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Wilson has lived in the same house in the Red Acres section of East Memphis for the past 26 years. It is a comfortable but far from palatial six-bedroom ranch. Here he raised his five children, Spence, 29; Bob, 27; Kern Jr., 25; Betty, 24; Carole, 22. Wilson and his wife Dorothy, whom he married five days before Pearl Harbor in 1941, are openly affectionate; he likes to hold her hand in public or squeeze her knee when sitting beside her. He also talks over many of his big plans with her. A handsome, energetic woman, Mrs. Wilson was named Mother of the Year by the American Mothers Committee in 1970. Both Methodists, the Wilsons are regular churchgoers, though he occasionally nods off during a sermon.
Born in Osceola, Ark. (pop. 7,204), Wilson had a youth that was laced with adversity. His father died when he was nine months old, and his mother Ruby brought her infant to Memphis, where she took a job as a dental assistant at $11 a week. An only child, Wilson idolized his mother, who died three years ago. When she lost her job during the Depression, Wilson, who had held part-time jobs almost since he could walk, quit high school and went to work for good. He bought a $50 popcorn machine—nothing down, $1 a week—and set up shop inside a Memphis theater. As he recalls: "I was soon making more than the theater manager, so he threw me out and took over the popcorn concession himself." Wilson sold him the machine in 1931 for the original $50, then invested the money in five pinball machines. (He later bought the popper back, and it now stands in his office.) By 1933 he had saved $1,700—all from nickels pumped into his machines—and used it to build a house. Soon after, Wilson was able to borrow $6,500 on the house from a bank. "Right then," he says, "I decided to go into the building business."
Fateful Vacation. He went on to build more houses, buy apartments, acquire theaters and take over the regional Wurlitzer jukebox distributorship. By the time World War II hit, Wilson was rich. But he sold out everything for $250,000, joined the Air Transport Command and piloted C-47s over the Himalayan hump, probably the hairiest air route of the war. After being mustered out, he bought an Orange Crush distributorship, but it soured, and he lost $100,000. So he went back to construction and built a fortune of about $1,000,000, all the while sharpening his skills in choosing real estate that had the potential for large increases in value.
In 1951 Wilson packed his family into a car and drove to Washington, D.C., for what turned out to be a fateful vacation. The family stayed in motels, but all were costly, cramped and uncomfortable. Wilson sensed a need for decent accommodations for the growing number of motorists and says that "as soon as I got back to Memphis, I decided to build a motel that had all the things we missed." The draftsman who designed it, Eddie Bluestein, scrawled a title across the bottom of the plans: Holiday Inns. He got the name from an old Bing Crosby movie that he had seen the night before.
Wilson borrowed $300,000 from a bank, and in 1952 the first Holiday Inn opened on Summer Avenue, one of the main approach roads to Memphis. Business was so strong that within 20 months he built three almost identical inns on other roads leading into the city. "You just had to go by a Holiday Inn to get into Memphis," he says.