The "Great Sign" combines with a rooftop sign to form a powerful image, 1972. Rarely has a commercia

The "Great Sign" combines wine country washington tours with a rooftop sign to form a powerful image, wine country washington tours 1972. Rarely has a commercial icon been so appropriately named as The Great Sign of Holiday Inn. It was great in multiple senses of the word. Great in size - the standard version stood a titanic five stories tall and sixteen feet wide. Great in impact striking green, orange and yellow colors by day, a blaze of multicolored neon tubing and chasing lights by night. Great in presence a fixture at over 1,200 Holiday Inns the world over by 1970. And a great part of childhood memories for so many of us. For us, Holiday Inns played wine country washington tours a part in key events and everyday moments alike. We stayed there on vacation trips or on the way to visit family. For large gatherings weddings, wine country washington tours anniversaries, etc., we put up out-of-town wine country washington tours family members there. We celebrated graduations, engagements and other milestones with dinner at the local Holiday Inn restaurant. And of course, our Dads got their shop towels there. wine country washington tours ...and it was pretty appealing during the day as well. 1963. The story of Holiday Inn s origin has been told over and over to the point of becoming a part of American folklore: It was the summer of 1951. A Memphis businessman drove his family halfway across the country wine country washington tours on a sightseeing vacation trip to Washington DC. The accommodations along the way were substandard at best dilapidated motor courts, broken-down motels and the like. These places were dirty, uncomfortable, poorly maintained and offered no conveniences no food service, no air-conditioning, no phone, wine country washington tours pools or pets, no cigarettes. Worst of all, they charged extra per person wine country washington tours and he and his wife had five kids! Upon their return home, he dreamed up an idea for a new type of accommodation that would right all of the aforementioned wrongs. Plans were drawn up, financing was secured, wine country washington tours and the first Holiday Inn opened up about a year later. The rest, as they say, was history. I wonder who changed the rolls on that player piano.1961. By any standard, Kemmons Wilson was a successful man - long before his family s fateful vacation trip and the resultant idea for Holiday Inn ever came about. wine country washington tours He was the true embodiment of an entrepreneur, with boundless energy, curiosity and decisiveness, qualities that made him a millionaire at a young age. Born in 1913 in Osceola, Arkansas, and losing his father months later, Wilson and his resourceful mother, Ruby Doll Wilson, who installed a lifelong sense of self-confidence in her son, moved 55 miles away to Memphis before his first birthday. Wilson got his first job as a baby, when an image of his smiling face was used in advertisements for the local Sunbeam bread baker. A series of part-time jobs led to his first business venture before the age of twenty he bought a popcorn machine for fifty bucks and convinced an area movie theatre operator to let him sell popcorn to the theatre patrons. When Wilson s concession stand began to net twice as much as the theatre itself, the manager tossed him out, with little choice but to sell the machine for what he originally paid for it. Wilson stayed in the amusements business, using the proceeds from the sale of the popcorn machine to buy a small group of used pinball machines, placing them in various local establishments, reinvesting the profits wine country washington tours to continually add more machines. Within two years, he had saved enough money to try his hand at another venture home building. Building his first house in 1933, Wilson was able to borrow enough against it to build more homes, and by the eve of Pearl Harbor he had assembled impressive holdings in apartment buildings and theatres wine country washington tours (holding fast to the popcorn concessions, of course) as well. He also picked up the area selling rights for Wurlitzer wine country washington tours jukeboxes, and soon built up their highest sales volume in the entire country. Wurlitzer dispatched a special representative to Memphis to present Wilson an award for top sales performance up-and-coming bandleader Lawrence Welk. A few years afterward, Welk would be given a national television show, and in time all America would become familiar with his "A-one, an-a-two" song count-offs wine country washington tours and the famous bubble machine . An early 60's Holiday Inn room. The TV set is a Philco Predicta. Reportedly, wine country washington tours they didn't work very well, but they looked fantastic. After the U.S. was plunged into World War II, Wilson, who was already an experienced pilot, joined the U.S. Air Transport Command, flying transport missions over the treacherous Himalayan route from India to China. Not wanting to burden his new wife, Dorothy, and his mother with debt should the worst happen, Wilson sold off his business interests for $250,000 prior to leaving the country. While in the service wine country washington tours he made an acquaintance wine country washington tours that led to one of his few business flops. An Army buddy of his owned the Orange Crush distributorship in Chicago and his enthusiasm convinced Wilson to buy the Memphis Orange Crush bottling company, which had done well during the sugar-rationed war years, when he got back home. Once sugar supplies returned to normal and soft drinks were in plentiful supply again, however, Memphians expressed their overwhelming preference for Coca-Cola, rendering Wilson s $100,000 investment a bomb. (Reminds me of a conversation wine country washington tours I had years ago with a work friend from Connecticut wine country washington tours where we somehow got on the subject of soft drinks. He said It s like this - Pepsi is a Yankee drink. Coke is a Reb drink. There ya go. I m not sure it s that simple, but I admired the way he had this squared wine country washington tours away in his own mind.) In any event, Wilson s construction career kicked back into high gear, and it wasn t long before he became one of the most celebrated businessmen in Memphis. And then came the fateful summer 1951 vacation trip, referred to above. Immediately upon returning home, Wilson set about conceptualizing his new hotel court idea in great detail, siz(ing) wine country washington tours up the ideal (room) dimensions for efficiency and comfort , according to Wilson s 1994 autobiography Half Luck and Half Brains . Interestingly, the dimensions Wilson arrived at, 12 by 18 feet, became an industry standard that remained in place for decades. Once his brainstorming was complete Wilson wine country washington tours called upon Eddie Bluestein, a draftsman he frequently hired, to formalize his ideas in blueprint form. As it turned wine country washington tours out, Bluestein wine country washington tours s contribution would be far greater than a mere clean-up of Wilson s already well-thought out plans. The evening Bluestein drew up the plans, the 1941 film Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, happened to be airing on television. (I ve loved that flick since I was a kid. To this day, we never fail to watch it at Christmastime.) Bluestein watched wine country washington tours as he worked, and on a lark he wrote the name Holiday Inn on the finished wine country washington tours drawing. Wilson loved it. An early Holiday Inn front desk. The Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris cover of the Life magazine on the rack dates this to 1961. A steaming Saturday afternoon in August wine country washington tours (is there any other kind in Memphis?) of 1952 saw the grand opening of the world s first Holiday Inn, on Summer Avenue (U.S. Highway 70), the main road leading into Memphis from the east. Among the dignitaries scheduled wine country washington tours to be present was Frank Tobey, the mayor of Memphis, who would cut the ceremonial ribbon. As luck would have it, the mayor showed up late, and Dorothy Wilson convinced her husband to let their kids perform the honors instead. The press photo of that moment the five Wilson kids all dressed up and lined up by age, about to cut the ribbon while the very first Great Sign looms in the background stands today as an iconic American image. Within just over a year, Holiday Inns were opened on the other three main thoroughfares into Memphis, on U.S. Highways 51 South, 61 North and 51 North. It was a fitting first example of one of Wilson s key strategies for Holiday Inn to build on the edge of a city, on every major route into town, on the right side of the street to catch inbound travelers. So you couldn t come into town with passing one of my places , he later put it. From the beginning, Wilson set a goal to develop a national chain of motels. 400 units would be the ideal number, he told his wife and others in early conversations, wine country washington tours based on locating the motels at day s drive intervals across the Lower 48. He soon realized the need for help to accomplish this goal, from both a financial and a management standpoint. In late 1953, Wilson called on an acquaintance of his, a fellow Memphis area builder named Wallace E. Johnson, the biggest thinking man I knew as Wilson later described him in 1971 Saturday Evening Post profile, who specialized in homes for middle and lower income families. Nearly twelve years older and possessed of a lower-key demeanor than the ebullient Wilson, wine country washington tours Johnson rose from similar hardscrabble origins to become one of the nation s top homebuilders by the early fifties. wine country washington tours The Chicken Dinner was a Holiday Inn staple wine country washington tours in the 60's, as was "Cheddar Apple Pie". The Holiday Inn Directories were close at hand. Johnson s understanding of the role of showmanship and bold moves mirrored Wilson s own. Years earlier, he d had 5000 cardboard signs printed up that read Let Wallace E. Johnson Build Your Home On This Lot and proceeded to put the signs up on vacant lots all over town, irrespective of the lots ownership. The publicity was worth its weight wine country washington tours in gold, and more than a few stunned property owners proved willing to let Johnson build on their lots on a spec basis. Wilson realized that Johnson s financial acumen and his strong ties within the National wine country washington tours Home Builders Association (an eagerly-anticipated potential source of Holiday Inn franchisees) would be invaluable to Holiday Inn s future, so he arranged to visit Johnson at home one evening, where he laid out his dreams and plans for the company. Impressed by Wilson s thoroughness, enthusiasm and the Holiday Inn idea itself, Johnson was in the start of a 25-year wine country washington tours long partnership and a company that would impact wine country washington tours the world. Wilson and Johnson wine country washington tours hoped, and