Chapter 3
Bill Marriott’s race against time began the day he was born, when he first demonstrated a competitive nature and a need for speed.
His parents’ best friends, Isaac and June Stewart, were expecting their second child at the same time as Allie and J.W. looked forward to their first. The two couples had the same obstetrician and the same due date, April 5, 1932. The obstetrician even booked adjoining rooms for the moms-to-be at Columbia Hospital for Women.
Allie began experiencing labor pains on the morning of March 25, and J.W. rushed her out of their apartment building and into his Nash automobile. As he raced down the street, the Stewarts, who lived only two blocks away, passed them in a speeding vehicle. Arriving at the hospital at about the same time, the two pregnant women were rushed into adjoining delivery rooms, and, as was the case in that era, the expectant fathers were relegated to the waiting room, where they wore out the floor with their pacing.
After three hours of labor, Allie gave birth to a seven-and-a-half-pound boy, whom his parents named John Willard Marriott, Jr. Two hours later, the Stewarts’ second son arrived. Baby Billy had won his first race. It was Good Friday—a very good Friday for the Marriotts.1
Outside the happy Marriott home, the world was in the middle of the Great Depression, an economic event that sparked widespread upheaval. In the United States, public discontent with President Herbert Hoover was at an all-time high, and he was being challenged for reelection by New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the first time in American history, more citizens left the country than immigrated into it, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record low of 44.22.
There were some bright spots besides Billy’s birth that year. Norwegian ice-skater Sonja Henie dazzled the judges to win a gold medal at the February Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, and the Los Angeles Summer Olympics netted so many medals for Americans that the second-place country, Italy, was almost 500 points behind. The New York Yankees swept the World Series again, with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at their peak. A curly-topped tyke named Shirley Temple appeared in her first movie. A wrinkle-free fabric was invented, and Ford unveiled its V-8 engine, while Italian Guglielmo Marconi tested the first shortwave radio. For better or worse, a new era was beginning at the same time baby Billy was embarking on his life’s journey.
When Allie’s office in the apartment was converted into a nursery, J.W. rented a basement office in their building. Much of Allie’s energy was taken up with the baby, so J.W. hired his first secretary and a bookkeeper. His brother Paul mastered the restaurant business and became J.W.’s right-hand man. Paul had the brains and vision to facilitate J.W.’s plans for rapid expansion. Not long after Billy was born, it was Paul whom J.W. tapped to open the first Hot Shoppe outside the D.C. area, in Baltimore. J.W. also tasked Paul to negotiate the purchase of the A&W franchise in Philadelphia. But he would never need his younger brother more than in early 1933, when J.W. was given less than a year to live.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected America’s thirty-second president in a November 1932 landslide, which evidenced a major shift of many Republicans to the Democratic Party. It was because of FDR’s popularity that Republican Senator Reed Smoot, who was running for a sixth term, lost his seat in a surprising defeat. When Smoot learned from radio and telephone reports on election night about the trend against him in early voting returns, he put his glasses into his vest pocket, took Alice by the hand, and said, “It’s past our bedtime.” J.W. and Allie had joined them for election night, and Smoot asked them, “When you’re ready to go, would you turn out the lights?” The next morning, he told the Marriotts he would serve out the last months of his term, and then he and Alice would return to Utah so that he could fully take up his duties as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.2
Billy on a pony.
The Marriotts attended FDR’s inaugural ball, but to them the President’s New Deal programs looked increasingly socialistic. Among the legislation were minimum-wage and union collective-bargaining laws that would challenge the bottom line for the Hot Shoppes and then the Marriott company for decades to come.
In March, several weeks after FDR’s inauguration, Billy turned one, and his family moved into Senator Smoot’s French provincial mansion at 4500 Garfield Street. It would be Billy’s permanent home until he left for college. J.W. and Allie had felt that the seven-bedroom house was too elegant for their young family of three, but Reed and Alice Smoot couldn’t find a buyer for the mansion, so they asked the Marriotts to house-sit. The Depression continued to discourage buyers, and eventually J.W. and Allie took over the mortgage for $35,000 and settled in permanently.
The Marriotts had barely moved into their new home when Allie urged J.W. to see a doctor about lumps that had developed under his arms and on the back of his neck. After a battery of tests, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph glands. It was so advanced that five doctors told him it was incurable.
“How long do I have?” J.W. resolutely asked.
“Six months—a year at most,” one of them replied, and the rest of the doctors concurred. They advised him that he might lengthen his life to a year if he took a long vacation and left his business concerns behind.
J.W. took their advice. He turned the business over to Paul and took Allie and Billy on a road trip. The threesome made their way up the Eastern seaboard, stopping at motels whenever J.W. was too tired to go on. At Moosehead Lake in Maine, they checked into a remote fishing and hunting camp called “The Birches.” After a long stay, they headed south to explore J.W.’s old mission stomping grounds. Memories flooded back to him of more than one occasion when he had seen God’s power heal someone. It occurred to J.W. that his illness was a test of his faith and it was time for him to seek out elders of the Church to give him a healing blessing.
Back home in Washington, he invited two Latter-day Saint men to his home, where they put their hands on his head and, after seeking inspiration, incredibly promised him that he would be healed: “We rebuke this disease. We believe, and we ask you to believe with us, in your mission of service to your fellow man and to your church, and we promise you that you will live to perform this mission.”3
J.W.’s burden had been lifted. Within a few weeks, the lymphatic swellings decreased in size and then vanished altogether. His doctors were astonished. Within months, the same doctors could not find the faintest trace of Hodgkin’s disease. By Christmas he was back at work. Not only was this a miracle for which he never ceased to be grateful, but he acknowledged that it obliged him to serve God in whatever capacity was asked of him for the rest of his life.
By 1934, J.W. had become the head of the extended Marriott family, even though his parents were still living. He had a strong sense of responsibility for his siblings, and the prosperity of Hot Shoppes enabled him to assist them financially. Doris, the oldest of the siblings and first to wed, had married a man who eventually abandoned her and her child, so she moved in with her parents in Utah. J.W.’s seventy-year-old father, Will, was a restless man, and, with Doris at home to keep her mother company, he went to Washington to work for his son in 1934, just as Billy was turning two.
Will Marriott became the Hot Shoppes’ first unofficial personnel relations man. He made the rounds of the restaurants, getting to know all the employees. He also scoured the local markets looking for the best wholesale food deals for the restaurants. Judging meat was his specialty. A butcher once threw down a challenge: “I’ll bet you a Stetson hat you can’t tell me what grade of meat that is, or the weight within ten pounds.” Will wore the Stetson proudly for the rest of his life.4
Billy saw a lot of Hot Shoppes during his early years. “When I was very small,” he recalled, “I remember going with Mother to the Arcade Market on 14th Street with the sawdust on the floor and the fresh meat and chickens hanging up for display. Afterwards we would go by the old 14th Street Hot Shoppe. I particularly remember Number 5.”5
Hot Shoppe Number 5 on Connecticut Avenue was the star of the chain, growing faster than the unemployment lines in the 1930s. “The cars used to line up on Connecticut Avenue as far as you could see to get in there,” J.W.’s brother Woody recalled from his first job as a Number 5 carhop. “Everybody that worked as a carhop had to learn to run. You wouldn’t dare go out of that door without running. That was my brother’s idea of telling them [customers] that we were speeding up the service.”6 The man called the “Mayor of Connecticut Avenue” was Mack Woodward, the curb manager. He rode herd on the boys, teaching them how to carry their trays high and run with them. Woodward wasn’t above making a little money on the side, charging the boys a small fee for the pencil stubs and windshield cards needed to take orders, requiring interest for any money he loaned them, and sometimes running a crap game in Number 5’s basement.7
Billy found the hustle and bustle both fascinating and funny. The older boys told Billy tall tales, like the time one of them was carrying hot chocolate on a tray on a windy winter night, and the wind blew the whipped cream off the chocolate and sent it flying over his shoulder, where it froze in midair and then smacked into the head of the unsuspecting running boy behind him, knocking him out.
Sometimes there were inebriated patrons at the Hot Shoppes whose antics could be amusing. J.W. began to sell both light and dark beer after the Prohibition Act was repealed in February 1934. Because the dark beer looked like root beer, embarrassing mix-ups often occurred, with customers getting dark beer for the root beer they had ordered, and vice versa. So an unknown number of curbers elected to become unofficial taste testers. That made for some tipsy running boys before a more reliable identification system was established.
When Billy was three, in 1935, several key changes were made at Number 5 that increased patronage even more. News reports that year touted Number 5’s modern broadcast system—seven transmitter poles for curbers to call in orders and a loudspeaker system to tell them when the order was up. The clever curbers and managers also adapted it as an early-warning system to thwart J.W.’s surprise inspections. When a curber spotted J.W. driving into the lot, he would quickly call in an order over the loudspeaker for “One Big Tamale!”—putting everyone on their best behavior.
J.W.’s surprise inspections were an early lesson in a management philosophy Bill would later adopt: “Management by Walking Around.” J.W. once told a gathering of employees, “My biggest mistake is a nice office. I like it. My visitors like it. So I don’t go visit the Hot Shoppes like I should. When I don’t, I feel I miss something.”8
Number 5 was known as the number-one restaurant hot spot in Washington in the 1930s. It “draws the fashionable night clientele of the city,” noted one newspaper report.9 When Dwight Eisenhower became president, he confided to J.W. that he and his wife, Mamie, had visited there at least once a week when Ike was an aide to General Douglas MacArthur. The Eisenhowers came for Allie’s chili and hot tamales.
Perhaps the most colorful contemporary report on Number 5 was written by columnist Gil Miner of Maine’s Madison Bulletin, who had been squired to the restaurant by a U.S. congressman he was visiting in June 1934. It was a hot summer night, and Miner wanted a cold drink. As if it were the Eighth Wonder of the World, the congressman bragged that he could take Gil to a place where he didn’t have to get out of the car to order a cold drink, a hot dog, or a steak, and he could eat it from a tray attached to the car.
“This interested me,” Miner wrote, “and in due time we arrived at the ‘Hot Shoppes’ on Connecticut Avenue. Believe me, it was ‘Hot!’ Parking spaces for over 1,000 cars, hundreds of young men bustling about taking orders and delivering them, dressed in snappy brown uniforms, with captains in outfits so white they’d make an admiral blush.”
The columnist ventured indoors and introduced himself to J.W., who happened to be there that night. Miner invited Marriott to vacation in Maine. “I do already,” J.W. smiled. “My family spends a month every summer at Moosehead. Do you ever go there?”
Miner was excited, in part because this was “the first time I had ever been able to talk things over with a living Horatio Alger,” he wrote.10
After discovering the idyllic hunting and fishing camp on Moosehead Lake when J.W. was coping with his Hodgkin’s disease diagnosis, the Marriotts spent seven summers there. It was one place where Billy could have his father’s full attention. There were no telephones, so J.W. could not conduct business. The lake was too cold for swimming, but fish were plentiful, and the family spent many nights eating the catch of the day and then settling into Adirondack chairs facing the picturesque 800-foot Mount Kineo a half mile across the lake. When the talking faded in the evening, J.W. would wind up the portable Victrola and play favorite records such as “Drifting and Dreaming,” “Stardust,” “Moonlight Bay,” or “Home on the Range.”
During that pivotal period, J.W. gained an important new friend, mentor, and Hot Shoppes’ most important outside investor, Earl Sams. He was president of the J.C. Penney Company and the boss of J.W.’s cousin-in-law George Bushnell. Sams was sixteen years older than J.W., and he had a personality, philosophy, and generosity that melded neatly with J.W.’s own character. The two developed a father-son relationship that began with the vital business advice Sams gave J.W. during their chats on the porch of the Samses’ house at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Two important keys to Sams’s success, which J.W. absorbed, were to never borrow money to expand and to hire only “good, clean-cut, decent workers.” The employees needed to consider their work at Hot Shoppes as a service, not just a business.
Bushnell, who was well aware that J.W. had nearly worked himself to death a few years earlier, also counseled him: “I do not think it necessary for a man to work 18 hours every day. In fact, I know he cannot keep it up.” Bushnell also believed in respecting the community. “Some storekeepers look upon a town as a mine out of which they are going to take all the treasure they can without putting anything in except the pick and shovel and their hands. The Creator never intended us to do that. We live with one another to serve, to build, to inspire. This is our duty toward our communities.”11
Sams and Bushnell were preaching to the choir with J.W., but it was encouraging for him to have his own operating philosophy confirmed by men who had already made their fortunes. In the future, the trio’s foundational business rules would have a powerful impact on the boy who overheard their adult talk. Billy would one day teach the same principles to hundreds of thousands of employees of the Marriott hotel empire.
As the Hot Shoppes business grew, in part with the addition of A&W franchises, Billy found his place in the company. His earliest recollections of the business were from trailing behind his father visiting the restaurants. There were proud moments when J.W. asked his opinion, using Billy as a one-boy focus group. At five, Billy couldn’t yet read, but his father showed him the 1937 mock-up for the first-ever Hot Shoppes children’s 35-cent menu. It became an instant success and was put in all the Shoppes.
Billy was growing up fast. After attending nursery school on Macomb Street, he started kindergarten at the Horace Mann School in 1937. J.W. and Allie took Billy on a trip to the Pacific Coast that year, stopping in Utah to visit the Marriott grandparents. Grandpa Will had returned to Ogden from working in D.C. earlier in the year, and he was happy to take his visiting son and grandson on a pheasant-hunting trip, which produced a memorable photo of the three standing next to a car with their trophies.
In August 1937, J.W. opened Hot Shoppe Number 8 at the south end of the 14th Street Bridge on the Potomac River. Much of the surrounding land was vacant; the area’s subsequent dominant building, the Pentagon, was not constructed until years later, during World War II. The only real business nearby was the small Hoover Airport across the street from Number 8. It was the first out-of-city location for the Hot Shoppes chain. There were no houses in the area.
Within a couple of days of the grand opening of Number 8, J.W. noticed a customer who was waiting for a flight out of Hoover Field. The man asked the waitress to find a container so he could take two quarts of hot coffee on the plane with him. She obliged and got a good tip. A few days later, J.W. visited Number 8 again and watched as another airport customer bagged a sandwich to take with him on his flight. An idea lit up J.W.’s mind, and he paid a visit to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the famous World War I flying ace who owned Eastern Airlines. J.W.’s proposal was simple: “Why don’t you buy my food for your passengers and charge a little more for their ticket?” Rickenbacker liked the idea and signed up with Hot Shoppes, making J.W. the pioneer of independent in-flight catering. The basement of Number 8 was converted into the company’s first airline kitchen. Bill remembered the bustle of that kitchen from when he was a young boy. It was a humble beginning for what would eventually—under Bill’s leadership—become the largest airline catering service in the world.
In the summer of 1938, affable Uncle Woody worked in the basement of Number 8, slicing thirty-five turkeys a day for airline meals. Woody became an asset to J.W., who made him vice president of store operations that year. Born and raised in Ogden, Utah, Woody had known few black people. When he went to work for J.W., he quickly noticed the number of minorities on the payroll. “Well, Willard, you’ve got quite a few blacks working for you, don’t you,” he commented.
J.W. eyed his younger brother carefully and then responded, “Woody, I don’t discriminate against anybody. But I want to tell you something—those blacks are more religious and more dependable than some of the white trash I’ve hired and fired from the South. That’s why I hire so many of these men and women. They’re hardworking, loyal, honest, and more Christian than a lot of whites I’ve met!”12
• • •
As 1938 drew to a close, Billy had good reason to be excited about an upcoming family event. His mother was expecting a baby. After almost seven years as an only child, he was finally going to get a younger brother or sister.
On January 9, 1939, in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, nine-months-pregnant Allie was invited to the home of Louise Bennion, her closest friend, for a sewing bee. That afternoon, the sewing and conversation hummed along until Allie began having labor pains. At least a foot of snow had accumulated on the ground, and Allie arrived at Columbia Hospital only an hour before baby Richard (“Dick”) Edwin Marriott was born at six p.m.
The boys’ only living grandfather, Will, was anxious to see his new grandson, and he traveled from Utah by train in the spring just in time to see D.C.’s famous cherry blossoms. The seventy-five-year-old Will seemed hale and hearty, except for a chronic stomach ailment.
At the time, Washington was abuzz with the anticipated visit of Great Britain’s King George VI and his wife. The royals had accepted President Roosevelt’s invitation to visit the former colonies, the first time a reigning British monarch would set foot on U.S. soil. Billy rose early on June 7, 1939, to get a good viewing spot for the welcoming parade on Massachusetts Avenue with his parents.
Grandfather Will wasn’t all that interested in seeing the British monarch. His father, John Marriott, had happily left that country decades earlier for greater opportunity in America, and Will wasn’t about to look back. So Woody took him on an outing to the Virginia countryside. They drove in Woody’s Buick convertible to the ranch where Woody boarded his horses. Will was thrilled to spend a couple of hours horseback riding—which, fittingly, turned out to be the last activity in which the retired Western rancher would ever engage.
Woody drove his dad back to the Garfield Street home about four p.m., several hours after the Marriotts had returned from the parade. Will lost his balance as he got out of the car, striking the open car door with his side, his Stetson hat flying off down the driveway.
“You all right, Dad?” Woody asked anxiously.
“Oh, boy!” he responded. “That was a hard knock.”
Still holding his side, Will went through the house to the sun porch to report to J.W. and the rest of the assembled family that he was going upstairs to rest. “I hit myself on the car door getting out of Woody’s car,” he explained. “It hurts.” J.W. called a doctor, who said there was nothing to worry about and gave Will some morphine so he could sleep through the night.13
The next day, Will was in terrible pain. J.W. called for an ambulance, which took Will to George Washington University Hospital. There he slipped into a coma. He lingered for a few days and then died. The Marriotts asked for an autopsy, which revealed that the fall against the car door had ruptured his aortic artery; he had eventually bled to death.14 Allie’s stepfather, Elder Reed Smoot, was the principal speaker at the funeral. After the service, a steady stream of callers at the Jackson Avenue home pressed envelopes of money into widow Ellen Marriott’s hands, explaining that they were returning money Will had given them without question when they had asked him for a loan. Many of those who repaid the money were strangers to the family.
At the end of that eventful summer of 1939, seven-year-old Billy went on his first airplane trip. The family flew from Washington to Boston. At a stopover in New Jersey, little Dickie was temporarily set on top of the airline counter when comedian Red Skelton happened to pass by. He took one look at the eight-month-old and pronounced Dickie “the cutest baby I have ever seen,” Bill recalled. That trip to Boston turned out to be their seventh and last summer at Moosehead Lake. It was the summer J.W. made a momentous decision regarding his son’s education. Though Billy had done fairly well in first grade at the public school, his father decided he could do better in another setting. J.W. made arrangements for Billy to attend second grade in the fall at the private Quaker school known as Sidwell Friends.
Sidwell’s reputation for academic excellence was such that it was the school several U.S. presidents chose for their children. Billy was sociable and made friends easily there, but the relationships did not go deep. “I had friends at Sidwell, but not any real close friends,” Bill recalled. Perhaps he might have had more friends at Sidwell if there had been other boys who shared the familiarity of his religious traditions. In later years, he could joke that there were twice as many Buddhists at Sidwell as there were Latter-day Saints; he was right. The official Sidwell 125-year history detailed the religious affiliation of Sidwell students when Billy was enrolled as “386 students . . . including 69 Episcopalians, 54 Presbyterians, 24 Methodists, 23 Catholics, 17 Jews, 15 Quakers, 14 Christian Scientists, two Buddhists and one Mormon.”15
With Billy growing older, J.W. increased his son’s chores. “My younger years were somewhat lonely,” Bill explained, even after his brother came along. Billy’s relationship with his father became complicated at an early age. There were plenty of rules and high expectations, but not much time for affection. “My parents consistently used the carrot-and-stick approach. My dad was very concerned that I would turn out to be a playboy like other rich men’s sons. So there were always goals to be met—high grades in school, chores to do around the house, etc. My father’s aggressiveness and desire for perfection in his son were mediated by a kind, thoughtful, understanding mother who would always listen and try to help. Without her continued love and support, I don’t know what the outcome would have been.”16
Most of his chores were outdoors—raking leaves, washing cars, mowing the lawn. He regularly shined J.W.’s shoes, which he often had to do twice in a row to satisfy his father. J.W. was a perfectionist, and Billy got the brunt of that—a pattern of father-son conflict that continued into Bill’s adult life in business. J.W. was always looking for better ways that his sons could do something. Once he told Billy to rake leaves and then watched as his son carried the leaves in bunches to a basket. “Why don’t you move the basket where you work instead of walking back and forth?” J.W. said. Bill called it “my first lesson in productivity and one I’ll never forget.”17
If the car was dirty on a Sunday morning, J.W. refused to leave for church until it was washed. “We rarely got to church on time,” Bill said. Quit was not a word in the Marriott lexicon. “My dad was never satisfied. Every day provided an opportunity for me to do better, and Dad was never reluctant to let me know it. On the other hand, my mother was quiet and rarely criticized. She didn’t have to, since I got enough from my dad.”18
Billy unconsciously drank in more lessons of perfectionism as he followed his father on Hot Shoppes inspections. J.W. required that floors be mopped from two buckets—one for clean water and one for dirty. Then he invented a bucket with two compartments. “He insisted that the parking lots be hosed down every night. He fussed about the dust on the venetian blinds. He wanted the hot food so hot it would burn your tongue; the cold food ice cold.” Billy once saw an argument between J.W. and a Hot Shoppes manager about the amount of salt on a hamburger. The manager threw away ten burgers before J.W. was satisfied. “He worried about the appearance of the waitresses—not too much makeup, no fingernail polish, proper hair nets, and, back then, stocking seams straight.” Male waiters were not allowed to have mustaches that dipped below the corners of their mouths.19
J.W. was demanding with his employees, but he compensated with unexpected compassion. When Allie took young Billy to the family doctor for an earache, Billy was surprised that his mother was on a first-name basis with several African-American men in the waiting room. He found out that his father had put the doctor on the payroll to take care of the workers—his own version of employee health insurance. Later J.W. added a surgeon to the payroll, too.
Outside of work and chores, Billy saw little of his father, though J.W. tried to be home for most dinners. Once when he left on a train trip out of Washington, he wrote the family a note that summed up the two sides of J.W. Marriott: “My dear Allie & Boys . . . I have never felt so badly in my life about leaving you. I almost got off the train at [Silver Spring, MD]. But as you say, when I get anything in my head I can’t get it out. Wish I were different but guess you will have to put up with what you got tied to for ‘better or for worse.’ It is hard to understand human beings & especially JWM.”20
The Marriott family in 1939: Allie, Billy, J.W., and Dick.
Though J.W. was spry, Allie was becoming increasingly debilitated by arthritis, so much so that she was unable to attend the February 1941 funeral of her stepfather, Reed Smoot, in Salt Lake City. It was the equivalent of a state funeral for the former senator and respected Apostle. Among the eulogies and stories told about Smoot, his step-grandson, Bill, had a favorite. It came from the grueling three-year Senate hearings in the early 1900s when fellow senators refused to seat Smoot because he belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which had once endorsed polygamy. Smoot himself was strictly monogamous, and Senator Boise Penrose of Pennsylvania rose to his defense. Glaring at one or more of his Senate colleagues who had a reputation for philandering, he famously declared: “As for me, I would rather have seated beside me in this chamber a polygamist who doesn’t polyg than a monogamist who doesn’t monog!”
Those family memories and other experiences taught Billy at a young age that his religion was controversial and often misunderstood. But the Marriotts remained firm in their faith, and Billy grew up in the comforting environs of the growing Latter-day Saint community in Washington, D.C.