Word: motoring
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...most striking contrast is between the poverty of the masses and the grotesque luxury of the Communist elite. There is no middle ground between the peasant donkey cart and the chauffeur-driven Mercedes from the state motor pool. Farm land is almost totally collectivized, and most peasants are virtually paid off with a lek and a promise. Tirana has a TV transmitter that broadcasts to a total of 200 TV sets owned by party officials. Albanian workers patch holes in their trousers with bits of vulcanized rubber, but in the new "jet class" "the men wear Italian-cut suits...
...downtown hotel is feeling the pinch of a new kind of competition: the motel. For years glued to the roadsides of the nation, the motel is moving into town. San Francisco, where only one conventional hotel has been built in 30 years, has acquired 52 "motor inns," as the intown motels are called nowadays; in Manhattan, which last summer got its first new hotel in 30 years, there are three big new motor inns and two more abuilding; a new motor inn in Washington, six blocks from the White House, is one of five built in the past five years...
Secret of the motor inn's success is its convenience and the fact that the U.S. citizen hates to be far separated from his car. Once the motorist arrives at the usual hotel, his car is taken from him and deposited in some costly limbo, from which he must bail it out with what seems like an everlasting stream of tips and usually a sizable garage bill...
...motor inn, things are different. The motorist can drive up, sign in, and often keep his car right outside his door. In some multifloored motor inns, the guest drives his car up ramps and leaves it outside his room: in other cases, it is parked directly beneath. From the moment he checks in, the guest has direct access from room to car, never has to clean up the children to run the gamut of a lobby, never has to wait for an attendant to bring the car around from the garage...
...perhaps the strangest evidence of all was that Chief Flight Engineer John Mayfield had blithely repaired a fuel pump motor on the Constellation the day before the crash by cutting down a brush taken from a 1954 Mercury automobile generator. As it turned out, the engine with the ersatz part kept going during the fatal flight. But engineers from established airlines blinked in dismay at Imperial's incredibly slipshod methods of maintenance. Said one: "They must have been a little desperate...