Stories From Texas

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Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-29-2026

Abstract

Connie was born on Christmas Day in 1887 in San Antonio. That would be San Antonio, New Mexico, which was pretty much a one-horse town compared to San Antonio, Texas back then.

As a teenager, Connie worked in his father’s general store for $5 a month. In school, he said that he excelled in two subjects: math and Spanish.

At home, his mother taught him the power of prayer. His father taught him that there was only one word that would lead to success and that was “work.”

In time, he learned that praying hard and working hard needed a third element: dreaming big.

During World War I, Connie enlisted and served in France. Sadly, his father died while he was in Paris. It was just a couple of months after Armistice Day. Connie’s mother sent him a telegram: “Father killed auto accident. Come. Mother.”

He returned home to a small town that was getting smaller and his father’s businesses were struggling or failing. While overseas, Connie had dreamed of becoming a banker or maybe even buying a bank.

His mother knew he couldn’t make that happen in a small, poor town with a dwindling population. She told him to find his own frontier, saying, “If you want to launch big ships, you have to go where the water is deep.”

Connie found out soon enough that that meant Texas. A great friend of his father’s who was dying sent for him and said, “Go to Texas, Connie, and you’ll make your fortune.” He would later say it was the single most important bit of advice he had received in his career.

Connie had $5,000 from savings and some investors he could count on. He wanted to buy a bank. He went first to Wichita Falls and found a bank that was for sale for $75,000. He wired the owner and asked for details and the owner came back with a higher sale price of $80,000. The oil boom in Texas was pushing prices higher.

Connie couldn’t meet the new price — and that turned out to be lucky. That bank failed two years later.

Connie moved on to Fort Worth where he had no luck and then took the train to Cisco, Texas. The town was full of hordes of men seeking their fortune in black gold.

Connie couldn’t find a bank for sale. He decided he’d check into a hotel to collect his thoughts, but he couldn’t find a room. In one hotel, he realized the owner was renting rooms for 8 hours at a time. He was collecting on three sleep shifts a day.

Cleverly working his way into a conversation with the owner, Connie discovered that the man wanted desperately to get out of the hotel business. He wanted to be in oil.

Connie asked him why he would want to give up a hotel that makes money hand over fist. He said, “I’m making only thousands a year when I could be making millions in oil.” Connie asked him how much he wanted for the hotel and he said, $50,000.

After negotiations, Connie got him down to $40,000, but he had only one week to close the deal. He had half of it from investors and borrowed the rest from a bank that was happy to lend some of the oil money it was flush with.

When Connie signed loan documents with the bank, he signed with his formal name: Conrad. And his last name you will recognize, Hilton.

The Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, was the first Hilton Hotel. He said that night he dreamed of Texas “wearing a chain of Hilton hotels.” That dream came true in a much bigger way than he dreamed that night.

Today, Hilton hotels number 9,000 across 143 countries. And it all started in Cisco, Texas.

For many years, Conrad Hilton kept a picture of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on his desk. He considered it the finest hotel in the world. He wanted it.

In 1949, 30 years after buying the Mobley in Cisco, he bought the Waldorf-Astoria on the famed Park Ave.

That evening he went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to do as his mother had taught him — to pray in gratitude. But he said he didn’t pray in thanks for his new hotel. It was in gratitude for living in a country where he had “the All-American right to dream with the actual possibility of seeing that dream come true.”

Format

.MP3, 192 kbps

Length

00:06:00

Language

English

Notes

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/commentary-how-a-man-named-connie-forged-a-global-chain-that-started-in-texas/

Comments

© 2025 William F. Strong. Uploaded with permission of copyright holder.

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