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Conrad Nicholson Hilton
(December 25, 1887 – January 3, 1979) was an American hotelier and founder of the Hilton Hotels chain. He lived to the age of 91. This is a story of how the Hilton fortune was gained and lost and amassed again in one lifetime and then added to by future generations.
Conrad Hilton was the great-grandfather of today's socialites Paris Hilton and Nicky Hilton. There are currently two members of the Hilton family named Conrad. One is Paris' younger brother, Conrad Hughes Hilton, the son of Richard Hilton. The other is Conrad Nicholson Hilton III, son of Conrad Nicholson Hilton, Jr.
I feel that the lessons that Conrad Hilton learned in life will be of help to many people right now. I think that you will learn from the knowledge he learned from being born in an adobe mud house in New Mexico Territory to his creating and living a life of great prosperity.
Conrad Hilton was born in the tiny town of San Antonio New Mexico in 1887 to a hard working father Gus and Conrad's mother Mary. His mother was very religious woman. As Conrad grew up he came to enjoy the hard work because it fulfilled his desire to be productive. He later became a person who prayed because it gave him comfort and hope when he was going through difficult times.
As a young man and up to 1931 Conrad Hilton had done well for himself and acquired much, but in 1931 at the age of 44 he found himself in financial trouble and everything that he worked for was crumbling away from him as the hard times of the Depression were hitting the Nation and Conrad personally. In his autobiography 'Be My Guest' Conrad Hilton tells the story of how the marshal was looking for Hilton to collect on debts that Hilton owed and how he didn't even have an office to operate out of. It seemed that all Hilton had worked for was being taken away from him by the depression. His mother had good advise for him at that time.
"Then I was a grown man and the Great Depression of the '30's tossed my own life's work from a tidy little mound of success into a bottomless pit of debts, humiliations, and mortgages. Men were jumping from hotel windows, my hotel windows, but Mother was perfectly calm. "Some may jump out of windows," she said. "Some go to church. Pray, Connie. It's the best investment you'll ever make." His father, Gus, believed staying busy was the best investment that a person could make in life.
When Conrad was almost 70 years old he had a discussion with his oldest son Nick and his second son, Barron about the two things that Conrad has taught them. Here is how Conrad shared with them the lessons he learned in life and how he realized the third lesson
I will use his own words from his autobiography to tell this part of Conrad Hilton's story.
"These two things I learned from Mary and Gus Hilton--the necessity of prayer and work--seemed so valuable to me that I tried valiantly to pass them on to my own sons as the "open sesame of life".
Theoretically, at least, they always agreed. But as they got older they began to insist that something was missing from my formulas. "There just has to be something more, Dad," Nick, the oldest, insisted.
"Sure," I said. "There's enthusiasm, and finding your talent, and a lot of other things that go to make up successful living. But these two are the basic ones. Without them you can't even start."
"Look," my second son, Barron, chimed in, "I know plenty of fellows who work hard and pray faithfully. And nothing happens. There must be some other ingredient that goes into it but I can't put my finger on it."
Nor, at that moment, could I, Was there anything I had to add, after almost three score and ten years of living, to the basic wisdom handed me by my mother and father?
I got an idea when I made a flying trip to New York. Sitting in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria I thought maybe I had the answer. Looking at what remained of San Antonio, New Mexico, months later, my theory seemed to be confirmed. This was the missing piece.
You had to dream!
I'll admit this is the last suggestion most people would expect to be thrown into the pot by a businessman. I'll also admit no one ever called me a dreamer and that you can't succeed without the other two parts, but it's where you start. At least, I realized, it was where I started.
When I sat in the Waldorf on Park Avenue a few days after my talk with my boys, unofficial host at a dinner dance which was part of that great hotel's twenty-fifth birthday celebration, I was more deeply impressed that anyone there. I suddenly realized that I was seeing a dream, a wild, all but impossible dream, fulfilled that can't help but fill a man with awe.
Here I was, Connie Hilton, from San Antonio, Territory of New Mexico, at the Waldorf's Silver Anniversary, a president of the company which operated this most costly, most luxurious, most famous, of all hotels. Sometime during the evening I would hand to the United Nations Children's Fund a check for $65,000 made possible by our providing food, drink, and entertainment at an absolute minimum. It was a sparkling event in the social season and the eight hundred guests, according to the society columns, were "prominent in diplomacy, government, business, the armed forces society, and the arts."
Why, when I saw my first photograph of the recently build "new" Waldorf in 1931, read of such luxuries as a private railroad siding in the basement, a private hospital for guests, a golden river in her innards where her construction had started, six kitchens, two hundred cooks, five hundred waiters, one hundred dishwasher, not to mention two thousand rooms, I was beating my way around Texas half hidden under a ten-gallon hat, existing on a voluntary loan from a bellboy. My laundry was in hock and a gun-toting constable was trying to find places to hang up the court judgments against me.
It was a presumptuous, and outrageous, time to dream. Still I cut out that picture of the Waldorf and wrote across it "The Greatest of Them All." As soon as I had won back a desk of my own I slipped the dog-eared clipping under the glass top. From then on it was always in front of me.
Fifteen years later, in October, 1949, "The Greatest of Them All" became a Hilton Hotel.
It had taken a lot of work, four years of delicate negotiation and even before that, careful planning.
It had taken a lot of prayer, During the final crucial days I had attended church at six-thirty each morning. No matter how late we worked into the night, I started the day on my knees.
The week-end of the Waldorf's Silver Anniversary I went again to kneel in St. Patrick's Cathedral. I was giving thanks, not for the Waldorf, but for the All-American right to dream with the actual possibility of seeing that dream come true.
Right there I think I saw the reason why so many successful men keep an almost boyish love of America and democracy. It isn't because she doesn't ask sacrifices. We all know better than that. It isn't because she offers and easy route. I guess nobody ever had it harder than Abraham Lincoln. It isn't because we are always getting "Pie in the Sky," or are automatically entitled to two chickens in every pot. I myself had looked up from the bottom of the heap with thirty-eight cents in my pocket and seen only a mountain of debt. But even then I had the complete confidence that our way of life offered me the freedom to crawl back up and eventually push out my horizons as far as my vision and strength would carry me.
Going even further back, what could have seemed more impossible than that the gangling youngster who rode Chiquita, my horse, swam in an irrigation ditch, worked fourteen hours a day in a general store in an isolated, sunbaked town, doing business with Spaniards, Mexicans, Indians, rough trappers and miners, would one day whirl around a dance floor in white tie and tails with some of the loveliest and most distinguished ladies of the world? Or be host two days later to thirty-five hundred guests at a reception in the Waldorf's Grand Ballroom? Or, on the Official Birthday, greet 350 of New York's most prominent men at luncheon and follow that with a dinner in the Sert Room where we wined and dined one hundred or more employees who had been with the "new" Waldorf since it opened its doors, long before I ever ventured out of the southwest except in dreams.
Yet, there I was, amongst the gourmets, being served Tumet of Gumbo Chervil with Lucullus Crusts, loving every minute of it, and as nimble among the vast array of knives, forks and spoons as a Chinaman born to his chopsticks. I could not help chuckling inside, remembering how my mother always refused to be impressed by the trimmings. Under her breath she would have been saying, "It's only fancy fish soup, Connie. And don't you forget it."
I don't. I wouldn't want to. It would spoil my private fun if I were to forget the original dreamer and get lost in the dream.
The type of dreaming that appeals to me has nothing to do with a reverie, and idle daydream. It isn't wishful thinking. Nor is it the type of revelation reserved for the great ones and rightly called vision. What I speak of is a brand of imaginative thinking backed by enthusiasm, vitality, expectation, to which all men may aspire.
To accomplish big things I am convinced you must first dream big dreams. True, it must be in line with progress, human and divine, or you are wasting your prayer. It has to be backed by work and faith, or it has no hands and feet. Maybe there's even an element of luck mixed in. But I am sure now that, without this master plan, you have nothing.
My own dreams were smaller that some--bigger than others. Some had flaws in them and fell apart before they could take form. Others were misguided; the energy behind them had to be redirected according to a sounder plan, and all that is part of this story.
Six months after the Waldorf anniversary, however, when I looked at what remained of San Antonio, my father's town, at what had once been my bank, I knew for sure that the beginning was always the same.
It always started with a dream.
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This story is one of the best examples of experiencing hardship but continuing to dream of a future of success through Dreaming Big, Hard Work, and Prayer.
Decide what you want. Set your goal. Dream big, work hard and pray with the expectation that your prayers will be answered and you will someday be looking back at your life in amazement at what you have accomplished and the pleasure that you are enjoying in remembering the journey that took you to your dream.
Lee Miller
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Conrad Hilton's story was taken from the first chapter 'You've Got To Dream" from the book "Be My Guest" by Conrad Hilton. I found it to be a very inspiring book. It is on my suggested reading list.
copyright 1957 by Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J.
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Original Material Copyright 2009 - A Master Key LLC - Lee Miller
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