Chapter 2
For several days in late 1918, there was no scent of baking bread in the Marriott home, only the smell of sickness. No bed was empty; from four-year-old Woody to eighteen-year-old Willard and twenty-year-old Doris, all eight of the children were coughing, some were feverish, and some had nosebleeds. Will and his wife, Ellen, did not have enough strength to leave their own bed to help their children. In front of the house a makeshift rag flag flew, and on a placard nailed next to the door was a one-word warning in large letters: “INFLUENZA.”
The whole Marriott family became victims of the deadly pandemic sometimes called the “Spanish flu.” It was a virus so deadly that in less than a year it killed more people than the bubonic plague—the “Black Death”—had killed throughout the entire fourteenth century. Nothing else before or since—disease, famine, natural disaster, or war—has killed so many in so short a time. One-fifth of the earth’s population became infected with the deadly flu, and more than fifty million died.
As near as can be determined, the pandemic first arrived in Utah in early October 1918. The infection spread so quickly that by mid-October, hospitals overflowed with patients. Most people were quarantined in their homes and required to fly the “flu flag.” By the next month, the worst of the epidemic seemed to abate in Utah, but then World War I ended on November 11, and public-health officials could not prevent celebratory gatherings in every town and city. Within a day or two, a second wave of infection occurred, worse than the first. In an act of desperation after Thanksgiving, Ogden’s leaders closed the entire city to outsiders.1
The flu epidemic hit during Willard’s senior year at Weber Academy high school. Between his absences for lambing in the spring and harvesting sugar beets in the fall, school was already “something of a hit-and-miss proposition,” he wrote.2 But when schools were closed by the epidemic for four months, there was no possibility that Willard would graduate in the spring of 1919. The epidemic finally abated that spring.
Willard would not be deterred from his plan to serve a two-year volunteer mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after he turned nineteen in September 1919. His assignment was to the Eastern States Mission, headquartered in New York. His father worried that the Marriott family could not handle the double financial hit of a mission—the loss of Willard’s help at home, coupled with the cost of supporting him while he was away. But Willard urged his father to have faith that it was the right thing to do. Will agreed and sold his beloved Buick, and Ellen sold her only precious possession, a gold watch and chain inherited from her mother. The money was used to outfit Willard with a new derby hat, crisp white shirts with celluloid collars, a suitcoat and pants, and shiny new black shoes. Then it paid for his train fare to New York City, with enough left over to cover his expenses for a few months.
The train pulled into New York’s Hoboken station in early December. Willard took the subway under the Hudson River to Brooklyn to receive his assignment from his mission president, George McCune. He stayed at the Brooklyn mission home for a week for training. During that week, he looked up a cousin, Laura Bushnell, who lived with her husband, George, in a large upper West End Avenue apartment. George was vice president and comptroller for the fast-growing J.C. Penney Company, which had moved its headquarters to New York from Salt Lake City only five years earlier. It was a very fortuitous family connection for the future businessman.
For his first assignment, Elder Marriott took the train to Burlington, Vermont, where he quickly acclimatized to the work—and learned humility. On his sixth day in Burlington, he wrote in his faithfully kept daily journal: “I am beginning to realize my divine calling, and responsibility I have fulfilling my duty. I can plainly see my transgressions, and what it would [have] meant if I had not stopped.”3 He soon demonstrated zeal in the work—sometimes too much zeal. On a New Year’s Eve train ride to Hyde Park, New York, Elder Marriott condemned a man to hell for not listening to the gospel message.
One night in Burlington, he received a frightening phone call from the Mathers family, members of the Church. Their daughter Ruth had fallen off a forty-five-foot cliff by Lake Champlain. Doctors told her parents she was dying. Elder Marriott arrived at the family’s home and asked to be alone with the unconscious Ruth, where he pled with God to know what he should do. Then he placed his hands on her head in the manner of Latter-day Saint priesthood blessings and promised her that she would live. In less than half an hour, Ruth was awake and asking for water. The experience greatly strengthened Willard’s faith in his God and in himself.
Along with the high spots, missionary labor could be grueling. Rising from bed at an early hour, when it was 20 degrees below zero outside, Willard and his companion would preach door-to-door and on street corners. Elder Marriott’s first experience with a street meeting was an unmitigated failure. “We spoke for 15 minutes to a telephone post & electric light. No one would stop,” he wrote.4 A few weeks later, another street meeting drew a hostile crowd that grew large enough to attract the attention of the local newspaper. The editor of the Rutland Herald Reporter invited the missionaries into his office to talk religion and then wrote an upbeat article about their efforts.
Elder J.W. Marriott (left) with fellow missionary Hugh Colton, his future business partner.
More often than not, people’s reactions ran from disinterest to anger at the missionaries. When Willard visited a local photo studio, the photographer told him he’d rather “be shot before being a Mormon.” One angry woman “shut my fingers in the door,” while another “acted awful hateful. She slammed the door and I hollered in saying she would feel sorry for slamming the door in my face. She came out with a mad rush and told us to get right out of there. Set the dog on us.”5
In Colchester, near Burlington, Elder Marriott had the most harrowing experience of his mission. Protestants in the town were united in their antipathy toward the Latter-day Saints. Willard and his companion entered the town cautiously on June 16, 1920, and did some private preaching, but word of their presence spread quickly. One welcoming family invited them to stay for dinner and lodging, but soon the house was surrounded by an angry mob. Their hosts gamely defended the missionaries as the young men made a hasty departure, hiding out in a field.6
Throughout the moonless night, they heard swearing and cursing against “those filthy Mormons”; and, occasionally, they heard a rifle shot. At one lull in the hunt, the missionaries stood up to assess the danger and heard the sound of footsteps around them. Willard’s companion kicked the nearest shadowy figure—a cow that bellowed in pain. Willard reported that at sunrise, after “ascending & descending hills, climbing over & crawling through fences & wading through dew-fallen grass,”7 they managed to evade their pursuers. Persecution only seemed to redouble Willard’s commitment. “The only time I am really happy is while I am preaching,” he wrote.8
Toward the end of his mission, Elder Marriott had encounters with an impressive list of luminaries, including Babe Ruth, who hit his 140th home-run ball toward the surprised missionary.
Ruth was in the midst of what some historians argue was his best season ever, leading the New York Yankees to their first league championship. On July 30, the Yankees were on their home field playing against the Cleveland Indians. Anxious to see the Sultan of Swat play just once, Willard and his companion somehow got seats in the sold-out crowd of 38,000, and the great Bambino hit a home run.
“I was wishing Babe Ruth would knock a home run & he lifted one right to me,” Willard wrote excitedly in his journal. “We were in the bleachers. I had my coat & a book in [my] hands so couldn’t grab it & it hit a man in the head sitting [to] the side of me. Knocked him out for a few minutes. Feel like kicking myself for not throwing my coat down but it came so sudden.”9
Willard never told anyone in his family about the moment, maybe because he had failed to drop his coat and reach for the ball. But, more than most moments in his early life, it allegorically foretold what would later become a consistent difference between J.W. and his son Bill. The father was cautious and disciplined, refusing to trade a bird in the hand for two in the bush. Bill became a risk taker who could pivot his company on a dime.
In the summer of 1921, J.W. received a letter from his mother warning that when the last $100 they had sent to Willard ran out, he would probably have to come home. Two weeks later, he got a letter from his father insisting he come home in September to start college. Then another letter came from his mother in August reminding him of sacrifices the family was making for him. Willard agonized over what to do. In the end, the mission president made the decision for him, sending him home ten weeks shy of his two-year mark.
The twenty-one months had changed him forever. “I developed beyond anything I could have imagined—in poise, vocabulary, knowledge, spiritually, and in working with people,” he described decades later.10 Not incidentally, he had made new friends who would prove pivotal in his early business ventures, including Franklin Richards, who would introduce him to the food-catering business, and fellow missionary Hugh Colton, who would be his first partner in founding the family restaurant venture. George Bushnell, the J.C. Penney executive and relative by marriage, would be an early investor who would introduce him to another key investor and adviser, Earl Sams, and to Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.
Finally, a stop in Washington, D.C., on his way home from the mission would prompt him to later choose the city as the best location for the start of a new restaurant business that his son Bill would later expand into an international hotel empire.
Willard turned twenty-one on that day he stepped off a Pennsylvania Railroad train at Union Station and got his first look at Washington, D.C. He never expected to live in the East, let alone begin a business there, so he thought this was his one chance to see the nation’s capital.
The next morning, he hopped aboard a sightseeing bus, which took him on a tour of Arlington Cemetery, the White House, and the homes of the capital’s most important leaders, including Reed Smoot, the highly respected senator from Utah who would one day become Willard’s father-in-law. In retrospect, the most memorable sight for Willard was a hardworking pushcart vendor who couldn’t keep up with the tourists’ demands for lemonade and ice cream in the sultry heat. That memory would later cause Willard to conclude that the District of Columbia was just the place for a root beer stand.
Back at home in Utah, Willard faced two obstacles to his college plans—he had no money and no high school diploma. A Weber College professor in Ogden saw potential in him and arranged campus jobs and classes that would give him high school and college credit. He buckled down to his studies, became student-body president, and graduated with a two-year degree in 1923.
That summer Willard and a friend took sales jobs with Baron Woolen Mills and were sent to the logging camps of northern California to sell long woolen underwear to loggers. On arrival at each camp, the partners would pick out two of the huskiest lumberjacks and dare them to try tearing the long johns apart. They never could, so orders for the $22 union suits piled up. The canny partners soon found they had to collect payment for the goods on Saturday, right after the loggers were paid and before they started drinking and gambling. Working eighteen-hour days, the pair each made $3,000 that summer.11
In the fall, Willard was admitted to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the oldest state university west of the Missouri River. His fraternity brothers at Phi Delta Theta included fellow missionaries Hugh Colton and Franklin Richards, who hired him to work at a catering company supplying university parties—his first foray into the food business. The next summer, Willard returned to the wool business and once again made $3,000.
Flush with cash and excited about his final year at the University of Utah, Willard went home at the end of summer, but there his ebullience was crushed. His father had borrowed money to buy a herd of 3,000 sheep in Elko, Nevada, and the sheep needed to be driven to Tremonton, Utah. Will would trust no one but his son to do that, so Willard put his studies on hold. With the assistance of two Basque sheepherders, he drove sheep through the cold winter months, from October to May. He came close to freezing to death one night, and he lost 500 lambs to the elements, lions, coyotes, and poison water. He was eventually successful, but most of the sheep sales went to repay the bank loan. The unshakable legacy of that sheep drive was Willard’s visceral distrust of debt, which would greatly impact the future Marriott company’s business decisions.
After the sheep drive, he checked in with Baron Woolen Mills for a summer job, was made district supervisor of seven states, and quickly built up a sales force of about forty-five University of Utah students to work for him. Although there was no salary for the position, his percentage of the sales that year came to nearly $5,000. That nest egg allowed him to finish his senior year at the university. The highlight of that year was the day he rounded a corner and spotted a slender girl wearing a green dress that set off her beautiful brown eyes and abundance of brown hair.
“That’s the kind of girl I’d like to marry,” Willard told a friend, who responded that Allie Sheets was way out of a sheepherder’s league.
• • •
Several decades before that chance encounter, a widow in Westvale, Yorkshire, England, was managing six young children and looking at a bleak future. Martha Hirst Taylor turned her life around by heeding the call of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to immigrate to Utah. In 1888, she and her children made the long journey over sea and land to Salt Lake City. Eleven years later, Martha’s daughter Alice married Edwin Sheets. Three years after giving birth to a son, Alice and Edwin had their second and last child, whom they named Alice, but who was always known as “Allie” to distinguish her from her mother.
When Allie was less than a year old, the family followed Edwin to law school at the University of Chicago. When they returned to Salt Lake City, Edwin settled into a law practice. He was also bishop of a Latter-day Saint congregation, and when the Spanish flu hit Utah, Edwin visited the sick and the dying without regard for the contagion. He died at the age of forty-four from pneumonia and influenza. A few months before his death, Edwin had a dream in which he was told that he was wanted “on the other side” to preach to the souls of soldiers who had died in World War I. He shared the dream with a friend, then swore him to secrecy until after he was dead.
The high regard in which Edwin Sheets was held is evidenced by the fact that amidst all the flu deaths occurring at the time, the Deseret News newspaper dedicated an editorial to Edwin’s death: “His entire life was spent in true service to his fellow man, and although but a young man in years, his long experience and faithful devotion to duty has seldom been excelled by men gray with age.”12
Edwin left his family financially secure, so his widow, Alice, had the luxury of throwing herself into religious and charitable work. She lobbied her church to build a children’s hospital, which it did, and worked tirelessly as a volunteer at that hospital.
Although Allie Sheets had lost her father, she was not without privilege and opportunity. She excelled in school and studied piano under the organist for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. She took Latin and geometry for fun and skipped eleventh grade. At the tender age of fifteen, she enrolled at the University of Utah. By the ripe old age of eighteen, her dance card was full and her goal was to marry a doctor.
She was definitely out of Willard’s league, but he was undeterred and unembarrassed about his own pedigree. On their first date he showed her pictures of his sheep. Then he took her to the mountain range to view his family herd—which, unbeknownst to Allie, was really the bank’s herd. The summer of Willard’s graduation, he proposed and Allie accepted.
Much of their courtship was spent at a new establishment that was all the rage in Salt Lake. It was called the “A&W” (only coincidentally their initials), and it sold frosty mugs of root beer for five cents. Business was booming—5,000 sales a day—and Willard was reminded of the pushcart vendor he had seen that hot day in Washington, D.C. For Willard and Allie, the envisioned marriage of product (A&W) and place (D.C.) became the birth of a dream.
A&W was the creation of California businessman Roy Allen, who bought his root beer recipe from a retired chemist in Arizona. He tried it out at a roadside stand during a veterans’ parade and was soon the purveyor of root beer at a half dozen stands in central California. Then, in 1923, Allen invented the modern drive-in. At the time, Allen had a partnership with one of his employees, Frank Wright, so they named their root beer “A&W.” By the time Willard and Allie were sipping the root beer in Salt Lake City, Allen had pioneered the notion of root beer store franchises. Willard’s cousin Sherman Marriott bought the franchise for Fort Wayne, Indiana. More important, Willard’s mission friend Hugh Colton, who was attending George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., began pushing Willard to go in with him on an A&W franchise in the nation’s capital.
That fall, Willard drove to Sacramento for a sit-down meeting with Roy Allen and came away impressed. In April 1927, he and Colton signed a deal with Allen and opened their nine-seat A&W franchise in a tiny storefront location on 14th Street in downtown D.C. Their grand opening was May 20—the same day that Charles A. Lindbergh took off from Long Island’s Roosevelt Field in his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis, attempting the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Willard and Hugh opened their doors at ten a.m., and the customers soon began pouring in. Many were anxious to hear the news about “Lucky Lindy,” so Willard rushed out and returned with a countertop radio so his customers could follow the minute-by-minute commentary on Lindbergh’s flight. Many years later, when Willard and Allie shared a table with the Lindberghs at a White House dinner, Willard deadpanned to Lindy: “You know, we went into business on the same day, but you got all the publicity!”13
By the end of that first historic day, Willard and Hugh had served nearly 2,000 mugs of root beer. At only a nickel each, and with plenty of free coupons given away, the take that day was $73.10, but the newly minted entrepreneurs had nearly 2,000 converts to the A&W recipe.
Meanwhile, Allie Sheets was preparing to graduate from the University of Utah in June, and planning a wedding at the same time. Willard made it home in time to see her receive her diploma. Then he had a last piece of business before their wedding at eleven a.m. the next day. He needed a ring.
After spending a fitful night at his family home in Marriott, Willard got up early, took the tarp off his Model T, and headed north to Baron Woolen Mills, which still owed him about $3,000 in commissions from the prior summer. The manager was waiting for him, with a chill in the air. He was not going to pay because too many of the sales from Willard’s crew had fallen through. A certain amount of “shorting” was expected, but never to such a degree. What he didn’t know was that the mill had bought some expensive equipment, and Willard’s commission was a budget casualty.14
The disconsolate bridegroom rushed off in his Model T to a bank in Ogden and asked to borrow $1,500, but the manager turned him down, citing Willard’s father’s poor credit history there. It was a humiliation Willard never forgot, and one that compounded his aversion to debt.
He was now broke and late for his wedding. When he called Allie, she was in tears, sure that he had stood her up at the altar. Finding it was “only” a money problem, she was overjoyed that the wedding would still occur, just two hours late. As they were about to enter the Salt Lake Temple, Allie’s mother pressed four crisp $50 bills into Willard’s hands. She had planned to use the money for a family wedding reception, but she knew they needed it for the long drive back to Washington, D.C.
In the late 1920s, there were few paved roads in America. The Model T was a sturdy vehicle, but it couldn’t go much faster than thirty-five miles an hour. It frequently got bogged down in mud and all too often overheated on inclines—forcing the couple to stop and wait for the engine to cool down, then refill the radiator from the three-gallon can strapped to the running board. They spent their wedding night at a dilapidated hotel in the cowboy town of Evanston, Wyoming. The honeymoon trip took eleven challenging days, but J.W. (as he was sometimes called in adulthood) and Allie always remembered it with fondness. “We were very much in love and the 11 days went by all too soon,” J.W. said.15
The Marriotts set up housekeeping in D.C. in an apartment building on New York Avenue, where the State Department is now located. One floor below were their new business partners, the Coltons. They quickly opened a second A&W franchise, and Allie was pressed into service as bookkeeper. Business was good, but not great. Marriott and Colton could not have survived the first year without reneging on key parts of their contract with A&W. This may have been a subconscious factor in J.W.’s future opposition to franchising Marriott restaurants or hotels. Deep down, he knew that he had started his business as a franchisee by not living up to the contract.
Marriott and Colton were often late in their payments to Roy Allen. And once they committed the cardinal sin of substituting another product for the A&W recipe when they ran short on the secret syrup. Allen caught them when he sent a quality-control spy to the store. The partners apologized, and Allen forgave them. They were his first franchisees east of the Mississippi, and Allen had a lot riding on their success.
Struggling to make money on root beer in the winter, J.W. took a train to California to ask Allen to let them sell food at the D.C. root beer stands, which was against their contract. Allen relented, and J.W. headed back to D.C. to confer with Allie about menus. Hamburgers were not even considered because that particular meat was so low on the social scale that few restaurants offered it. They agreed that hot dogs and barbecue sandwiches would be good, and then, being Westerners, they thought maybe they could throw in some Tex-Mex offerings. Allie visited the nearby Mexican embassy and used her college Spanish to charm recipes out of the chef. Soon Allie was cooking up chili and tamales in their apartment. Because they were the first to feature those foods in a chain of stores on the East Coast, the National Restaurant Association later called J.W. “the father of Tex-Mex restaurants.”
J.W. in the doorway of the first Hot Shoppe, 1927.
Word of the upcoming change to their root beer stores spread that fall of 1927, and a friend asked when they were going to open their next “hot shop.” The Marriotts liked the name, especially using the old English spelling—“Hot Shoppe.” Overnight they rebranded their locations from street-front root beer stands to warm, enclosed “Hot Shoppes,” still offering the A&W product. A new restaurant chain was born.
By March 1928, Hugh Colton wanted to move back to Utah. Profits were anemic, and the business couldn’t sustain two families. Colton offered to bow out. “We nearly tossed a coin to see who got the business,” J.W. said in one interview. “Neither of us wanted it very bad.” J.W. was still a cowboy at heart, and he also was tempted to return to Utah. The Marriotts finally agreed, reluctantly, to buy out the Coltons for $5,000, which J.W. had to borrow from a bank.16
The contract with Allen required the Marriotts to open something new in 1928—a drive-in restaurant unlike their walk-in establishments. It would be the first drive-in east of the Rocky Mountains. They found a spot on Georgia Avenue and wrangled with the D.C. government over the unique traffic and parking demands of a drive-in.
Among the innovations J.W. incorporated into his first drive-in was a food tray—invented by a friend for the Salt Lake City A&W stand—that attached to the car door. The young men who served the cars, called “curbers,” wore A&W orange-and-black uniforms and hustled to receive their tips-only income. That image of the “Running Boy” soon became part of the Hot Shoppes logo. On an average weekday, more than sixty gallons of root beer were dispensed from the store’s six spigots. Unlike the previous two stores, the drive-in with food was an instant success.
By the time the stock market crashed in October 1929, the Marriotts had eighty employees at three stores. Although the young couple wanted a baby more than anything else, that baby, Bill, would not be born until five years into the marriage. For the time being, Allie was content with their life. She penned a letter to her husband that March while visiting Utah. The most telling paragraph addressed her thoughts after visiting with a friend whose husband was a sheepherder: “He is out with the sheep & she is living home with her folks. He comes in every 2 months for a week. She hasn’t seen him for 7 weeks now & here I have only been gone 3 1/2. She says it’s an awful life & never to let you do it. So if we sell hot dogs the rest of our lives, I don’t care—as long as I can be with my sweetie 25 out of 24 hours.”17
J.W. and Allie Marriott in Washington, D.C.
Only a few months later, when Hot Shoppes filed its first incorporation papers, Allie Marriott became the company’s first president. J.W. was not even listed as a board member until the third board meeting. The game of administrative musical chairs continued the next day when J.W. was named president. The officer slate was set, probably more to fill in the blanks on incorporation forms than to represent actual company control.
Life in Washington without children was not all work for the Marriotts, however. They had a rich circle of friends, many of them Utah Latter-day Saints who had been invited into government service by Senator Reed Smoot. They met for church in a rented hall, and Sunday School was taught by a brilliant Latter-day Saint lawyer, J. Reuben Clark, who had become undersecretary of state during the Coolidge administration.
As 1929 closed, and the first waves of the Great Depression were felt across the country, the Marriotts looked for signs of trouble in their business and could find none. They were soon up to five restaurants, all in the D.C. city limits. They had founded their new business in the most Depression-proof city in the nation. The same could not be said for J.W.’s family back home. Will Marriott was effectively bankrupt. When his farm went on the auction block, the winning bidder, at $5,000, was none other than J.W. With some creative financing, he had saved his family’s farm, but he didn’t want his father to run it anymore, so J.W. spent another $6,000 to move his parents and sister Doris into Ogden.18
Hot Shoppe Number Five opened on July 2, 1930, the same day Allie’s widowed mother married Senator Reed A. Smoot. The widow Alice Sheets, then fifty-four, had come to D.C. for a visit the previous spring. At church she met the senator, who, at sixty-eight, had been widowed for two years. He instantly set out to win her heart with a series of dates that were reported in the local press. After the wedding, their honeymoon was cut short by President Herbert Hoover, who needed Smoot in town on legislative business. The newlyweds spent their two-week honeymoon living at the White House. The first morning there, President and Mrs. Hoover gave a wedding breakfast in their honor, and the only other guests were J.W. and Allie. The new Mrs. Smoot wrote back home to Utah: “Can you imagine any little girl coming across the ocean and almost the width of the United States as a little emigrant, dreaming that she would ever become the wife of a Senator of the United States [and to find] herself, with her distinguished husband, the honored guest of the head of the United States government?”19
As it turned out, the extended Marriott clan would become accustomed to moving in such circles as their business empire grew, spurred on by the son who was born to J.W. and Allie on March 25, 1932.