Conrad Hilton

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.