"This Place Was Like A Mansion"

The old San Gorgonio Inn has had thousands of visitors in more than 125 years since the business first opened in Banning.

On Tuesday morning, one of them came back for a last look.

Richard Atha, 74, stood in front of the remains of the half-demolished inn and shook his head.

"It's an old place," the Beaumont resident said Tuesday morning. "I remember coming here as a boy."

Atha now lives in the Solera development in Beaumont. He said he came to California with his family during World War II, in a 1936 Hudson Terraplane.

 "We came here in '44 from Oklahoma and stopped here and this place was in business," Atha said. "When we came here the freeway wasn't here. This was the main drag.

"This was old Highway 99 then," Atha said. "The main highway went through Banning and Beaumont and continued out and went up over the hill. I was just a kid then but I remember that Hadley’s Fruit, they were there then. We stopped there too."

Atha said he and his family came from the Choctaw Indian Reservation, near Chattanooga, Oklahoma.

"I was about eight years old when we stopped here," Atha said. "The building looks like it hasn't changed a bit since then. They probably upgraded the electricity but as far as the walls and everything it looks the same as it did when I was here.

"In those days you could stop and feed four people for less than two dollars, get everybody something to eat," Atha said. "In those days when you went into a restaurant they wanted to give you all kinds of service because they needed the money, because those were tough times."

"In '44 the war was going on, so places like this for someone coming from, especially us Okies who didn’t have any money, this place was like a mansion."