Hotels, rivers and cars in swimming pool

Imagine you live in a city by a river. There used to be at least one bustling hotel right in the downtown, but that building was boarded up well before the early 1980s.

Along comes the Hyatt string of hotels and decides they are going to build a big old hotel right there on the river. It was "if you build it, they will come" in real life.

Only no one came. The hotel was, and is, a 2-hr. drive for 60% of the population of the state. The hope was for conventions (yay!), big name musical acts (yowza!), and people galore pumping money into the slumping economy in the city (ka-ching!).

Well, today the building may or may not be a convention center, for the Institute in Basic Life Principles. It was purchased by this group in 2000.

I believe by the time I moved away from Michigan, in early 1985, Hyatt had already departed dear old Flint, after only a few months of dismal failure - although rumor had it that Mick Jagger stayed there one time.

Speaking of hotels/motels, my first summer job after my freshman year of college was at the Holiday Inn, located just off I-75 by the Chevy plants and the airport. This motel was the scene of Keith Moon (the late drummer for The Who) driving a car into the swimming pool - although Moon biographer Tony Fletcher claimed it was just a myth.

Said Roger Daltry in a 2003 interview on NPR marking the 25th anniversary of Moon's untimely death, "I saw it. We paid the bill (for the damages). It was $50,000. It's vague now, but I just remember the car in the pool. And the chaos. And Keith being rushed off to the dentist after being arrested because he knocked his front tooth out... But then I read in the biography that never happened, so maybe I've been living someone else's life, I don't know."

Yeah, well I remember the news stories!

Plus Flint DJ Peter C. Cavanaugh of WTAC, or "WeeTAC," as we all called it in the 60s, was apparently there when this all went down. I believe WTAC, an AM station, was the first in America to play The Who.