Royce Kardinal was named for her father, and while she’s proud of that, she has also spent her life correcting people who think her name is “Joyce.” Her father, Roy Coxswell — known to many as “Mr. Wickenburg” for his years of dedicated service to the town — was instrumental in recruiting members for the lodging association that would become Best Western, the Phoenix-based global hospitality enterprise founded 20 years after the birth of Historic Route 66. Roy and his wife, Betty, owned and operated the Rancho Grande, a Wickenburg motel that was one of the first charter members of Best Western — and also the place where Royce grew up. Royce says she could work the switchboard by herself at the age of 5, and all her friends from school loved to come play in the construction zone around the motel as it expanded.
The first in her family to go to college, Royce majored in art and art history at Woodbury, in Los Angeles. A week before graduation, her father called to say that he was having some health issues and asked if she and her husband, Glen, could come back to Wickenburg and spend a year to help out. “Glen and I guaranteed my dad a year,” Royce says, “and here we are — lived here ever since. Raised our kids here. My parents lived here till they passed. My brother lives here in a group home that we helped start.”
Roy’s big issue had been fighting the Brenda cutoff, which opened in 1973 and bypassed Wickenburg. The family even had a dog named Brenda. “My dad’s nearly dying words to me were, ‘Throw yourself down in the middle of the street if it ever looks like they’re going to bypass us further.’ So I kind of took over the mantle of heading up the transportation committee with the chamber and being ultra involved.”
The family sold the Rancho Grande in 2003; today the 77-room hotel is still a Best Western member. Royce put her college degree to good use as the executive director of the Desert Caballeros Western Museum (now known as the Sigler Western Museum), which her father had co-founded. She helped conceive of and launch “Cowgirl Up,” an annual exhibition highlighting women artists whose focus is the American West. At the age of 82, Royce remains focused on serving Wickenburg, like her father before her. “It’s a great place to live,” she says of her home town, “with real Western hospitality.”