FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — The El Pueblo Motor Inn, or what’s left of it anyway, sits vacant behind a chain-link fence along Route 66, its stucco walls clad in weathered sheets of construction tarp.
At first glance, the nearly 90-year-old motel appears to be another crumbling relic from the famed highway’s early years as a bustling thoroughfare for hundreds of thousands of Americans traveling between Los Angeles and Chicago.
But this isn’t just a fading Route 66 roadside attraction.
Six years after El Pueblo motel opened its doors, with the country plunged into World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the motel’s proprietor, Philip Johnston, devised a plan to enlist Navajo men into the U.S. Marines Corps. Their mission: create a secret code based on Diné Bizaad, the unwritten Navajo language, that could not be broken.
It’s believed that Johnston’s motel served as a recruitment outpost and way station for some new recruits en route to the Southern California base where they would train to become Navajo Code Talkers.
From an initial group of 29, more than 400 Navajo men would eventually become Code Talkers, rapidly transmitting hundreds of thousands of encrypted messages through some of the fiercest battles in the Pacific theater — messages that opposing forces never deciphered.
“Without these brave men and their knowledge of their language, the war in the Pacific would have been prolonged with great human loss,” then-U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-CO, said during a 2001 congressional Gold Medal ceremony for the first 29 Code Talkers. “And maybe it would not have turned out the way it did.”
Of the 400 or so Code Talkers, only two are alive today: Peter MacDonald and Thomas H. Begay. Both men sat down with the Chicago Tribune this summer to talk about their experiences during the war and their hopes for the El Pueblo Motor Inn.
This is the story of the last two Code Talkers and the mastermind behind the top secret program whose Route 66 motel faces an uncertain future.
Two teens join the Marines
World War II came to Thomas Begay on a gravel football field near the Arizona-New Mexico border. There, a boarding school classmate heard on the radio that Japanese planes had bombarded American military personnel stationed at Pearl Harbor.
Fearful those same planes would strike closer to home, Begay found a Marine Corps recruiter in Gallup, N.M., near his family’s home. There was one catch: Begay was likely only 16 — his birthdate was never recorded. Because his age was “flexible” as Begay once described it, the recruiter said he could enlist with a parent’s permission. His mom signed the necessary form with a thumbprint in place of her name.
Like Begay, MacDonald wouldn’t let his age stop him from joining the fight.
Peter MacDonald, 97, one of the last two living Navajo Code Talkers, at his home in Tuba City, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation, June 6, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
The way he saw things, a soldier had to run fast and shoot straight. And he was just as fast as his 18-year-old cousin, who was already a Marine, and just as accurate with a hunting rifle.
So, in 1944, a then-15-year-old MacDonald and his cousin drove to a recruitment office in northwest New Mexico, where the cousin signed a form saying MacDonald was 17.
Later, sitting on a cold steel truck bed on a chilly evening heading to his barracks, he would briefly regret his decision and entertain the notion of desertion — until a Navajo friend sitting next to him reminded MacDonald that he could either stay in the Marines or go to jail for lying on an official government document.
Thomas H. Begay, left, is seen in April 1945 shortly after participating in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Begay is believed to be one of two surviving Navajo Code Talkers who used the Navajo language to send coded messages during World War II. Code Talker Peter MacDonald, right, is seen in 1944 after finishing U.S. Marine Corps boot camp. MacDonald was 15 when he enlisted. (Family photos)
MacDonald had hoped to join an artillery or tank unit. Begay wanted to be an aerial gunner. Instead, both were shipped to the Marine Corps communications school outside San Diego. They learned Morse code, how to repair radios, how to quickly climb coconut trees to tie telephone lines and rapidly descend before being picked off by Japanese sharpshooters.
Once that training was over, they and other Marines — all of them Navajo — were sent to a restricted area on the base with separate barracks. A large sign warned all others to keep out.
That was when MacDonald and Begay first learned they were training to become Code Talkers, and when they first met the staff sergeant leading that training: Philip Johnston.
“He’s the one,” joked Begay, “who got us in trouble.”
‘The one who got us in trouble’
Johnston learned Diné Bizaad as a young child playing with Navajo kids he befriended while living on the western edge of the Navajo reservation, where his father worked as a missionary.
He was apparently so well-versed in the language that in 1901, at age 9, he traveled with his dad to Washington, D.C., to translate land negotiations between a group of Navajo leaders and newly elected U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
Johnston attended what’s now called Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. It’s possible it was during that conflict that the seeds that became the Navajo Code Talkers first took root; soldiers from at least a half-dozen different Native American tribes — including the Choctaw, Ho-Chunk and Comanche — sent coded messages in their native languages during the Great War.
The vacant El Pueblo Motor Inn sits along Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona, on June 6, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
Around 1936, he and his wife opened the El Pueblo Motor Inn on Route 66, commissioned a decade earlier. Three Spanish colonial-style buildings with attached carports provided six rooms for guests. A fourth building near the road served as the office.
By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, a nearly 50-year-old Johnston was living in Los Angeles and working as a civil engineer for the city.
In a collection of his writings and photographs kept in a special collection at Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library, he wrote of his frustration at being too old, it seemed, to join the conflict.
“Chances were overwhelming,” he wrote, “that the most deadly weapons I could wield in this war were a slide rule and pencil.”
After reading a news story about an armored division’s attempt to send secret messages via soldiers from one Native American tribe, he met with a lieutenant colonel at Camp Elliott, near San Diego.
“Colonel,” he wrote of that meeting, “what would you think of a device that would assure you of complete secrecy when you send or receive messages on the battlefield?”
What Johnston proposed was impossible, the lieutenant colonel responded. No code was completely secure. Even codes based on Native languages, as Johnston had suggested, were inherently flawed. They either lacked certain words for essential military terms or had been studied by other countries after the success of Native Code Talkers in WWI.
The Navajo language had never been written down, Johnston argued, so it could not be studied. Its complexities made it difficult to learn outside of Navajo members or those who, like Johnston, grew up immersed in the language.
To illustrate the point, Johnston wrote, he uttered a few Navajo words to the lieutenant colonel and asked, “Tell me if you honestly believe that anyone but a Navajo could understand them.” He repeated them again, slower.
“Dammit, Mr. Johnston,” the man replied, “you may have something there! I’d like very much to see some of these Navajos.”
About two weeks later, Johnston returned to the base with a few Navajo men, ready to demonstrate for select commanders how the code could work.
Soon, the newly enlisted Marine Corps staff sergeant would head into the Navajo Nation to find recruits, using El Pueblo motel as a base for that effort and as a place for candidates to stay before heading to their Southern California base.
Twenty-nine Navajo men were eventually tasked with crafting the code.
The irony of the moment was not lost on those first Code Talkers and the ones who came after. Here was a country that repeatedly sought to eradicate their culture, if not their very existence. That had, less than 80 years earlier, forced at gunpoint tens of thousands of Navajo men, women and children to march some 300 miles from their homes to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo, N.M. That set up boarding schools where Native American children were punished for speaking their language.
Now, that same country needed their language.
‘It was a bad place’
By the time Begay, and later MacDonald, arrived at Camp Pendleton, the battle-tested code contained hundreds of words.
All 26 letters in the alphabet were represented by a corresponding Navajo word or words. The letter A, for example, could be wol-la-chee (ant) or be-la-sana (apple) or tse-nill (axe). A submarine was a besh-lo, or iron fish. A bomber plane was a jay-sho, or buzzard.
Code Talkers had to commit every word to memory. Nothing could be written down to ensure the code would not fall into enemy hands.
A mural honoring the Navajo Code Talkers is seen just off of Route 66 on a building in downtown Gallup, New Mexico, June 8, 2025. It was painted by artist Be Sargent. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
Begay would find himself thrust into one of the war’s most infamous and deadly battles. In February 1945, while aboard the USS Cecil, his unit landed on the beach at Iwo Jima. One Code Talker, a friend of his, had been killed in a bombing at an airfield. A second died from a Japanese sniper’s bullet. Begay was ordered to replace that Code Talker.
He made his way to the front, through gunfire and exploding mortar rounds.
“It was a bad place,” he remembered, sitting in a veterans memorial park in Albuquerque, N.M. “Nothing but rock. No place to hide. No place to dig a fox hole.”
Japanese troops dug a network of tunnels in the 8-square-mile island’s volcanic rock. At one point, Begay remembered, three Japanese soldiers “came out of nowhere,” maybe 40 feet away. Begay raised his rifle in their direction. Someone in his unit yelled for him to hold his fire. One of the Japanese soldiers was naked. The others wore tattered uniforms. They repeated only one word: mizu.
Water.
During the first two days of the invasion, six Code Talkers “sent and received more than 800 error-free messages,” reported Maj. Howard Connor, 5th Division signal officer. “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
A post-war secret revealed
After serving with units in Guam and northern China, MacDonald earned an engineering degree from the University of Oklahoma and worked to develop the Polaris missile system for the Hughes Aircraft Co., founded by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.
In 1971, he was elected chairman of the Navajo Nation. His four nonconsecutive terms ended in scandal. Ousted by the Nation’s council in 1989 amid corruption allegations — his removal sparked a deadly riot in an attempt to restore his chairmanship — MacDonald was eventually convicted in tribal and federal court of charges including fraud, racketeering and bribery. He was later pardoned by the Nation and his sentence commuted by President Bill Clinton.
Struggling to find post-war employment, Begay enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in the Korean War. Back home, he worked as a senior administrator with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
For years after WWII, both men were forced to say nothing about the Code Talkers. Not even their families knew what they had done during the war. Their work remained classified until 1968. One night, sitting with his family around the dinner table, Begay revealed his secret.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Ronald C. Begay cares for his father, Navajo Code Talker Thomas H. Begay, who is at least 100, at a war memorial in Albuquerque, New Mexico, June 9, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
“We didn’t know what he was talking about,” remembered his son, retired Army Lt. Col. Ronald C. Begay.
The Navajo Code Talkers were eventually honored in 1982 with a congressional resolution establishing National Navajo Code Talkers Day on Aug. 14, and congressional Medals in 2001.
“In war, using their native language, they relayed secret messages that turned the course of battle,” then-President George W. Bush said during a medal ceremony. “At home, they carried for decades the secret of their own heroism. Today, we give these exceptional Marines the recognition they earned so long ago.”
Navajo Code Talker Thomas H. Begay wears a large medal surrounded in turquoise — a congressional Silver Medal he and other Code Talkers received in 2001. The inscription at the bottom translates to: “The Navajo language was used to defeat the enemy.” (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)
A motel’s uncertain future
As for Johnston, his post-war years are a bit of a mystery. He retired from civil service and gave talks on the Navajo language — including one in 1954 (14 years before the Code Talker program was declassified) that, according to a Los Angeles Times brief, touched on its use “as code for secret communications” during the war. He died in 1978, six days before his 86th birthday.
Johnston and his wife sold El Pueblo motel in 1947. It changed hands several times in the ensuing years. Subsequent owners sold off pieces of the property, converted carports to guestrooms, added a roadside sign and a fifth building and transitioned the motel from tourists to weekly rentals.
The property was last sold in 2007, county records show. Current owner Nava Thuraisingam also heads the Tempe, Arizona-based Kind Hospitality, which operates around two-dozen restaurants, most in Arizona.
Thuraisingam did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Around 2018, Thuraisingam hired Flagstaff realtor Jacquie Kellogg to sell the now-vacant El Pueblo motel. After learning its history, she tried to marshal public awareness and resources toward restoring the motel and commemorating its association with the Code Talkers.
The campaign garnered plenty of attention but ultimately fizzled.
“Everyone thinks it’s the coolest thing,” she said, “but nobody wants to do anything about it.”
Though eligible, the property does not appear on the National Register of Historic Places, nor does it have local historic landmark designation. A Flagstaff City Council report from last month says Thuraisingam did not want to pursue local historic designation and had been advised by financiers not to seek its inclusion on the national register in fear it “may limit the development potential of the property.”
An architect hired by Thuraisingam submitted plans in 2020 to restore the motel’s three guest room buildings and office. Two years later, revised plans from a different architect called for a “substantial motel building” behind the three historic buildings, which had been essentially gutted in preparation for rehabilitation.
Those plans also noted the office had deteriorated to the point it could not be saved. It has since been razed.
“It’s not in great shape right now,” said Flagstaff Councilmember Khara House, who requested a council discussion on the motel’s preservation. But, she added, “there’s a glimmer of hope.”
Kellogg is less optimistic.
“It’s just gonna rot away until somebody tears it down,” she said. “It’s very frustrating.”
MacDonald is 97. Begay is at least 100. It’s possible they won’t live to see what becomes of El Pueblo Motor Inn. Still, they and their families said it should be preserved, its legacy celebrated and not destroyed.
“The guy that actually envisioned the Navajo code was Philip Johnston, and he needs to be recognized,” MacDonald said from his home in Tuba City, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation. “Flagstaff should be proud. Set up a huge statue of some sort for (Johnston). Yes, the motel may be bad. But do something.”
This summer, a new realty firm listed the property for sale. Asking $2.75 million, the listing notes that two of the five original buildings are gone, “with the remaining structures reduced to studs, providing an open slate for redevelopment.”
“With high traffic flow and prominent exposure, this site is ideal for a variety of commercial uses including lodging, dining, retail, or mixed-use development,” the listing continues. “Don’t miss this rare opportunity to reimagine a landmark location in a high-demand area.”
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