Word: first
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...mural showing a Puerto Rican feast-day celebration; roulette wheels, chemin de fer and dice tables had been moved into the casino. The blue-tiled swimming pool cut out of the coral rock and the bright yellow-awninged beach cabanas were all ready for the first guests...
...Ruml, David Rockefeller and Julius ("Cap") Krug. But none of the party-goers would enjoy the round of banquets, swimming parties and tennis tournaments as much as their party-loving, party-giving host, Conrad Nicholson Hilton, the world's No. 1 hotelman, who this week was getting his first excited look at his newest hotel...
...could lose money," he says. "And I had to establish myself in New York. I could borrow money from my Texas friends to buy a small hotel, but only in New York could I get the millions I wanted to swing the deals I had in mind." The first deal looked too good to Hilton. The famed Ritz Hotel was offered to him for $700,000 and he turned it down. Said he: "I thought they were just taking advantage of a fellow from out West." (They weren't; Hilton now regretfully estimates the Ritz to be worth...
...modest adobe dwelling at $1 a day, and Connie helped him. But it wasn't what young Hilton wanted. He went into politics and, with the help of a well-organized graveyard vote ("the best people in the county"), was elected, at 24, to New Mexico's first state legislature...
Flophouse Nights. Politics was not for Connie either and he started a bank, San Antonio's first. When World War I came, he enlisted. Two years in the Army and a year as a lieutenant in France opened Hilton's eyes to the world beyond New Mexico. He had sold his little bank, and in 1919 (after his father died) he set out for the oil-rich town of Cisco, Texas, looking for bigger game. Instead of a bank, Hilton bought the shaky old Mobley Hotel with $5,000 of his own money, $15,000 from friends...