Word: hiltons
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...Mobley," Hilton recalls, "wasn't exactly a hotel-it was sort of a flophouse. We considered it a bad day when we didn't have a three-time turnover on the beds. It was a bad night when I had a bed of my own." But the flophouse made $3,000 the first month and Hilton decided "to freckle Texas with Hilton hotels...
Murderer at Large. Freckle No. 2 was Fort Worth's 80-room Melba ($28,000); No. $ was Hilton's first Waldorf-in Dallas-which he bought with the help of a syndicate of friends. In deal No. 4, he bought Fort Worth's Terminal Hotel with two partners and learned that there were more dangers for a hotelman than the complaints of dissatisfied guests. One of his partners, D. E. Soderman, thought he was being cheated, stalked down the third partner and shot him dead. When Soderman got out of jail, he phoned Hilton and asked...
Coal Mines & Graveyards. Actually he is not. The son of a Norwegian immigrant, he was born on Christmas Day of 1887 in little (pop. 500) San Antonio, N.Mex. His father, August Holver Hilton, parlayed a jug of whisky into the town's general store, livery stable, and eventually a coal mine, which made him one of the richest men in that part of the country...
Young Conrad, the second of eight children, went to private schools (Albuquerque's Goss Military Institute and New Mexico Military Institute at Roswell), and to college for two years (New Mexico School of Mines). When father Hilton was wiped out by the panic of 1907, he started taking roomers into the family's 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...
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...