In our American Dreamers series, we often meet folks who saw a problem and decided to fix it, creating something incredible along the way. Today, we journey back to 1951 with Kevins Wilson and his family. Imagine a long road trip, a crowded station wagon, and the simple search for a clean, fair-priced place to rest your head. When a motel owner unfairly hiked the price just because a family had five children, a spark ignited in Kevins. He knew there had to be a better way for everyday travelers to find comfort and respect on the open road.
Determined to transform the travel experience, Kevins Wilson set out to build a groundbreaking chain of hotels. He envisioned places where every room was clean, a standard size, and came with welcoming amenities like a restaurant and a swimming pool – all at an honest price. What started as a frustrated moment on a family vacation soon became a monumental quest to serve millions of families across America. From those humble beginnings, a legendary brand was born: the Holiday Inn, forever changing how we travel and dream on the road.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. And now it’s time for our American Dreamers series, which is sponsored by the great folks at the Job Creators Network. And they work hard to help small businesses grow into bigger ones by fighting for public policies that effectuate such things. And today we bring you the story of someone who, likely, you don’t know, and his name is Kevins Wilson, but you definitely know the iconic brand that he brought us. Here’s his son, Kevins Wilson Junior, with the story.
00:00:44
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty-one, we took a family vacation to Washington, D.C., and we had a big station wagon. And my father was going up there. I think, you know, again, this is a dual family vacation business trip. My two brothers, two sisters all piled in the car, no air conditioning, and want a funny store. We had a luggage rack on top, and partway through the trip a suitcase flew off, and my brother Bob said, “Hey, Dad.” He said, “Don’t bother me, I’m driving,” and, “Dad, be quiet.” And they just kept driving. “Hey, Dad, I need to be quiet!” So we get to some, I guess, the next casseling station, and he looked up like, “What is wrong?”
00:01:44
Speaker 3: Where is this?
00:01:45
Speaker 2: So my brother Bob said, “Well, I was trying to tell you that the suitcase fell off.” So we drove back, and our clothes were all over the road.
00:01:56
Speaker 3: They had tar all over them.
00:01:59
Speaker 2: Back in those days, you know, the road had a lot of tar, and so we basically had to throw them away and buy some news.
00:02:06
Speaker 3: But the real story there was that.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: Back in those days, they were mostly sole proprietor and mom-and-pop motel, cabana, cabin owners that had motel-type rooms. Now, the big cities had the aristocratic downtown hotels that were very expensive, so the situation was such that you actually had to go in and inspect a room before you agreed to stay there. And that was for a lot of reasons. You know, you wanted to see how big it was; was it clean? I remember, I was six at the time, sitting in the car. My dad would walk up to the little office, and then he and the manager may walk out to see a amma, and then many times he just walked straight back to the car and said, “Hey, it’s it wasn’t big enough, or it’s too dirty, and we’re going to have to just keep driving.” And in the back of those, he didn’t know how far the next place was. So, and anyway, we finally got to a place. Of course, as children, we all wanted to stay at one; one had a swimming pool because it was the summer, it was hot. But we got to this one property, and my dad went and looked at the room and came back and said, “Okay, kids, this is good.” So we all piled into one single room, and my brothers and sisters, we had sleeping bags, so we slept in the sleeping bags. And the deal he had made with the hotel owner was the room would cost six dollars. So the next morning he goes to check out, and the guy charged him sixteen dollars. And he said, “Wait a minute, now. You know, we agreed yesterday, it’s six dollars.”
00:04:03
Speaker 3: Well, why is it sixteen?
00:04:05
Speaker 2: He said, “Well, I charged two dollars extra for every child,” and, of course, there were five of us, so the six dollars turned into sixteen.
00:04:15
Speaker 3: And that was the spark that was in my father.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: Said when he said, “You know, this is just not fair.”
00:04:24
Speaker 3: We didn’t use any more water, or towels, or linens, or… And the guy said, “Well, buddy, that’s the way it is.”
00:04:33
Speaker 2: And he realized at that moment that this was a huge, untapped market, and he made a determination then that he was going to come back to Memphis and build a chain of hotels. And he told my mother that day that he was going back to Memphis to build four hundred hotels across the country, mostly a day’s drive from one another. They said, furthermore, they’re all going to have some standardization. They’re all going to be the same size; they’re all going to be clean. We’re going to have a restaurant in every one. We’re going to have a lounge in every one. We’ll have a swimming pool in every one. We’ll have a Gideon Bible in every one. You know, we’re going to have a pastor on call. We’re going to have a doctor on call. Because he felt like just a normal guy, and, you know, if I like this, I think everybody ought to like this. And so my mother laughed at him, and obviously that gave him great incentive to prove it wrong. So, sure enough, he came back to Memphis, and he started. He was a frustrated architect; he loved drawing, so he went to a guy named Eddie Bluestein. He was a draftsman, not technically an architect, and my father knew exactly what he wanted in a hotel. And one of the reasons for that was he had the background in construction, so he knew that lumber comes in twelve-foot lengths and carpet comes in twelve-foot lengths, and wet. So it’s not surprising that the room that he designed was twelve foot and with because that.
00:06:27
Speaker 3: Was the lumber. You didn’t have to cut the lumber.
00:06:29
Speaker 2: You know, if it was thirteen feet, you’d have to add some. If it’s eleven, you’d have to subtract something.
00:06:35
Speaker 3: And really, even today.
00:06:38
Speaker 2: That’s still the standard size running. You know, you’ll find some a little bigger, some a little smaller. But he really set that in motion. So Eddie Bluestein drew the plan that my dad told him. And, you know, all architecture plans on the bottom left or bottom right.
00:06:56
Speaker 3: They have the name of the project.
00:06:59
Speaker 2: And it just so happens that he had watched the movie Holiday Inn the night before, and so he drew on the plans “Holiday Inn.” And he brought them to my dad the next day, and my dad said, “This is great! I like it!” He said, “What in the world is this on the plans?”
00:07:19
Speaker 3: He said, “Well, I don’t know,” he said, “it was just…”
00:07:22
Speaker 2: Just, “I saw the movie. I liked the name,” and he said, “You know, Eddie, I like that too.” And so, sure enough, that’s how it happened. And one of the things that really kind of has always impressed me, in a sense, was it may tell you a little bit about my dad’s ego that Mister Hilton called his Hilton Inns, and Mister Marriott called his Marriotts, and Dad, he was happy with Holiday Inns. And, you know, probably thirty years later, after the company was sold, they became the Promus Company.
00:08:07
Speaker 3: Promus was how they pronounced it.
00:08:10
Speaker 2: And Dad had long since retired, and we found out that they paid a half a million dollars for some think tank to come up with that name.
00:08:19
Speaker 3: And here Eddie Bluestein, you know, gives him an iconic name.
00:08:24
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Kemmens Wilson Junior tell the story of his dad. And by the way, so many of our American Dreamers’ stories are just this story: an ordinary guy trying to solve a problem. Here he is, checking in a hotel and not even knowing he’s going to get. And then he finally picks when he likes on this trip and finds out he’s being charged ten extra bucks. Two dollars an extra kid meant something, and he said, “That’s not fair.” And then he went home, and he designed a business to solve a problem: standardization, same size, same cleanliness, a pool in every one, a Bible in every one, a pastor on call, a doctor on call. In other words, what he’d want for his own family. When we come back, more of this remarkable American story and American Dreamers story, the story of Holiday Inn and the story of one guy trying to solve a problem for his family and families, particularly working-class families across this great country. Our story continues here on our American Stories, and we continue with our American Stories and with the story of Holiday Inn and its founder. Let’s return to his son, Kemmens Wilson Junior, on the story of his dad and the iconic brand he created.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: Somebody asked my dad one time, “Why did you decide on sort of the market for Holiday Inns, which is really, you know, moderate-price, you know, family, or, you know, rather than be upscale or whatever?” And my dad would always say that there’s more people in the middle than there are at the top.
00:10:28
Speaker 3: One of the interesting things.
00:10:30
Speaker 2: That my father wanted to do, too, was to make a statement with the sign. And he had a friend named Harold Bolton, who was in the sign business, and he and Harold designed this, what some would call iconic, some would call gaudy, huge neon sign with the arrow pointing to wherever the hotel was. And my dad felt that, you know, that was important. If you could see the sign, you knew what it was. And the sign had a little marquee on it where you could change the message out every day, you know, like “Buffet tonight” or “Kids stay free.” And that was one of the gifts that my dad said he wanted to gift to the industry, and that is that kids stay free if they stay in…
00:11:22
Speaker 3: The same room with their parents.
00:11:24
Speaker 2: And he sort of forced all the other hotel chains to kind of do that at the time.
00:11:31
Speaker 3: But y’all, you’ve certainly seen.
00:11:33
Speaker 2: Especially back in those days, just about every hotel, the motel, had a vacancy/no vacancy sign. He did not want that. He wanted that totally eliminated because he wanted a person to stop, to actually get out of the car, come into the hotel, and if they didn’t have a room at that particular hotel, the desk clerk was to call around to all the other hotels and find that person a room because he felt that he could win.
00:12:10
Speaker 3: So he builds this one.
00:12:13
Speaker 2: Successful hotel in Memphis, and he went and built three more. Now, this was way before the Interstate system. So he built them on the north, south, east, and west entries into town. So if you were coming to Memphis, Tennessee, you had to pass a Holiday Inn. And they were all done very well. And so he went to build number five, and the banker said, “Hey, you’re tapped out.”
00:12:46
Speaker 3: You know, you’re out of credit. We can’t lend you any more money.
00:12:51
Speaker 2: And so his dream of the hotels across the country was jeopardized. I cannot even build the fifth Holiday Inn, much less…
00:13:01
Speaker 3: The four hundredth. “What are we going to do?”
00:13:05
Speaker 2: And that’s when he sat down and came up with the theory of franchising, where they would license a person, and that person had to adhere to a certain set of standards, and if you didn’t, they could take your license away.
00:13:22
Speaker 3: So he started the franchise business.
00:13:26
Speaker 2: Even today, you know, it’s about eighty percent franchised and about twenty percent company-owned, so to speak. You know, one of the things he was most proud of in all his life was he said that he’s created a lot of millionaires, and he really had. I mean, at one time in the sixties, they were building; a hotel was opening every two and a half days, and I think a room was opening every twenty minutes or something. So it was incredibly explosive. And then when the Interstate system hit, you know, the timing was, you know, perfect and right. And my father probably personally inspected every Holiday Inn site—I don’t know, maybe the first five hundred of them. Well, one of the funny things was early on in Holiday Inns, they didn’t have much representation on the West Coast. It was mostly in the South. When it started growing, it, you know, went Northeast and a little Midwest, but not much on the coast. So, and so Dad got a call from Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, and McDonald’s was flourishing at the time; they were still young. He had bought it from the McDonald Brothers, and he had visions of, you know, “How do I expand that business?” And Holiday Inns was already actively in the franchise business. So Dad was really excited when Ray Kroc said, “I’d like to come to Memphis and talk to you about getting a Holiday Inn franchise.” And so he did, and, of course, they, you know, rolled out the red carpet and gave him all the franchise agreements, explained everything to him about the ins and outs of it. And, of course, they would say, “Look, you know, we’re sure, you know, I hope you got some sites out there that, you know, he talked about, ‘All I can build a Holiday Inn here and put a McDonald’s here.'” So they thought, “Look, we may have hit the jackpot.” And so he goes back to California, and it just goes silent. And there’s…
00:15:45
Speaker 3: No dialogue, no nothing. He never calls back.
00:15:49
Speaker 2: My father calls him, and everybody in the organization is trying to get a hold of him, and they literally found out, really, all he wanted was the actual franchise agreement so they could—I mean, I’m sure they didn’t copy it verbatim—but, you know, they got white-out for Holiday Inn and put McDonald’s in there. But obviously, we know the history of that. So we joke around and we say, “Well, my dad gave Ray Kroc his start. Where’s the account of me?” And, you know, jumping back, you know, the biggest success for Holiday Inns, in my mind, was the standardization that nobody until that time—everything, every hotel room, place was different. They didn’t have to go in and look at the room, you know, they just went in, checked in, went to their room. And there was a great advertisement years ago that said, “The best surprise is no surprise. Stay Holiday Inn.” And that was really, to me, captured the essence of what he did.
00:17:08
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think about he told us one day.
00:17:15
Speaker 2: Long after this, we were quizzing him about kind of growing up and stuff, and he said he and his mother ate bread and beans for an entire year back then—the deep, deep Depression. Her husband, my dad’s father, died when he was nine months old, so he was completely raised by his mother. She got a job as a bookkeeper just to kind of, you know, have some money to come in.
00:17:48
Speaker 3: But, you know, he had to.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: Drop out of high school when he was in his senior year, and he had to drop out because his mother had gotten terminated her job. So he was basically the breadwinner. He had to go hustle. But what she did, she was his biggest encourager, his Barnabas. She told him that there was nothing in the world he couldn’t do. I mean, she absolutely adored him; he could do no wrong. And again, I mean, you know, she was—she was the one whispering in his ear, “You know, you can do it when the world says, ‘No way, you can do this.'” And really, her life, you know, became his life. And, you know, today we would call her a helicopter mom, right, that she was just…
00:18:47
Speaker 3: All over him.
00:18:48
Speaker 2: But I, you know, I’m sure she saw in him a leader, someone who could make things happen, someone who’s aggressive and can be successful. So she just undermined that with daily, “You can do it. Hang in there. There’s nothing you can’t do.”
00:19:09
Speaker 3: So it was.
00:19:12
Speaker 2: That springboarded him into his life of having confidence and being able to just be successful, and the thought of not even graduating from high school and going on to be the founder and CEO of one of the largest iconic companies in the world is…
00:19:39
Speaker 3: Just amazing to me.
00:19:42
Speaker 1: And great job, as always, to Alex for all the work he does on these pieces. And a special thanks to Kevins Wilson Junior for sharing the story of his father, and what a story it is. And by the way, for more of this great American story, make sure to pick up Kemmen’s book “Half Luck. In half brings” the Kemmens Wilson home and story, a father-son’s story, a family story, and a working-class family turning well hard work into success. Here on our American Stories.
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