Kemmons Wilson

"Holiday Inn founder
enjoys busy retirement"
Repository Financial
July 1, 1983
By Woody Baird

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - In the three years since he "retired," Holiday Inn® founder Kemmons Wilson has built two shopping centers and is almost finished with a couple of hotels and a $100 million vacation complex.

"I'm still pretty busy," says Wilson, 70. He has been building things all of his life. Since he started in business as a high school dropout with a popcorn machine, he has formed hundreds of companies - the best known Holiday Inns Inc.

After suffering a heart attack, Wilson retired from Holiday Inns in June 1980. "But I couldn't quit work. To me, work is my fun, my pleasure," says Wilson, who splits his time between his office at Kemmons Wilson Inc. in Memphis and his newest major interest, Orange Lake Country Club in Kissimmee, Florida, four miles from Walt Disney World®.

"I like to work a half a day," says. "I don't care if it's the first 12 hours or the second 12 hours. I just put in my half-day every day. I think it's good for everybody. It keeps you out of trouble."

Wilson got into the Orange Lake project the same way he has gotten into all his other business ventures - by watching for an opportunity to make money.

"If you keep trying enough things, you're going to find some things that are going to hit," he says.

The first business venture he tried just that. At 17, he bought a second-hand popcorn machine and set up business in the lobby of a Memphis theater.

"I got it for nothing down and $1 a week. When you don't have any money that's the only way to do it," he says.

Business was good, too good. "I got to doing so well that I was making more than the theater manager and he took my concession away from me."

Wilson sold the popcorn machine for $50, and invested the money he had made in five pinball machines, which he placed around town. He continued buying pinball machines, became a jukebox distributor and extended his finances to the limit to buy 250 cigarette machines.

In 1933, Wilson bought a house for $1,700 and found out one day that he could use it for collateral on a $65,000 loan. He went into the building business.

His ventures were interrupted from 1943 to 1945 while he served as a pilot during World War II, flying cargo over the Himalayas from India into Burma and China.

After the war, Wilson went back into building and real estate, and in 1952 he built the first Holiday Inn on Summer Avenue in Memphis.

Wilson says he decided on a car trip with his family to Washington, D.C., that the motels of the time did not offer the traveling public enough quality.

He vowed to his wife that he would build a chain of 400 motels. When he left Holiday Inn®, the company had more than 1,750 motels.

Wilson says he has always watched for business opportunities, big or small. One of the companies he recently formed makes and sells nacho chips and cheese dip.

"I was in California and I found a man who was making the best chips I'd ever tasted," Wilson says. "He said he was enlarging his plant and if I'd buy his equipment, he'd show me how to make chips."

Wilson's chip company, called Nachos, Inc. did $2.5 million in business last year.

Typical of his way of doing things, Wilson hired someone to run the company after he set it up.

"I'm a great guy for partners," he says. "I always have someone doing the work."

Wilson says he got the idea for the Orange Lake Country Club while visiting a business associate in Florida.

The associate took Wilson to a condominium that was purchased for $7,000 on a "time-share" basis, and he liked what he saw.

With timeshare a buyer purchases an apartment for a certain length of time each year. He owns it for that period, and he can sell it or leave it to his children or deal with it in many other ways that one handles private property.

So far Wilson has sold $32 million worth of units at Orange Lake and construction is expected to continue through 1984.

The development has 600 units, including a hotel with 168 units, also sold on a time-share basis. It also has a golf course, 16 tennis courts, four racquetball courts, three swimming pools, an 80-acre lake and a 7,000-seat tennis stadium.

Wilson is a tennis player himself and tries to get in three or four matches a week. Other projects he has started since his "retirement" include a conventional, 320-room hotel a mile from Disney World, oil exploration in Louisiana and two factory outlet malls.

Wilson has always been a family man and has a bank of 20 pictures of his wife, Dorothy, and their five children displayed on one wall near his desk.

"I've got ten children," he says. "Five of my own and the five my children married."