J. Willard Marriott

The stand at 3128 14th Street NW opened on the day Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris, which tells you where the newspapers were looking. Nine stools, one product, a partner named Hugh Colton, and an A&W franchise covering Washington, Baltimore and Richmond. Marriott had seen the city six summers earlier, passing through on the way home from a two-year mission to New England for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and had watched push-cart vendors sell out of lemonade and soda in minutes in the heat. Two weeks after opening he went back to Utah, married Alice Sheets on June 9, 1927, and brought her east to keep the books.

Root beer does not sell in November. Alice spoke Spanish, befriended a chef at the Mexican embassy, and the stand added chili and tamales and became The Hot Shoppe. A drive-in followed in 1928, the first east of the Mississippi by the company's account, and Hot Shoppes, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in 1929. By 1932 there were seven of them in the Washington area.

He was the second of eight children of Hyrum Willard and Ellen Morris Marriott, raised on sugar beets and sheep at Marriott Settlement outside Ogden. At 13 he planted lettuce on fallow acres and handed his father $2,000 at the end of the summer. At 14 his father put him on a train with 3,000 sheep bound for San Francisco, alone, to sell them. The mission came at 19. He finished an associate degree at Weber College in June 1923 as student body president, a bachelor's degree at the University of Utah in June 1926, and took a job at Weber under its president, Aaron Tracy, who had helped him make up the high school credits the ranch had cost him.

It lasted about a year. A cousin held an A&W franchise, and the memory of those Washington crowds did the rest.

The revenue figure at his death is less settled than the rest. Wikipedia gives $4.5 billion for 1985; a Deseret News report from 1988 said sales had exceeded $4 billion a year. Whichever you take, the airline catering business he built, which Wikipedia says he invented, and the contracts feeding schools and colleges were still a large share of it. Hotels were the newer line. The first one was a motel, and he needed his son Bill to talk him into it.

He ran the company by walking through it. The Wikipedia account, drawn from a family biography, describes him arriving unannounced at the kitchen door at any hour and moving at half a run through pantries, cold rooms and cutlery drawers, running a finger along shelves for dust and tasting the root beer, and it records his vow to inspect every restaurant and hotel at least four times a year even when there were hundreds. Two lines of his survive in the record. One is the operating rule he gave on tape: "You've got to make your employees happy. If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy." The other, which the Marriott School at BYU calls his favourite saying, is three words long. His son Bill put the same idea in management terms: there was "a lot of attention and tender loving care paid to the hourly workers", and when they were sick he visited them. The Church side of his life ran on the same clock. He served as president of the Washington Stake from 1948 to 1957, and in that role called a young Army doctor named Russell M. Nelson, then posted to Walter Reed, into a ward bishopric; Nelson, who later became president of the Church, wrote to Bill Marriott decades later about what the older man's example had meant. He put a Book of Mormon in every hotel room beside the Gideon Bible, a practice the company keeps. He was an active Republican and a friend of Michigan governor George Romney, whose son Mitt carries the first name Willard after him. On August 14, 1985, the day after Marriott died of a heart attack at 84 in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Ronald Reagan issued a statement calling him "a living example of the American dream".

• Marriott Center, the basketball arena at Brigham Young University, named in 1973
• J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott School of Management, BYU, announced October 28, 1988 with a $15 million challenge grant from the Marriott Foundation; the endowment has since grown to about $150 million
• J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah; Marriott Allied Health Building, Weber State University
• Golden Plate Award, 1971; Silver Buffalo Award, 1980; BYU Exemplary Manhood Award, April 1964

Success is never final.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom came three years after his death, at an East Room ceremony on October 16, 1988. Alice accepted it. The citation, read by Reagan, said he had "turned a small root beer stand in the nation's capitol into one of America's largest and most successful businesses". The same week the Deseret News noted that Forbes listed his widow and both sons among the wealthiest Americans, at about $245 million each (1988).