Conrad Nicholson Hilton (December 25, 1887 – January 3, 1979) built the world’s first major hotel chain out of a single 40-room property in an oil-boom Texas town. He bought the Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, in 1919 for about $40,000, discovered that beds were more profitable than the bank he had originally come to buy, and spent the 1920s assembling a string of Texas hotels — the Dallas Hilton (1925), the Abilene Hilton (1927), the Waco Hilton (1928) and the El Paso Hilton (1930).
The Great Depression nearly erased all of it. Occupancy collapsed, loans came due, and Hilton lost properties to foreclosure and was forced to merge his remaining hotels under outside management. In the worst stretch, around 1931 to 1933, he was personally near bankruptcy and, by his own later account, borrowed pocket money from a bellboy named Eddie simply to keep eating.
Hilton clawed back by holding on through the leases he could keep, negotiating with creditors, and slowly regaining control of his surviving hotels as the economy recovered. He then went national and global on a scale no one had attempted: buying the Stevens and the Palmer House in Chicago in 1945, winning control of the Waldorf Astoria lease in New York in 1949, incorporating Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1946 and Hilton International in 1948.
By the time he died in 1979, the once-bankrupt Texan presided over a chain of well over 180 hotels in the United States and dozens more abroad, and was widely known as “America’s Innkeeper.” His second act was not a return to where he had been — it was an empire many times larger than the one the Depression had taken.
Soichiro Honda (November 17, 1906 – August 5, 1991) was a self-taught mechanic who built a successful wartime manufacturing business, watched it be destroyed within a single year, and then founded one of the world’s largest vehicle companies from the wreckage. In 1937 he established Tokai Seiki to make piston rings, eventually supplying Toyota; by World War II it was a substantial industrial operation employing thousands.
The fall came in 1944 and 1945. A U.S. B-29 bombing raid destroyed the Yamashita plant in 1944, and the 1945 Mikawa earthquake collapsed the Iwata plant. With his facilities in ruins, Honda sold what remained of Tokai Seiki to Toyota for about 450,000 yen in 1945 and walked away from the company he had built.
After what he called a “human rest period” of roughly a year, Honda re-entered manufacturing. In October 1946 he founded the Honda Technical Research Institute and began bolting small surplus engines onto bicycles to create cheap motorized transport for a fuel-starved, war-ruined Japan. In 1948 he incorporated Honda Motor Co., Ltd., and in 1949 partnered with businessman Takeo Fujisawa, who handled finance and sales while Honda focused on engineering.
That division of labor powered an extraordinary ascent. The Super Cub of 1958 became the best-selling motor vehicle in history, Honda grew into the world’s largest motorcycle maker, then broke into automobiles and, in the early 1980s, became the first Japanese automaker to manufacture cars in the United States. Honda died in 1991, his name on engines and vehicles across the globe.
Johnny Cash rose from Sun Records in the mid-1950s to become one of the defining voices of American music, but his career was nearly destroyed twice and rebuilt twice. The first collapse came from a decade of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction in the 1960s that wrecked his health, his first marriage, and his reliability as a performer.
His first comeback was anchored in a hard-won, partial sobriety, helped by June Carter, and crystallized in two live prison albums: At Folsom Prison in 1968 and At San Quentin in 1969. They returned him to the top of the charts and led to a network television variety show on ABC. For a few years he was again a giant.
A second decline followed in the late 1970s and 1980s. Relapses recurred, his record sales faded, and in 1986 his longtime label, Columbia Records, dropped him after nearly three decades. He spent years recording for smaller labels with diminishing commercial impact, written off by much of the industry as a nostalgia act.
The second comeback was the most improbable. In 1994, producer Rick Rubin paired the aging Cash with stark, stripped-down recordings under the American Recordings series, reaching a young rock audience. The arc peaked with his 2002 cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, a late-career masterpiece, before his death in September 2003.