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Two views of the Grayson Motor Inn on Main Street, circa 1940.
"By 1950 the gas pumps were gone and the cabins no longer rented by the day. Motels were in and Cabins were out. The small building on the left, with Grayson Camp written on it, became home to the Grayson telephone exchange."
"The Restaurant was renamed the Hamburger Inn and was popular with male high school dropouts. The Hamburger Inn was where you loafed in Grayson if you were waiting your turn to leave town. You were waiting to get old enough to either go into the Army or to the factories in Mansfield, Cleveland or Detroit to work. Here you learned to nurse a five cent 16 ounce bottle of RC Cola or an Orange Nehi all day, while you learned arts such as making a salt shaker or a quarter stand on its's edge, crack your knuckles loud or roll a cigarette with one hand. From the jukebox Johnny Cash would sing about rivers, Memphis and lost loves keeping cadence with a pinball machine that thudded, jingled and clacked to the delight of a hunched over youth lurching and swaying to keep the ball from disappearing into the hole."
"The Hamburger Inn and Johnny Cash are gone. The Commercial Bank now sits on that lot."
Submitted by: Glen Haney