Word: hiltons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Connie Hilton loves to color a white elephant. His technique, with hotels less lively than the Stevens, has been to humanize them according to Hilton standards, to free them of the dead, half-lit, intimate air. His chief bid is for freer-spending transients; Hilton hotels do not go after the trade of the hometown folks...
Music & Laughter. A Hilton hotel has never lost money. But some have lost a good deal of their old face and manner. In its aloof pre-Hilton days, Los Angeles' Town House frightened merry transients away with its forbidding, exclusive atmosphere. Then, in 1942, came Hilton. Out went the haughty air. In came bright flowers, elaborate bars, hot music and floor shows. Employes were instructed to stop freezing guests and make them feel at home. Soon Hilton's old Texas friends and others long awed by the Town House began to make it their California headquarters. Up went...
Five-Room Start. When Connie Hilton was 16, he was managing a five-room inn for traveling salesmen over his father's general store in San Antonio, Socorio County, N. Mex. (pop. 760). The rent money put him through college. At 21, Hilton was elected to New Mexico's House of Representatives. He enlisted with the break of World War I, became an Army lieutenant, and fought in France...
...bought the Mobeley Hotel in Cisco, Tex., on the eve of the Texas oil boom. This deal set the future Hilton pattern-step in when the boom is starting and the property value low, make it pay, unload at the peak. He applied this pattern to a long series of small Texas and New Mexico hotels, putting the profits of one into the purchase price of the next...
...Hilton built his first "mini-max" (maximum hospitality, minimum cost) hotel, and started out to become a Western legend. In Texas horse-trader fashion, he bought and sold more than two dozen hotels, naming most of them after himself, finally built the chain that has brought him an estimated fortune of $28,000,000 and made him one of the ranking men in the U.S. hotel business.* As a hotelman, Hilton has relied heavily on four attributes: 1) tremendous energy (he can get by with four hours' sleep); 2) a shrewd ability to analyze people and pick good employes...