Kemmons Wilson
| Kemmons Wilson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Charles Kemmons Wilson January 5, 1913 Osceola, Arkansas |
| Died | February 12, 2003 (aged 90) Memphis, Tennessee |
| Occupation | Builder/Developer Founder, Holiday Inn |
Charles Kemmons Wilson (January 5, 1913 – February 12, 2003) was the founder of the Holiday Inn chain of hotels.
He was born in Osceola, Arkansas, the only child of Kemmons and Ruby "Doll" Wilson. His father was an insurance salesman who died when Kemmons was nine months old. Shortly thereafter, his mother, Doll, moved the two to Memphis, Tennessee, where he was raised solely by his mother.
Wilson was married to Dorothy Lee. They had five children: Spence, Robert, Kemmons Jr, Betty, and Carole. Wilson died in Memphis aged 90 and is interred there in Forest Hill .
Wilson initially came up with the idea after a family road trip to Washington, D.C., during which he was disappointed by the quality of the roadside hotels of that era. The name Holiday Inn was given to the original hotel by his architect Eddie Bluestein as a joke, in reference to the 1942 movie of the same name.
He opened the first Holiday Inn motel in Memphis in 1952, and quickly added others to create an entire hotel chain. Holiday Inn went international in 1960. Wilson and his financial partner Wallace E. Johnson (1901-1988) were practicing Christians who saw to the placing of a Bible in every one of their hotel rooms and who donated much of their growing fortunes to charitable enterprises.
The first four roofs put on the Holiday Inn were by James Edwin Murphy.
In 1957, Wilson franchised the chain as Holiday Inn of America and it grew dramatically, following Wilson's original tenet that the properties should be standardized, clean, predictable, family-friendly and readily accessible to road travellers.
By 1958, there were 50 locations across the country, 100 by 1959, 500 by 1964, and the 1000th Holiday Inn opened in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968. The chain dominated the motel market, leveraged its innovative Holidex reservation system, put considerable financial pressure on traditional hotels and set the standard for its competitors, like Ramada Inns, Quality Inn, Howard Johnson's, and Best Western.
In 1968, Wilson bought Continental Trailways and merged the bus company into Holiday Inn. From then until 1979, when Holiday Inn sold Trailways to private investor Henry Lea Hillman Sr. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Holiday Inn television commercials were prone to show a Trailways bus pulling into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn hotel.
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