American businesswoman and entrepreneur who used an inheritance to acquire six motels successively from 1961-1969. After selling her sixth motel in 1987, she retired.
One of eleven children raised on a farm in Saskatchewan, at 15 she sold her coat for $10 and moved to the town of Lang to become a hired girl. She married a prosperous older businessman, Nelson Fast in 1921. Their courtship included going on walks together, and he once gave her a candy bar with a $50 bill in the wrapper “to buy nice things,” a fortune. When her mom went to the hospital with an ulcer, he paid the bill. One day he announced to her that they were “going to Regina to get married next week.” She spent the next 19 years as a small town housewife with three kids.
On October 17, 1940, her husband was found on the street with several skull fractures. The RCMP investigated the case as rumors and speculations abounded, but it was never proven to be murder, by whom or why. Fast died eight days later, on his widow’s birthday, and was buried three days after that, on his birthday.
Yates spent the next ten years with an eleven-year-younger husband whom she married in September 1941, accompanied by her daughter, Lois. Her two sons joined the military for WW II. She and her husband went through a series of business ventures and some 17 moves around the country, trying everything from the manufacturer of mobile homes to working in aircraft plants to running a restaurant to selling airplanes. She had the romance of a handsome young husband plus the travel and adventure she had missed in her earlier, stable years.
Nelson Fast’s estate was settled when their daughter reached 21, on May 22, 1949. Yate’s share was some $20,000, a respectable amount at that time. It was enough, at any event, to buy a trailer park, that led to the purchase of a first motel a few years later, parlaying her small fortune into larger and more prestigious resort motels.
Yates divorced her second husband in 1950. In the Fall 1951 she met engineer George Yates. They moved to Indio, California together the following year, and married in November 1954. In the Fall of 1955, she bought her first motel. A dynamic, flamboyant woman, she kept in shape by swimming daily, a regime she practiced up to the age of 87.
On 1/20/1964, she was robbed, beaten and raped at knife-point when she admitted a young white male into her San Diego motel office late at night. She retired for a year of a nervous breakdown to a small, obscure motel in the desert.
In February 1968, she sold the small motel and she and her husband, both approaching 70, retired. She later said that they sat for six months waiting to see which of them would die first before she went back into business. In September 1972, at age 72, she bought their final motel in Palm Springs. She had 15 of the best years of her life there, loving the desert and her home that looked out at the azure pool and the mountains rising out of the desert.
On 3/30/1977, George Yates died. In January 1987, her last motel sold. After a year in an apartment by herself, she moved in with her daughter for two years. Gradually slipping into senility, she moved into a nursing home on 3/04/1990. Sturdy to the end, she died on 8/22/1997, San Diego, CA.
Through her lifetime, Yates had excellent health, remarking that “she did not even know what a headache was.” She had several cancer surgeries including a radical mastectomy, from which she recovered in prime time. She was very close to her family, maintaining relations with her kin in Canada to the end of her life, and always supportive with her own kids.