Chapter 5
On Billy’s seventeenth birthday, J.W. proudly took his son to shop for the young man’s first car. J.W. could afford to spoil his sons, but he generally chose not to. He required obedience to his rules and ungrudging acceptance of chores at home. He expected the boys’ best efforts at school and adherence to the Church’s strict moral and health codes, which included no sex before marriage and no alcohol or tobacco. Billy had done most everything his father had asked, and his father rewarded him with a 1949 Ford, with all the independence that came with that for a young man.
At the end of Billy’s sophomore year, J.W. bought an impressive inboard speedboat—a seventeen-foot Higgins. J.W. enjoyed going for a fast ride with his son and would sometimes invite friends along, including the George Romney family, who visited in the summer. The Detroit-based Romney had been the chief spokesman for the auto industry during the war, and was then a top executive with the Nash-Kelvinator company (soon to be American Motors). J.W. and Romney had membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in common and were close friends. Romney named one son Willard after J.W., though the boy would become better known by his middle name, Mitt.
At school, in addition to co-managing the basketball team, Billy joined The Albanian yearbook staff as an ad salesman in his senior year. The yearbook reported that many of the advertisements appearing in the volume “are due to his tenaciousness and efficiency.”1
His parents were pleased with his activities, his academic performance, and his behavior. After one Sunday church meeting, J.W. wrote in his journal: “We had quite a discussion with Billy as to whether he should go to a party after the meeting.” It was an issue because Latter-day Saints encourage a quiet Sabbath observance with little extracurricular activity. “We left it up to him, so he went, and came home at 12 o’clock, the time he said he would come home. Billy is a fine young man. He is 100% honest. He tells us what he does when he goes out, and we never have to worry about his coming home with liquor on his breath. He has good moral habits, and we are mighty proud of him.”2
Billy’s St. Albans days were formative in his religious development, even though he had few friends who shared his particular faith. As an adult, he told a Church audience about his high-school years: “I was often called upon to defend my religion to those classmates who make fun of it. I thought about Elizabeth Stewart [his pioneer ancestor] and her sacrifice for her beliefs. As I defended my church, I too came to believe it was true. To strengthen my convictions, I studied and tried to learn more about our teachings and doctrines. The more I learned and prayed about them, the more convinced I was that the church to which I had been born was indeed the Church of Jesus Christ.”3
After graduation, Billy was the only St. Albans senior headed for a Western university—the University of Utah—but his independent streak steered him away from his father’s Phi Delta Theta fraternity; he planned to pledge Sigma Chi instead. No matter where Billy went, J.W.’s hope was that his son would find a Latter-day Saint wife, and the odds of that were higher in Utah.
Thus it was that when Billy headed to Lake Winnipesaukee with his family for their summer 1950 vacation, the family was in great spirits. Billy had made up his own mind about college, and that decision made his father and mother happy. Unfortunately, only two weeks into the vacation, just twenty-two days after Billy’s high school graduation, the world turned upside down.
North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25. America was again at war, only five years after the previous war ended. Unlike his father during World War II, Billy was of prime draft age. His well-laid plans were plunged into the great unknown.
In the fall of 1950, Billy drove his Ford across the country to Salt Lake City to begin college. To everyone he met, he was now “Bill,” having shed the “Billy” of his youth, except when he was with family and old friends. The rush chairman for Sigma Chi that fall was Sterling Colton, son of J.W.’s first business partner and longtime friend Hugh Colton. He and Bill would become close friends for life.
In its centennial year, the university was still in the midst of postwar turmoil and transition—at the tail end of a postwar boom that peaked with more than 12,000 students, who had to make do with inadequate housing and cramped classrooms. Instead of living at the fraternity house, Bill chose dorm life in a converted army hospital on the grounds of Fort Douglas adjacent to the campus. Intending to join his father’s company, Bill opted to major in banking and finance.
From his first day of class, Bill realized that the “U” was going to be a walk in the park compared to St. Albans. “I thought it was amateur night in the beginning,” he said, which meant he had more time for socializing. “I didn’t do great my freshman year because I became interested in girls.” (For Bill, that academic slip meant a few B’s among mostly A’s.)
In those days, the “U” had a community college feel; the vast majority of students went home to their families at night. Fraternities flourished because they provided a center for social activity, which was one reason Bill joined Sigma Chi. He found a lifelong friend in fraternity brother Bruce Haight from Palo Alto, California. The most difficult issue Bruce and Bill wrestled with during their first freshman months was their desire to serve missions for their church when the federal government wanted them as soldiers for the Korean War.
Bill went ahead with his mission plans, hoping to leave the summer after his freshman year. He also scheduled an appointment in Washington at Christmastime for a patriarchal blessing: a special priesthood blessing pronounced by an ordained patriarch that provides direction for the future and understanding of God’s will for the individual. The patriarch placed his hands on Bill’s bowed head and pronounced, among other things, that he would someday serve a mission. But the Church was soon warned by General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, that no religious deferments would be given to young men to serve missions, and those already out on missions might be drafted into the army at any time.4
After the Korean War, in 1955, Congress passed a resolution giving Latter-day Saint missionaries ordained-minister status, allowing them ministerial deferments—but for Bill it was too late. He never served a full-time mission for the Church as a young single man, though he did later serve as an adult in a succession of missionary-related Church positions. Although he keenly felt the loss of the opportunity to serve a traditional mission, he was never one to harbor regret or take too many backward glances. He said in later life, “I do the best I can and trust in the Lord that that is good enough.”5
Unlike the previous World War, the Korean “police action” was unpopular with most Americans. To the young men of draft age, the conflict was not a clear defense of the homeland, and its purpose was not compelling enough for many to volunteer for the military. Bill Marriott was no exception. He looked for a fallback plan that would prevent his being drafted to the front lines. Student deferment for those who took a minimum of twelve credit hours at the university was good for a limited time, but he knew it was better to join the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), which guaranteed enlistment as an officer. His preference was for the navy, but its ROTC roster was nearly full. After impressing the right commanders, though, he was admitted to the navy ROTC. While he couldn’t be drafted, this gave him a good opportunity to serve his country.
During Bill’s freshman year, another pivotal event occurred: he found that he loved working in his father’s restaurant business. Even before Bill’s plans to go to college in Utah, J.W. had thought about opening a Hot Shoppe in Salt Lake City. One of J.W.’s friends, also a former sheepherder, Stephen M. Covey, had opened a hotel-restaurant-filling station in the mid-1930s near Granger, Wyoming. He called it “Little America.” The way station in the middle of nowhere was such a success that Covey built a Little America motel and coffee shop in Salt Lake. In 1950, weary of the coffee shop part of the business, Covey sold it to J.W., who remodeled it as a Hot Shoppe, opening it during Bill’s freshman year. It was the company’s twenty-third restaurant and the only one in the West.
J.W. was on hand to greet more than 500 guests who jammed the shop for the grand opening. Bill was working hard in the kitchen. From his first day on the job, Bill said, “I liked the pace—the ability to interact with employees and customers, and just the speed of the business. When you get busy in a restaurant, things become very chaotic, and I kind of liked that.”6
When Bill returned home after his freshman year, his father had a new acquisition to show him: a sprawling farm in Hume, Virginia. J.W. longed for a taste of his Western cowboy upbringing, which the farm would give him, so Allie finally capitulated to the purchase.
Besides, there was a health-related reason for the property. J.W.’s face had turned sallow; after a battery of tests, doctors diagnosed his ailment as hepatitis. He was hospitalized for six weeks and given intravenous glucose and penicillin to repair the damage to his liver. The doctors advised that the best thing for recuperation was total rest. Allie agreed that it was time to find a farm, which would serve him intermittently as a recuperative oasis.
Fairfield Farm was originally owned by King Charles of England in the 1600s and eventually became the estate of James Marshall, brother to noted Chief Justice John C. Marshall of the Supreme Court. During the Civil War, it was used by the Confederate army as a temporary headquarters. A Belgian baroness whose husband was taken captive by the Nazis used it as a refuge for her part-Jewish family during World War II.7
Fairfield Farm.
After J.W. bought the 2,200-acre Fairfield Farm in 1951, the Marriotts made a half dozen overnight visits there that first spring and summer, staying in a little cottage on the estate because the manor house was dilapidated. Bill was busy that summer after his freshman year working in the “kitchen engineering” department of the company, but he went at least once to see the new farm, enjoying its beauty but not the outdoor ranch life. That was not a passion he shared with his father.
When Bill returned to the University of Utah as a sophomore, he went back to work at the Salt Lake Hot Shoppe. The previous spring, he had reported often to the breakfast chef at four a.m. and helped prepare the meals for the day. It was then that the infamous Deep Fat Fryer Incident had occurred. After one lunch hour, his shift manager asked Bill to clean out the fryer used for cooking French fries. “I cooled it down and drained out most of the grease. I got soap, and a hose, and hot water and shoved it into the fryer and all of sudden the whole thing started to foment, foment, foment, foment and it just bubbled up all over the fryer, all over the kitchen, all over the floor, all over me. It was the biggest mess you ever saw in your life.”
In the fall of his sophomore year, Bill was now put in charge of the grill and steam table five afternoons a week. Bill learned to do every job during his college years except waiting tables. By his junior year, he was a shift manager, and in his senior year, when he was busier at school, he became a supervisory inspector.
The store manager, Jerry Clark, was a navy reservist who tried to interest Bill in naval aviation. Bill’s interest faded the day Clark took him for a flight in a trainer and demonstrated a high-flying loop. “He did it two or three times, and then he said, ‘Now you try it.’ I almost crashed the airplane. And I had thrown up all over the place.” After they landed, the mechanic “took one look inside the plane and said, ‘Get some rags and clean it up. It’s your mess.’ So I did. I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going into naval aviation.”
While he was home one Christmas, Bill met Russell and Dantzel Nelson, new Latter-day Saint friends of his parents who would become important in Bill’s life. Lieutenant Nelson was an army doctor at the Walter Reed Medical Center. In the future, he would become a world-renowned heart surgeon and then, at the age of ninety-three, the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was the second close family friend in Washington who would become the Church’s President in later years. The first was Ezra Taft Benson, who served as Secretary of Agriculture during the Eisenhower administration.
At the end of his sophomore year, at his father’s request, Bill drove to Los Angeles to scout drive-in restaurants. “At least once a year, someone from our company did a drive-in tour of California, which was the drive-in capital of the world,” Bill recalled. Both the good weather and the high level of auto ownership spurred the fast-growing industry, whose giants got their start in California. From Sacramento in 1919, Roy Allen had launched what would become the large A&W franchise chain. From Glendale in 1937, Robert Wian had begun another successful chain, called “Bob’s Big Boy.” And in 1948, the McDonald brothers switched from barbecue to hamburgers in their San Bernardino restaurant and had expanded to a half dozen franchisees by the time Bill went to Los Angeles in June 1952.
What interested Bill the most on the scouting trip was a new revolving-wheel-based check-order system he observed at one drive-in. Bill raved about it to his dad when he returned to Washington, so J.W. directed him to test it at the Philadelphia Hot Shoppe on Market Street. The system was simple: a curber took the order and clipped it to the wheel at the kitchen’s edge. The cook filled the order and turned the wheel to return the ticket, which the curber presented as a bill to the customer. “Dad put me in charge of the new wheel, getting the food out and calling the curbers in,” Bill said. “I was making so much noise that the neighbors complained I was too loud on the loudspeakers, so I had to stop screaming.”
At the time, J.W. was in the middle of one of the biggest business decisions of his life—whether to convert Hot Shoppes from a family company to a publicly traded firm. J.W. decided to take Bill into his confidence. Back in Washington, only a few days before Bill returned to school for his junior year, J.W. invited Bill into his study for a review of the pros and cons of going public. They debated until eleven p.m., with Bill firmly on the side of not selling any stock, keeping it “in the family.” He was so adamant that J.W. recorded in his journal: “Billy doesn’t want us to sell any stock.”8
Meanwhile, J.W. was dealing with the most nettlesome issue of his life—his brother Paul, who was still managing the In-Flite airline catering. Earlier in the year, J.W. thought the only way his own health would improve was if he could remove the stress caused by having Paul at headquarters. Paul believed he should be an equal partner, and he was jealous of anyone else who won J.W.’s ear. Paul’s drinking and unhappiness spilled all over the River Road headquarters and cost the In-Flite division an important contract at Newark Airport.
J.W. had warned Paul he would have to move the In-Flite offices to a separate location, hoping to remove the friction Paul caused. Paul said he would move only if the larger family corporation divested itself of any ownership in the catering operations, giving it all to him, but J.W. refused. Privately, he began working on a plan to buy Paul out completely, partly driven by J.W.’s continuing interest in taking the company public.
Only a couple of days before Bill returned to college in January, J.W. told him that he had made up his mind to take the company public. Unfortunately, Paul was still a factor, increasing his demands and complicating the stock sale. Still, J.W. couldn’t bring himself to fire his brother. Instead, he signed a ten-year management agreement keeping Paul on the catering payroll. By the end of that decade, Bill would be the new president of the company, and it would fall to him to fire his uncle Paul because his dad, even then, could not do it.
March 17, 1953, was set as the date for Hot Shoppes, Inc., to go public. The company was to be sold over the counter, which was a step down from a stock exchange. J.W.’s reputation was a key factor in the sale. One Virginia broker confided to J.W., “I wouldn’t touch your stock if you were not the head of the company.” The price was set at $10.25 a share. On offering day, the success could not have been more stunning. After the investment houses opened for business that morning, the phones never stopped ringing. Every share was sold in only two hours, and the calls for orders were still coming in. Every goal J.W. had for the sale was achieved. The company’s working capital had been increased by more than $1 million, while the Marriotts were still in full control since they still owned two-thirds of the outstanding stock. J.W.’s three brothers—Paul, Woody, and Russell—all did very well with the IPO, and would eventually become multimillionaires. J.W. made the most, more than $1 million on this first sale.
On the last day of the year, J.W. and Allie met with their bishop to pay their tithing, defined by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as 10 percent of one’s annual increase. When the personal checks and donated stock shares were added up, J.W.’s and Allie’s total contribution to the Church that year was $132,743.50. “Sure glad to be able to pay it,” he wrote in his journal. “The Lord has been exceedingly good to us.”9
In the days immediately after the stock sale, J.W. was in a mood to celebrate, and he planned a trip with Bill. He flew to Salt Lake City and the pair took off for Las Vegas, where J.W. wanted to check out the drive-ins, restaurants, hotels, and the gaming business. Once they arrived, J.W. was appalled at the “awful gambling,” which he concluded was a waste of time and money. Both father and son loved Nevada’s no-speed-limit highways, though. “A nice day. Drove 120 miles per hour. Good visit with Bill,” J.W. recorded.10
Bill finished his junior year with A’s and a rare B in Labor Relations, where he learned of the challenges that unionizing posed to corporations. Once back home, Bill frequently joined J.W. for restaurant inspections and lengthy business discussions. The father-son relationship began to subtly change. After seven years of journals in which Bill was referred to either as a “good boy” or “fine boy,” J.W. penned his first criticism. “Billy very selfish & can’t see much good in anybody,” his father wrote one evening.11 Bill later acknowledged that it was a fair complaint from his father at the time.
In June, father and son shared a moment of harmony when they picked up a beautiful, classic wooden speedboat named the Dolphin. When they first took it out on the water, the 160-horsepower engine smoothly skimmed the boat across Lake Winnipesaukee at forty miles per hour. The Dolphin soon became the sentimental favorite among family members and was kept in pristine running condition in Bill’s family for decades. A few weeks after the Dolphin purchase, it was time for Bill to ship out on a much bigger boat, the USS Columbus, a World War II heavy cruiser.
As part of navy ROTC requirements, all midshipmen were dispatched on a summer training cruise, and it was a happy coincidence that Bill and Bruce Haight were assigned to the same cruise. Berthed in Norfolk, Virginia, the Columbus, whose nickname was “The Tall Lady,” was an impressive sight for the two college men—674 feet long, bristling with armament. In all, there were 358 ROTC midshipmen assigned to the cruise from forty-nine universities. They rotated around, learning all duties on the ship. The first port of call was the Coco Solo Naval Base on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal Zone, and then on to Port of Spain, Trinidad, and then Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The only previous foreign countries Bill had visited were Mexico and Canada, and now he added three more to that list in as many weeks. When the ship returned to Norfolk, Bill and Bruce drove to Washington and then on to Lake Winnipesaukee for two weeks before returning to college.
Bill later lauded the “U” for being the place that “inspired me to continue to study and learn.”12 None of his professors came close to matching the impact of speech professor Dr. Royal L. Garff. He rarely sat down to lecture, preferring to be always on the move among the students. He believed that the only way students could learn the value of public speaking and gain confidence in it was by doing it before an audience. “Royal made you do it,” Bill said. “He taught you to stand up, to speak up and to shut up.”13
Occasionally, Professor Garff would tell his students stories about his family, speaking with great pride about his oldest daughter, Donna, who was then enrolled as a freshman at the “U.” That didn’t catch Bill’s attention until one day when he saw a pretty blonde girl waiting at the bus stop. Excitedly, he asked a friend who was riding with him if he knew the girl. The friend was a handyman at the Chi Omega sorority house, where she had pledged. “That’s Donna Rae Garff,” he replied. He subsequently introduced the two, and Bill’s world changed in that moment.