Hotels Sign On As Barracks For Single Sailors

The Navy has recruited seven Pierce County hotels for a year of barracks duty, to provide housing for single members of the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

Lisa Warren, who cleans rooms at the Days Inn here, feared the worst when she learned the hotel was booked solid with sailors through November.

But to her relief, the Navy guests are nothing like her nightmare caricature of sex-starved, drunken swabbies.

“They’re neat,” Warren reports. “They’re not rowdy or slobs or anything. Most of them have pictures of their girlfriends hanging up on the walls.”

The carrier, assigned to Puget Sound in mid-November, is being refurbished at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton.

While that’s being done, 750 of the Abraham Lincoln’s approximately 3,000 crew members are staying in the Tacoma area, busing to Bremerton each day to work on their ship. The carrier, which had been based in Alameda, Calif., will be homeported in Everett when the overhaul is completed in December.

The Navy is spending $8.3 million on temporary housing arrangements, shipyard spokesman John Gordon said.

After a month of duty as partial or complete barracks hotel managers, law-enforcement officials and businesses near the leased hotels give the undertaking a thumbs-up.

“It’s been great,” said Coy Wood, president of the Fife Chamber of Commerce.

“Practically nobody even sees the sailors. They are required to be in bed, with the lights out, at 10 o’clock. They’re up early in the morning, and they’re on the bus to Bremerton. By the time they come back, they’re tired and they go to bed,” Wood said.

“In the beginning they attracted hookers,” said desk clerk Sue Miller at Travelers Inn, across the street from Days Inn.

“I guess the word was out,” she said. “But we pretty much curtailed that.

“I’m here every day with them. Most of them are very nice guys. They don’t really seem that much different than anybody else we’ve had. They’re lonely, some of them.”

The sailors are tightly supervised, she said.

“If we have a problem, we go straight to the chiefs and they solve it in a heartbeat.”

More than 200 sailors are staying at the Sherwood Inn, just south of Tacoma on Interstate 5.

“The only problem we’ve had is a couple of glass doors that got broken,” said Glenn Wildberger, the inn’s general manager.

“These guys have been practically no trouble at all.”

Wildberger said the sailors fill all but three of his rooms: “The only reason I have those rooms left is because they’re too small.”

That ensures a 97 percent occupancy rate - good news for Wildberger despite a break on the per-night charge.

He’s making $40 per room per night for 100 rooms throughout the 11 months of the contract - a deal that will allow him to install new carpeting, new furniture and new beds in 80 percent of the rooms.