A bedtime story.

• Author: Peek, Charlie
• Position: Selma, North Carolina motels along Interstate-95

How an accident of geography turned the sleepy little town of Selma into an overnight success.

Only the afternoon gin game is unpredictable on Charles and Hazel Terrel's annual winter run down Interstate 95 to Florida. By 5 a.m., the couple is up and away from Montclair, N.J. By 4 p.m., they've paid $20.95 for a room in the "snowbird wing" of Selma's Royal Inn, and Hazel is writing the first score down on the motel scratch pad.

After a quiet night, the Terrels will leave at 5 a.m. in order to pull into Ocala at 3 p.m. the next day. Life in the fast lane it isn't, but the Terrels, married 52 years, like it that way.

"It's 518 miles from my house to here," says Charles, a retired mechanic. "This place is neat, clean. It's not luxurious, but, hell, I'm just going to sleep here."

Lured by an accident of geography that puts the town eight hours from both central Florida and the New York-New Jersey population center, thousands of strangers sleep in Selma every night, slipping off the interstate at dusk with only a vague idea of being somewhere in rural North Carolina. Last year, they left behind $42 million. Selma, a whistle-stop railroad town before I-95 was laid through Johnston County in 1961, must have paid attention to some advice attributed to former Gov. Luther Hodges: "It's a lot easier to pick Yankees than to pick cotton."

Clee Daniels, who ran the Royal Inn until his only son, Hank Daniels, took over, realized that in 1948 while pumping gas at the Pure station in Kenly (Johnston's northernmost town). "One day a Yankee asks him for a place to stay and said he'd give him $5," Hank Daniels recalls. "So Dad gave him a room in the back. Pretty soon, he bought a piece of land and built a couple of rooms and then a couple more. He heard people were paying $6 a night in Rocky Mount, and he got excited."

The establishment was named Shorty's, the nickname Clee had given his wife, Edith. The couple moved north on U.S. 301 and built two motels in Wilson. Edith, being farm-raised, simply ran her old Cadillac through the construction site, carving out a circular driveway.

Realizing that the interstate highway being built would miss Wilson, Clee Daniels raced to Smithfield, where he built yet another motel across the road from a new Howard Johnson. Daniels promptly painted his motel orange and teal and named it Henry Johnson's. He insisted it was just a coincidence since his friend, Henry Johnson, was a cook in the cafe. Hojo was not amused and let Daniels know it, so he renamed it the Village Inn.

He bought the 3-year-old Royal Inn in Selma in 1976 and ran it for seven years before his death. By that time, the Royal Inn was one of six motels at Exit 97, says his son, who inherited the Royal Inn -- and its 80% occupancy rate. "Again, my father had the foresight to see this exit would become the stronger exit. People go where there's more stuff, and it sort of snowballs."

There's a motel room for every eight of Selma's 4,600 residents. Five motels with 579 rooms cluster at Exit 97, all feeding at the I-95 trough that 25,000 cars pass through on an average day...