J. Willard Marriott, Root Beer Stand to Empire
Near Ogden, Utah
About six miles north of downtown Ogden, in a settlement called Marriott that his family had helped found, John Willard Marriott was born on September seventeenth, nineteen hundred. His great-grandfather had helped establish the community around eighteen fifty two, and his father ran the sheep ranch and farm that the family had worked for two generations. John Willard was the second of eight children. He worked the ranch. He missed enough school during lambing seasons that the president of Weber College had to help him make up credits before they would let him in.
He graduated from the University of Utah in nineteen twenty-six and went east to Washington, D.C., with a root beer franchise from A and W. In the summer of nineteen twenty-seven he opened a nine-stool root beer stand. Washington summers are brutal, humid and hot, and he added hot food to get customers in the door during slow season. The stand became a restaurant. He named it the Hot Shoppe. He opened more of them.
In nineteen fifty-seven, thirty years after the root beer stand, he opened his first hotel, actually a motor inn in Arlington, Virginia, which he called the Twin Bridges Motor Hotel. The logic was the same as the food business: travelers needed somewhere to stop, and he would be where they stopped. By the time J. Willard Marriott died in August of nineteen eighty-five, the Marriott Corporation employed roughly one hundred fifty five thousand people in twenty-six countries and operated more than one thousand four hundred restaurants and one hundred forty-three hotels.
The sheep ranch outside Ogden where he grew up no longer exists in its original form. The settlement of Marriott has been absorbed into the western edge of Ogden's suburbs. The name is on hotels on six continents.
