August 3, 2006
Another Great Hotelier Posted by Ellen Feldman at 09:20 AM EST Yesterday’s AmericanHeritage.com homepage article about Conrad Hilton reminded me of another American success story in the hotel business. In 1950 Kemmons Wilson, a Tennessee homebuilder who was doing well in the postwar boom, decided to take his wife and five children to the nation’s capital. They would drive from Memphis and enjoy the sights along the way. The trip turned out to be anything but enjoyable. Sleeping accommodations for the large family were hard to find. Rooms were often dirty. Food was frequently inedible. The family was dispirited by the trip. Kemmons Wilson was inspired.
He knew he was anything but unique in postwar America. Before the war, families that took to the road had not done it for pleasure. During they war, gas was rationed, and tires were out of the question. But now many men were making more money than they had ever dreamed of in their Depression-era youth. Families started during the wartime years were growing rapidly. These newly prosperous and confident Americans would want to see their country. And the thriving automobile industry would provide the best way to do it. Cars offered flexibility, intimacy, and fun for the whole family, or so it was thought. But when the shadows grew long on the road and the children got cranky and started fighting in the back seat, these families would need a reliable place to stop for the night.
The answer, Wilson sensed, was a chain of hotels that would not vary from town to town or even state to state. You could stay in a room in Missouri one night, check into another in Ohio a few days later, and know you were going to find the same clean and comfortable accommodations, as well as plenty of space to park the family car. The rooms would even look alike. Wilson’s brainstorm would take fear of the unknown out of adventure.
In 1952 he opened his first hotel in Memphis. By 1958, the chain had grown to 50, by 1964 500. In 1968, the 1,000th hotel opened, in San Antonio Texas.
As inventive as Wilson was, however, he could not seem to come up with a suitable name for his new-style hotel. Then one night he was going over blueprints drawn by his friend and architect Eddie Bluestein. Bluestein had been watching an old Bing Crosby movie on television while he worked, and as a joke, had scribbled the movie’s name on the plans. Holiday Inn.
I have a footnote to the story. A few years ago a friend’s seven-year-old caught Holiday Inn on cable and was enchanted. She had heard of Holiday Inns in her own world, but had never been to one. She pleaded with her parents to take her. When they drove up, she almost cried with disappointment. It looked nothing like the set Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire had sung and danced their way across. When I passed on the information that, yes, Virginia, there really was a connection, she was mollified, but only slightly.
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