Word: hotelful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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 and a $20,000 bank loan...
Shortly after, Hilton decided that Dallas needed a new hotel-and he built it by a fabulous deal that Dallas still recalls with wonder. He started by persuading George Loudermilk, an ex-undertaker and a large landholder, to give him a 99-year lease on some Dallas property he owned. Then he used the leased land as collateral for a $500,000 bank loan. Hilton put up $100,000 of his own money, and raised $200,000 from friends. He needed another $150,000, and he borrowed it from the contractor who was to build the hotel. Then...
Dark Days. It was worth all the trouble; the Dallas Hilton was a whopping success. Hilton branched out throughout Texas and formed Hilton Hotels, Inc. (succeeded in 1946 by Hilton Hotels Corp.). When the depression hit, and an estimated 80% of all U.S. hotels went bankrupt, he was far overexpanded. He hurried from hotel to hotel, yanking out the room telephones and closing off some of the floors to cut costs. When a guest asked for ink, a bellhop would ceremoniously pour out enough to write one letter...