Beyond the Horizon

A Speech given by Conrad N. Hilton
October 28, 1969

I am honored that you have asked me to speak to you today. It is good to be in Texas; it is good to be in Houston again. Fifty years ago I put my first, frightened unsophisticated foot into the three-cultured sophistication of Texas when I started in the hotel business by purchasing the Mobley Hotel in Cisco. That day I started down a long road. To some it was the road to empire, but to me it is still the simple road to our Hilton Family of Hotels Around the World. And it all started in Texas.

In fact, there are many who think I am a Texan, but I am not. I was born in San Antonio, to be sure, but San Antonio, New Mexico, not Texas. Years ago your Governor Beauford Jester offered to make me a "Texan of Distinction." I accepted the honor. The press was alerted, the guests invited to the traditional banquet. At the eleventh hour a specter arose over the projected festivities. There came a frantic telephone call from the governor. "You were born in San Antonio?" he pleaded. "Yes, I was," I answered, "San Antonio, Socoroo County, New Mexico." Then there was a silence. But the Governor bounced back. "Connie," he said, "You will become the only Honorary Texan of Distinction in the World." So I am a Texan and I am proud of it. I started business here; my sons were born here; anything and everything Texan has a special meaning for me.

Now, what I have most to say to you this evening, is to tell you briefly why I have made this gift to the University of Houston for your new Hilton School of Hotel and Restaurant Management. I have made it because I am proud of the hotel industry as an industry in the American scene and across the world. As a profession it has a longer history and gives as great promise as any in the world today. Its history goes back beyond the history of any industry except agriculture. I can see the chap who invented the wheel rolling it into that first inn to brag to his fellows, "Now go ahead and make a wagon or make a Cadillac!" And for me, the promise of hotels as an industry is far beyond the horizon of the moon. That is why I am making this gift to the university [of Houston], to see that there are young men and women prepared to reach that horizon and beyond.

I have chosen Houston because your city, as a tracking-station for astronauts, symbolizes for much of the world the ability of man to stride through space in his flights to the moon, Mars - and with God's help, to God. I have chosen Houston because it is the largest city in Texas, in the top ten of the country - and major hotels are in major cities. Here in Houston can rise the social, psychological and economic laboratory in which young men and women studying hotels may encounter the challenges which will be part of their lives wherever they manage hotels in the future. Why do I make this gift to the university? Because I am proud to be a hotel man, proud of the three thousand years of history behind me. Before the Bible was written our industry was born. Before the pharaohs, before Samson met Delilah in that inn on the Gaza Strip, before the Greeks and the Romans, we find the caravansaries of the East on the long, lonely desert highroads. When civilized man first began to travel in the interest of commerce, religion or just plain survival, man found rest, food and shelter in the mud huts along the Nile, the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Indus, the coasts of the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Aegean and the Yellow Sea off China spawned our industry in the morning of the world. I have watched it come out of the murky shadow of history, and glory in its progress down the ages. Two thousand years ago Horace called us "Perfidus Caupo," rascally innkeepers; today from Houston to New York, from Paris to Tokyo, our managers are considered city fathers. This is what I want my hotelmen of the future, my successors, to know. Be sure, I want them to be able to read a profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, to be able to purchase economically, to manage wisely; I want them to know the fabulous tradition of our profession down through the ages. If they don't know where they have been, they will now know where they are going.

For the next hundred years hotels must be manned and managed by men and women of greater vision, broader cultural horizons and deeper insights of leadership than any hotelmen in history. If the men who come out of the Hilton School of Hotel and Restaurant Management here are going to be good hotelmen, if they are going to be successful innkeepers, they must accept a new responsibility to the community and to the nation beyond anything that has been asked of hotelmen over the centuries. They must know the cultural significance of metropolitan and even cosmopolitan hotels in the modern world.

Culturally the very architecture of hotels contributes to the beauty of any city; their interiors are authentic reproductions of period or contemporary art, decor and furnishings. Efficient equipment and facilities dramatically exemplify modern life and its achievements. Here at your Hilton School of Hotel and Restaurant Management your students must learn that hotels typify and even carry within themselves a cross-section of contemporary life. They will learn that men and women of all races and creeds, whether religious and artistic significance. This the men and women of the University of Houston Hotel School will come to know and to cherish.

But they will not unless they know whence they have come, whence has come the career, the profession they practice. They will not unless they recognize with pride that the little inns and great hotels of the world have been the settings against which a thousand dramas have been played out over three thousand years. They will not unless their study of history tells them that ancient Persia and later ancient Rome had a string of posting places and inns where caravans of merchantmen, like great fleets of ships, would stop to refresh themselves and their animals, and stay for the night. It will be good for their humility - as it was good for mine - to know that the monks of the Middle Ages probably ran the first hotel chain with two hundred and six monasteries across Europe. One of the reasons that I am helping to fund the Hilton School of Hotel and Restaurant Management is to give today's students, the future hotelmen of America, the opportunity that I did not have, the opportunity to realize that the historical record of man has something to teach them.

My point in this matter of history is that the world is not totally new, the past is not completely over. And it is the job of the university to acknowledge the reality of what went before if it is to serve mankind. The job of this university - of any university - is not only the pursuit of knowledge, but also its preservation in responsible freedom. This is what distinguishes the university from government, industry, the military or the press. And it is my hope that the young hotelmen and women who study here at Houston will take every advantage of the time, the faculty and facilities given them. I should like to have them come out of our hotel school with the hard thought that is involved in knowing what we are and where we have been; that men can learn from other men; that men need not repeat the errors of the past; that everything is not yet known.

Across the world today modern hotels typify the color and culture of each nation. It is my hope that it will be the American Hotelmen who will lead the way, who will follow in our pioneering footsteps, to circulate good men, good ideas, and a healthy commerce around the world. I want it to be the American Hotelmen who will match and outmatch the famous hotels of Europe, Asia and Africa. Out of your Hilton School, the Statler School at Cornell and the other American schools of hotel and restaurant management, must come the men who will do this.

And mentioning the name Statler brings to mind a great lady, Mrs. Alice Statler, whom I had hoped to have with us this evening. It makes me sad to say that I have received word of the passing of this very fine person. She was much interested in the kind of thing we are starting today. She and her husband were pioneers in helping to transform our hotel industry from insignificance to the seventh largest in America. If she were with us today, she would join me in concluding that the keeper of the inn is the keeper of the flame, that thousand-year-old flame of hospitality which the graduates of our Hilton School of Hotel and Restaurant Management must hold high and carry into the hotels of the twenty-first century.

Thank you.

Conrad N. Hilton
Houston, Texas
October 28, 1969

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