IS HOLIDAY INN EXPRESS HIP?
BY CHRIS BARNETT March 17, 2005 — History has not been kind to Kemmons Wilson, the man who gave the world a plain-jane motel-hotel chain called Holiday Inn. Competitors Conrad Hilton, Bill Marriott, Cesar Ritz and even Howard Johnson all achieved brand-name immortality in the hospitality trade. But when Wilson checked into the big hotel in the sky two years ago at the age of 90, he was hardly a household name–except in Memphis, where he is a local legend second only to Elvis. Yet Wilson, whose brainstorm of a roadside inn with clean sheets, rooms starting at $4 a night and no extra charge for kids, may have bedded down more traveling salespeople and vacationing families in the last half-century than all his rivals combined. A high-school dropout who borrowed $50 during the Depression to pop and sell fresh popcorn in movie theatres, Kemmons Wilson was a jovial hotshot real-estate agent in Memphis who made his first fortune building large homes at moderate prices. In 1951, he took his
