Hills real-estate broker, at All Saints Episcopal Church, and kept the hotel anyway, dividing her time between Death Valley and Bel Air. In the spring of 1966 she sold it to the Povahs. Four years later she stood on the highway west of the Village as principal speaker at the dedication of the Eichbaum Toll Road monument, with the original wooden toll sign mounted on it. Three widows carried this hotel: Helene for four years, Agnes Bennett for three, Peg for sixteen. Only one of them turned the place into an institution, and she did it without a telephone.
Sources
Desert Magazine, Feb and Dec 1950, Jul 1952, Nov 1952, Jan 1953, Jan 1954, Nov 1954, Dec 1954, Jan 1955, Nov 1955, Jan 1956, Nov 1956, Jul 1960, Oct 1961 and Nov 1964; Midland Reporter-Telegram (AP), Jun 11, 1945; San Francisco Chronicle, Feb 18, 1951; San Bernardino County Sun, Oct 23, 1952, Nov 4, 1953, Nov 11, 1954, Jan 18, 1955, Nov 23, 1958 and Nov 8, 1959; Inyo Independent, Jul 10, 1953; Hartford Courant (AP), Jan 7, 1954; Los Angeles Times, Jun 3, 1954, May 31, 1960 and Sep 27, 1962; Salina Journal, Sep 27, 1956; Valley Times, Oct 29, 1956; Pomona Progress-Bulletin, Nov 17, 1959; Highland Park News-Herald, Oct 1, 1961; Inyo Register, Oct 18, 1962; Inyo Independent, Nov 19, 1970; NRHP nomination (2012) on the pool.
