My sister told me she used to see Sam lounging in his underwear on the windowsill of his room, swiging bourbon. He was quite a character.
The Alamo Hotel has several memories for me. I was at Fire Station 1 at 5th and Trinity during the early eighties, when downtown Austin was very rough. Punches Lounge, where you went when you were too burned out to be a Bandito anymore, was still running. Anyway, the Alamo Hotel had become a by the week or by the hour place, quite a comedown from it's proud beginnings. The Willie Nelson-Merle Haggard music video, "Pancho and Lefty" filmed the sequence where they filmed the line "the poets tell how Pancho fell, Lefty's livin' in a cheap hotel, the desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold" at the Alamo Hotel. Nelson was out front, and Haggard was up in the room. We hosed down the streets to make it look like it was raining. We refused to hose down the cars, as they were antiques, so the producer did that himself (later it turned out the water swelled the doors on one of the woodies to the point they wouldn't close). Anyway, the hotel used to have a drug store and a liquor store inside, and the original signs were still up. If you see the video, it pans across the sign and shows the original text: "Alamo Hotel: Drugs, Liquor".