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| As the sign sinks slowly in the west, Vickie and Mike Stahl hope travelers on I-94 won’t come knocking anymore to see if there is a vacancy. The Stahls moved into the Flickertail in November last year. Mike teaches welding at Sheyenne Valley Area Career and Technology Center, and Vickie, a registered nurse, commutes to Fargo. Carla Kelly/VCTR |
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Last Friday, there was a new bird at the Flickertail Motel: the crane. Two cranes, in fact, and they weren’t looking for a bird refuge.
The objective was to uproot the Flickertail sign from where it had rested more than 50 years.
Mike and Vickie Stahl bought the former motel last November when Mike became the welding instructor at Sheyenne Valley Area Career and Technology Center. Vickie, a registered nurse, works for MeritCare Extended Hour Home Health in Fargo.
They weren’t planning to buy the motel. In fact, the Stahls had purchased a lot on Oak Street just south of the motel, intending to build.
“Mike noticed that some of the motel’s doors were off, and asked the realtor about it,” Vickie said.
The motel belonged to Bob and Bonnie Burchill. They hadn’t been planning to sell, but when the Stahls approached them, they reconsidered. Although the two-story motel had fallen on hard times, the semi-attached house was in fine shape.
Just the house alone (it has two levels) was a pleasant surprise. “I don’t think a lot of people know there were conference rooms and a bar in the basement,” Vickie said. “We have more room now than in the house in Fargo where we raised our three boys.”
They’ve taken some good-natured kidding from family members who call the house the Bates Motel, after the gothic fright house in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “Psycho,” run by the tightly wound Norman Bates.
Mike is turning the lower level of the motel into garages for his vintage cars. He has remodeled one unit into a workroom. The Stahls are storing stuff in other units on the upper level, but haven’t quite decided what to do with all that space.
So visible for so many years, the sign had to go. “We can hardly go a few weeks without someone asking if they can rent a room for the night,” Vickie said.
Mike did feel some nostalgia about taking down a sign that was a Valley City icon. He was raised on a farm near Binford, and remembers seeing the Flickertail on trips to town when he was a kid.
“It was a fine motel,” he said. He pointed out the area where the swimming pool remains, although it has been filled in now. “You can see the outline, if you’re standing right by it.”
Uprooting the heavy steel sign was no easy task. One crane from Enterprise wasn’t up to it, so another one arrived on the scene to double the heavy lifting capacity.
To attach the cables to the top of the sign, one of the workers had to crawl inside the sign, which has trapdoors underneath and above.
Fifty years of - ahem - bird memorabilia made that job less than pleasant, but he finally attached both cables from the cranes and the deed was done. The sign will probably be turned into scrap metal.
Without the sign, the Stahls have lost a convenient marker for their out-of-town visitors. Their proper address is 2359 Elm Street, but it’s the only house on Elm Street.
That’s not really an issue for Valley City residents. “I just tell people here, ‘It’s the Flickertail Motel,’ and everyone knows,” Mike said.
They probably won’t miss the petty annoyance of Interstate travelers stopping by for lodging, though, with the big sign gone from the front yard.
Vickie has one good memory of would-be guests. A few months ago, a young couple stopped just before dark, wanting to take pictures of the sign and the motel.
“Their parents were about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary,” Vickie said. “After their wedding, they had spent their honeymoon at the Flickertail.”
The couple wanted to surprise their folks with framed pictures of the motel.
With the sign just a memory now, maybe the Stahls won’t be kidded about the Bates Motel anymore.
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