I was living in Beeville when the Hershey Hotel was built in Corpus Christi. Like most everyone else, I would drive by the site when I had to travel into Corpus. It was really something to behold . . . a beautiful white luxury hotel being built on the waterfront. I have pretty much always been a little kid who loved to watch things being built. Once the construction was finished and the hotel was in business, Sandy and I enjoyed going there for dinner. It had a magnificent dining room on the top floor overlooking Corpus Christi Bay . . . excellent food in a most charming environment . . . the service was impeccable. It was an upscale place and that was drilled into the staff.
After a couple of years, we moved from Beeville to the Aransas Pass area. At that time I was serving on the board of directors of a statewide developer’s association of some 400-plus members. The Convention committee expressed an interest in holding its annual convention in Corpus and asked me during a board meeting in Ft. Worth to try to identify a suitable hotel that could accommodate our group. Upon returning home from the board meeting, I called the Hershey and scheduled a meeting with the sales director. Over the next few months, I would have a number of meetings with the folks at the hotel and representatives from the developer’s association. It was during one such meeting that I was introduced to the hotel’s General Manager, Bill Boyd. Bill and I took a liking to each other and we became fast friends. He would invite me to the hotel for lunch and I would take him fishing. As our convention drew near and I got to know Bill better, I invited him to be on our program and tell his story . . . and the Hershey story to our folks, which he agreed to do. Our folks loved it.
Mr. and Mrs. Milton Hershey were a childless couple who adored children. Mr. Hershey had a dream of being a candy-maker. The story is that he had several failures along the road to success. When he finally found success he head-quartered just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania . . . a quaint little community that would come to be known as Hershey, PA. It was there that the Hersheys would place their orphanage. The kids that came to live there found the Hersheys to be loving, kind, gracious, and quite generous. After some time, Mr. Hershey took the company public, but retain 40% of the stock for the Hershey Foundation . . . which operated the orphanage. The Foundation helped young folks discover themselves and find their way through life . . . and even provided for their education. My friend Bill Boyd was a Hershey kid . . . he went to school and studied architecture, and ultimately became a licensed Architect, and then went to work as such for the Foundation. The Foundation looked for investments to help keep it solvent . . . and liked real estate investments. At the time, Corpus Christi, Nueces County, and the State of Texas were making plans to open what was known as the Packery Channel, a waterway between Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Hershey planned a large-scale development as part of the Packery Channel project, and the downtown water-front hotel was simply phase one . . . it provided the Foundation with a presence in the community. The hotel was a terrific convention hotel and was arranged as such . . . primarily made up of double-occupancy rooms and a wide arrangement of meeting rooms. It soon became a successful venture . . . a beautiful hotel located in a great area which folks enjoyed visiting.
Bill spoke to our group and was a big hit. Later that day, I served as the convention speaker for the group . . . and Bill sat in on my speech. Little did I know then that it would later lead to my becoming something of the Hotel’s “in case of an emergency” fill-in speaker. As the hotel became well-known and accepted as a convention hotel. It all began quite by accident . . . Bill was hosting a convention and the group’s guest speaker was flying in from Boston and his connecting flight into Corpus was cancelled and the group had no one to step in. The group presented their dilemma to Bill and he called me late on Friday afternoon and asked me to run home, put a suit on and come running . . . I had like 45-minutes to be there and be ready. There was a nice fee involved and it was something that I would do a number of times over the years. I learned to ‘keep one in the barrel.’
Times change . . . years come and go and we all move on in the life experience. The Hershey Hotel was sold to Marriott and is now an Omni Hotel. The government entities reneged on the Packery Channel project, and the Hershey Foundation decided that the Corpus hotel was too small and too far away from headquarters to be operated as a ‘stand alone’ deal. My friend Bill Boyd moved on . . . we stayed in contact for a few years and then lost touch. Me? I don’t do much public speaking these days . . . I limit it to teaching my Sunday school class and doing a couple of seminars a year.
I just woke up this morning with fond memories of those years . . . and the Hershey Hotel. Actually, I saw a Texas ad for Stouffer Foods before going to bed last night, and I was reminded of doing a few seminars and conventions at a Stouffer hotel (when it was owned by Nestle’s). My favorite was located on the waterfront in downtown Mobile, Alabama; it always reminded me of the Hershey.