The Spar Hills Country Club
a.k.a
The Royal Hotel

Thrown out of our manager Ira's uncle's house, we were camping out in a New Jersey state park while Ira looked for new lodgings for us. Disappointed by his choice of a new place for us to live (a nasty, smelly, unlivable old tourist camp in Mt. Freedom, N.J.), we went down the road to a convenience store in "town"to get a soft drink and decide what we should do. While at the store we met a very nice, and very pregnant 17-year-old girl named Gracia, from North Carolina. She asked if we could give her a ride a few miles down the road to the hotel where she was living, and being the real southern gentlemen we were, we obliged.

The Royal Hotel must have been really nice in it's day (back in the '40's or '50's), a resort hotel spread out over nearly 50 acres of grounds, with about 60 rooms in a pair of two-story buildings, another split-level L-shaped building with two restaurants and a nightclub overlooking an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis courts, and a baseball diamond. But by the time we found the place in the summer of 1970 it was a run-down hippie hotel; tennis courts and ball field all overgrown with brush and trees, restaurant and nightclub long closed, and the swimming pool now spring-fed and green with algae. The hotel's two residential buildings had been raided by the police a few weeks earlier in a drug sweep, so Vince, the owner, had plenty of rooms available. As run down as the place was, it was way better than Ira's choice. We moved in immediately.
The place really needed a lot of work, and Vince wanted to try to open the restaurant and nightclub again, so we worked out a deal: we would play in his nightclub for free and help clean the place up and maintain it in exchange for our rooms.

As we began to get other gigs and actually make money, we found a house of our own, about 30 miles away, outside of Hackettstown, New Jersey. With a friend we had met at the hotel (Dave Osborne, a cemetery plot salesman from England) to share the rent, we moved in, using our one small van to make many trips, finishing at about 5:00am. One of the last things that needed to be moved from Dave's second-story hotel room was his Castro Convertible sofa / fold-out bed. We were trying to carry this (probably 300-pound) couch quietly down the stairs at 4:30 in the morning when the damn thing sprung halfway open, right square in the middle of the landing. It wouldn't close back up, and we couldn't move it up or down, so we finally gave up and left it in the middle of the stairs. Vince must have been pissed. He filed charges against us (defrauding an innkeeper and larceny of hotel room furnishings).

When we went to court to answer the charges, as we were waiting for our case to come up, the bailiff called what turned out to be the case before ours; Vince had been cited for having unlicensed animals and stolen vehicles on the hotel property. The judge gave him a pretty hard time. Apparently, Vince had been brought before him several times before on similar charges. The case against Vince was disposed of (I forget how it came out), and then our case was up.
Vince took the witness stand and told the judge that we had moved out owing rent, and had stolen some room furnishings (beds, tables, etc.). The judge asked him if he had any written records of our debt, and Vince handed him a list of charges hastily scribbled on a piece of cardboard (the inside of the back of a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes). The judge then called Vince's only eyewitness to our "crime", one of the hotel's residents who testified that I was the only person he had seen leaving with anything. When asked what I was carrying, he replied "a paper bag". The judge asked if this bag was big enough to hold a bed, or a dresser, to which the witness smiled and answered "no, sir, it looked like laundry to me".

Case Dismissed!