Word: nationalizes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fever is hardly a new affliction. The most enervating, enduring and escapist of social institutions, the convention is as American as rubber chicken, as ubiquitous as revolving hotel-top restaurants, as old as the nation itself. Our more perfect union was forged at a convention (Philadelphia, 1787), divided against itself at another (Montgomery, Ala., 1861), reunited at a rather intimate one (Appomattox Courthouse, 1865) and renewed quadriennially. Long before Sinclair Lewis chronicled the fictional convention high jinks of George F. Babbitt, boobus Americanus and prototypical conventioneer, other observers dis covered our penchant for gatherings. "As soon as several Americans have...
...years ago, and twice as much as Americans allot for amusements and spectator sports. There are some 28,000 trade, professional and other voluntary associations in the U.S., and by year's end they will have met nearly 250,000 times. The rage to meet has helped pack the nation's 37,410 hotels and motels to more than 70% of capacity, the highest room-occupancy rate in two decades. Some cities today are so over run with conventioneers that there is, quite literally, no room at the inn. Says Chicago's Jay Lurye, 55, one of a growing number...
...thing is certain: the convention is wreaking irreversible changes in the nation's topography, economy and patterns of social behavior. Consider the urban landscape. Cavernous convention centers, often municipally financed and usually little more than a big enclosed space, are popping up across the country like second-story men at a jewelers convention. Some 60 cities have built one of those concrete boxes, and another eleven are on the way. Meantime, hotels that cater to the convention trade are being expanded or else threatened by newer, larger ones. Las Vegas' 2,783-room Hilton, the nation's roomiest, has been...
...nation go on meeting like this? As entrenched as it has become in the mores, folkways and lower economics of contemporary living, the convention business faces a few hangovers of its own. One is the National Organization for Women's convention boycott of the 15 states that have not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. NOW officials say that organizations have yanked $100 million worth of meetings from non-ERA states, and that its boycott has become one of the most effective pressures so far in the drive to get the amendment passed. Missouri and Nevada are suing NOW on grounds...
...want it) and the tariff problems of heavy carriers. Representatives from all 51 A.T.A. state chapters listened, debated (often heatedly) and took notes. "Our company feels this is a way of life," said Newton Graves Jr., a vice president of Yellow Freight System, one of the nation's largest common carriers. "We have 15 people and their wives here. I have given each one of them a list of all the meetings we expect them to attend. They better go." Many trucking executives, like Graves, spent a good part of each day discussing new models and products with...