John’s Motel & Cabins – Part 1

Here’s a Lake Road tourist camp that I’d never heard of before: John’s Motel and Cabins. The above real photo postcard postcard recently appeared on Ebay and was postmarked August 12, 1951.

The location of John’s Motel and Cabins is inscribed on the front of the postcard – East Lake Road, Route 2 & 6, Vermilion, Ohio – with a phone number of 2204. (The back of the card was blank.)

It was fairly easy to find it and its matching phone number in this 1950 Lorain Telephone Company directory listing of Tourist & Trailer Camps (below), which was the earliest book that included it.

The telephone directory listing provided a better description of where it was located: Stop 124 1/2, which would on Lake Road east of Vermilion, near Sunnyside Road.

The location was further pinpointed by the motel’s listing in the 1954 Lorain County Farm & Rural Directory as being on the south side of the highway. The listing also mentions an inn.

Best of all, the listing also revealed the name of the man behind the business: John Kovanic.

Here’s a later listing from the Lorain phone book. This one appeared in 1959. Note the many motels and tourist camps that have been featured on this blog during the past seven years : Anchor Lodge Motel, Beachcomber Motor Lodge, Beth-Shan Motel, Foster House Motel, Grandview Motel, Hialeah, Holiday Inn, Kayann’s, Lakeland Lodges, Peck’s Cottages, and Vians.)

John’s Motel continued to appear in the Lorain phone book until it disappeared as of the 1962 edition.

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John J. Kovanic passed away on October 11, 1972. His obituary that appeared in the Journal the next day revealed that he was born in Czechoslovakia in October 1887 and came to New York at the age of 23. He had been a resident of Vermilion for 52 years.

As for his career in tourist lodging, his obituary stated that he had “owned and operated the Home Restaurant on Main St., Vermilion, from 1920 to 1930 and then later operated the John’s Motel, East Liberty Ave., Vermilion, from 1930 to 1962, when he retired.”