It’s Checkout Time at the Beach & Oceanaire : Development: After 53 years of housing vacationers, Ernestine Pollman has decided to call it quits. Twelve new townhouses will take the place of her beloved motel.

Ernestine (Ernie) Pollman has decided to stick around for the demolition of her Beach & Oceanaire Motel. “I watched it grow, so I might as well watch it go down,” she said. “After 53 years, would you want to go away and come back and see absolutely nothing?”

The Long Beach motel, which opened in 1938 and was the first in the Best Western Motel Assn. founded by Pollman’s father, closed a week ago. It is expected to be razed soon to make way for 12 townhouses that Pollman will build.

“I have mixed emotions,” said Pollman, 72, who was a teen-ager when the motel opened. “It’s been fun and I’ve made a lot of friends, but it’s been a hassle putting up with the everyday problems and getting good help. After a while it gets old hat.”

The salmon-colored motel on Ocean Boulevard will be mourned--by Midwesterners who came for winter vacations, by Pollman’s friends who sought refuge during domestic turmoil, and by college swimming teams who littered the rooms with bags, parkas and wet bathing suits between events at the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool across the street.

Pollman ran the place with an air of intimidation and a cigarette-roughened voice. But the guests discovered, beneath that crusty facade, a heart of gold.

“I call her the stern marshmallow,” said Shauna Wood of Las Vegas, who had checked in for the final weekend.

Pollman was a veteran of the motel business even before the Beach & Oceanaire opened. After moving to Long Beach from Texas with her father, Merle K. Guertin, she helped him run the Cherry Motor Court at Pacific Coast Highway and Cherry Street. “I was 14,” she said. “I worked the front desk and scrubbed toilets when there weren’t enough maids.”

Guertin, who eight years later would found the Best Western organization, decided to build his new motel across from the beach. “There wasn’t a thing here when we started,” Pollman said.

The motel’s original Spanish-style building, since remodeled, contained 10 rooms that rented for $5 a night.

In 1953, a modest-size swimming pool was put in (“My father wanted shuffleboard courts; we had a terrible fight”) and a two-story, 15-unit addition was erected that featured large plate-glass windows.

A third building, behind a back alley, went up in 1969, a year before Guertin died, increasing the units to 30.

The motel was profitable, with high occupancy rates until about four years ago, when the influx of high-rise hotels with their weekend specials began in downtown Long Beach.

“But we always did our fair share,” said Pollman, who ran the motel with help from her late husband, Solanus Bernard Pollman, who was an assistant fire chief at the old Long Beach Air Force Base. “I have been fortunate because I’ve worked here every day. I made sure we didn’t go into debt.

“It has not made me a wealthy woman, but it put a roof over my head, gave me three meals a day and helped me to raise five kids. And it’s enabled me to do my thing for athletics.”

Pollman has been a longtime fan and financial supporter of teams at Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach City College, and has given summer night-clerk jobs to athletes. She also belongs to the Long Beach Century Club, which aids and promotes athletics.

“What she’s done for our program is immeasurable,” said Robert Donlan, an associate athletic director.

The motel was busiest from the mid-1950s to the early ‘60s.

“We had winter guests from Minnesota who would come out for six weeks,” Pollman said, “and we had people from Pasadena and Temple City who came down here and took our kitchenettes for two weeks and brought their kids.”

The heyday ebbed when freeways enabled travelers to go to places farther away than her motel, and when some of the Midwestern customers became neighbors. Pollman, who lives in a house behind the motel, chuckled and said, “They liked it so well here in Long Beach that they bought a damned house.”

Still, the owner never lowered her rates, which in recent years were $65 or $70.

“I always had a nice type clientele,” she said. “I’d rather have the rooms empty and in good shape than rent them at $35 a night and have them trashed.”

Pollman’s idea to tear down the motel and build townhouses came about three years ago. “I saw where the motel business was going,” she said. “Down the tubes, with all the new hotels coming into the city.”

What little notoriety the motel achieved consisted of three holdups and a drowning, all many years ago. A group of Russians, in town to learn about American swimming techniques, awoke one morning to discover a body floating in the pool. “He wasn’t a registered guest,” Pollman said.

Robert Taylor, Martha Raye and Lloyd Bridges were the motel’s best-known guests, but to Pollman, “Everyone who stayed here was a personality.”

Many swimming teams stayed at the Beach & Oceanaire. The University of Tennessee team, after winning the NCAA championship at Belmont Plaza in 1978, celebrated in Room 25.

“When Ray Bussard (Tennessee’s coach) found out I was closing,” Pollman said, “he came out here and said, ‘Ernie, I want the door to 25.’ Then he took my head maid into the room and said, ‘Mildred, I want that desk and those four chairs and that game table, and I want them shipped back to me in Hot Springs, Va.’ ”

On the phone last week from his retirement home in Hot Springs, the former coach said, “Ernie has a heart as big as an elephant.”

Bussard went on about Pollman and her husband, who died in 1983: “It was their genuine sincerity in taking care of guests--they’d give us a hamburger fry when we got back from the meet.”

“Now,” he added, “there’s going to be a lot of sad swimming coaches.”

Dick Miller, manager of the Long Beach Marine Bureau, has told Pollman to save him a piece of the motel pool’s tile.

Pollman let Miller give swimming lessons at the pool in the mid-’50s so he could put himself through San Jose State.

He taught more than 200 youngsters there, refining the strokes of future Olympians Tim Shaw, Jody Campbell, Ann Simmons and Susie Atwood.

“I went to Ernie and told her I was a poor college student,” Miller recalled. “She said, ‘I’ll cut you a great deal, the only thing I want is for you to teach my kids to swim.’ ”

The farewell party eight days ago drew a crowd of about 200 people that overflowed from the pool area into the parking lot.

“I brought daddy,” said Pollman, putting a picture of Guertin atop a fence next to an architect’s conception of her tile-roofed townhouses. The units, each with a patio and two-car garage, will sell for up to $600,000.

Pollman drank 7-Up and chatted with people she had not seen in 20 years. She tried not to think about the musty accumulation of bedspreads, sheets and towels she hopes to sell.

“I almost had a coronary yesterday, looking at all that stuff,” she said. “Dishes that don’t match and lamps with no shades.”

A story was told about the time an actor complained to Pollman about a baby crying all night in the room next to his, only to have the owner tell him that if he did not like it he could leave. “The baby had an ear infection,” Pollman said. “I went out and found somebody to take care of it.”

And there were tales of Century Club members’ ringing the night bell at 2 a.m. after fights with their wives.

Reaching for a beer, attorney Don Dyer said, “If we couldn’t find a member by calling their number on the roster, we’d always call Ernie to see if he was here.”

Mildred Clark, the head maid for 17 years, said she was sad to be leaving Pollman but also relieved: “Tomorrow, we don’t have to make up no beds.”

Four of Pollman’s children were also in the crowd, including Patricia Pollman, who breaks into tears every time she walks into the place.

But her mother, as she socialized in the fading sun by her precious pool, refused, at least for the time being, to cry.