STARDUST GOES ‘ALL AMERICAN’

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Bill Rautenstrauch

Staff Writer

Money and elbow grease and can fix a lot of things. They’re working wonders for the west Adams Avenue motel known formerly as the Stardust.

Bob Jellum, who re-assumed ownership of the property in a February sheriff’s sale, has changed the name to the All American Motel. His goal now is to restore the place to the respectability it enjoyed in 1990, the year he first sold it.

It’s been no easy task. In the past decade-and-a-half, the 32-unit motel was allowed to deteriorate in the worst way possible.

When Jellum and his wife Linnie took over early this year, they

were stunned at the extent of the damage.

"Ten or twelve of the 32 units, you might have been able to live in. But that’s stretching it," Jellum, a La Grande-area resident since 1980, said. "Four units had no carpet and no furniture at all."

Jellum owned the Stardust from 1981 to 1990, when he sold it to Vijay Narain. Since then, the facility has been through a couple of changes in ownership and bankruptcy proceedings.

Jellum said that in order to get the motel back, he forgave about $300,000 in money he was owed for the property. The motel was in bankruptcy receivership when he got it back.

Jellum said about half of the rooms were being rented to full-time residents. Living conditions were crowded and dangerous, he said.

"People were cooking their meals in there, and that’s against the law," he said.

He said many of the full-time residents had trashed their rooms and were living in generally squalid conditions.

"It was absolutely filthy when we got it. The carpets were totally filthy. Most of them smelled so bad I had to replace them," he said.

As one of their first orders of business, they asked all but one of the full-time residents a physically challenged woman to leave.

Next, they set about making the place fit for human habitation.

Since February, they have redone most of the plumbing, replaced the roof, fixed the boiler and pipes for the swimming pool and replaced crumbling sidewalks.

Inside the rooms, they’ve scrubbed, painted, ripped up old carpet and laid down new.

"Work on the cleaning, painting and carpets is continual. We’ll just keep at it until we’re done," Jellum said.

The Jellums said there was a certain amount of drug activity going on at the motel and that homeowners nearby were complaining.

"I had one woman tell me she wouldn’t let her kids walk by the back of the place," Linnie Jellum said.

Lt. Derick Reddington of the La Grande Police Department said officers fielded numerous calls at the Stardust over the years, but added the department never saw the place as a hotbed of crime.

"You’ll always have a certain amount of trouble at motels. I don’t think we had more calls there than at other places," he said.

Still, neighbors think the changes at the motel are positive ones.

"I notice they have a lot better clientele there than they had before," said Shannon Pittser, manager of the Oak Street Shell adjacent to the motel.

For the time being, the Jellums are living in the motel’s manager quarters and staying busy with their clean-up, paint-up, fix-up campaign.

They figure they’ve got about five months hard work ahead of them before they can hire a manager and go back to their life on Bob’s rural La Grande farm.

They hope by then the unsavory memory of the Stardust will have faded away.

Until that happens, they’re working hard at building a better reputation for the business.

"I always ask the customers if they want to see the room before they rent it," Bob Jellum said.