Kemmons Wilson's Holiday Inn: Summer Avenue, Holidex and the Great Sign

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In 1952 Memphis resident Kemmons Wilson drove his family to Washington, D.C., and came home angry about filthy, unpredictable motor courts that charged extra for children. In August 1952 he opened his first motel on Summer Avenue, on the main road to Nashville, and named it Holiday Inn after his architect scrawled the title of the 1942 Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire film across the blueprints. With home builder Wallace E. Johnson he ringed Memphis by 1953 with three more inns on U.S. 51 South, Highway 51 North and U.S. 61, then turned to franchising. The chain reached 30 locations as Holiday Inn of America in 1957, 100 by 1959, 500 by 1964 and 1,000 by 1968. When the Albert Pick Corporation steered Holiday Inn guests to its other hotels, Wilson barred franchisees from owning any other hotel brand and forced Pick out by the end of the 1950s; a federal district court ruled that rule an illegal restraint of trade in 1973 after a dispute over a Newark franchise.

In 1965 the company launched Holidex, a network of teleprinters linking front desks over AT&T lines to a central computer in Memphis, and in 1967 it adopted toll-free 800 numbers under the slogan "your host from coast to coast." A 1963 deal let travelers charge rooms and meals on Gulf Oil credit cards while Gulf built stations near the inns. Wilson made the cover of Time in June 1972 and bought the Trailways bus parent TCO Industries and Delta Shipping. In 1982 the board replaced his 50-foot Great Sign with a cheaper backlit box, which Wilson called the worst mistake they ever made. He sold his remaining interest in 1990, and the domestic hotels were absorbed by the British brewer Bass PLC.

• Each Great Sign cost about $13,000 in the 1950s, roughly $150,000 today, and its colors were said to be his mother's favorites.
• The sign's changeable marquee let local managers welcome reunions or advertise steak dinners.
• Wilson built a university in Mississippi to train managers and an airport beside it for the corporate jets.
• After leaving he started the Medicenter nursing home chain, Show Biz Inc., bought the Delta Queen riverboat and developed Orange Lake Resort.
• His tombstone, after his death in 2003, carries a replica of the Great Sign with a marquee reading Founder.