Ervin Shane and The Sunshine Motel (Unabridged‪)‬

“The miracle of loneliness is that sooner or later it makes you act otherwise.”


Illuminated by extraordinary tenderness, Ervin Shane and The Sunshine Motel is a poignant tale about origins and endings told in the plain speak of a man tired of living a hand-to-mouth existence in the racist, post-WWII south.

In 1951, Ervin Shane boarded a Greyhound headed to wherever the winter sun was warmer. A thousand miles later, a layover in a West Texas bus station and a chance browsing of the want-ads led him to curtail his journey and take up as the custodian of The Sunshine Motel - a neon-bathed oasis situated halfway between somewhere and somewhere else, offering wayfarers, “…clean sheets, a warm blanket and a soft pillow for those lost souls bound for nowhere in particular.”

And so begins the chronicle and construction of a humble life; a beautiful and haunting story of classic simplicity; a story of indefinite echoes.