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Why was his mother present at the meeting? Could the others turn him down with Mary Hilton eyeing them, and willing to pitch in herself—which she did—to the tune of $5,000? Soon, the other seven businessmen in the meeting agreed to put up $5,000 each. Donald H. Hubbs, director emeritus of the Hilton Foundation, recalled that Hilton grabbed the money, “raced to the elevator, ran to the bank and made the lease payment. He said, had he not made that payment, he would have most certainly lost his empire right then and there.”
    Though he managed to save the El Paso, Hilton was still in big trouble. It was just one problem after another as things crumbled all around him. At one point, a sheriff showed up at the Dallas hotel with a judgment. “I’ve come to collect,” he told Hilton. “Pay up or I’ll tack this judgment in the lobby.” Though it was a humiliating moment for Conrad, what could he do about it? “Tack away,” he said blithely. “I’ll go find you a ladder.” A half hour later, the sheriff returned, saying, “You knew I would never be able to find a place to tack this, didn’t you? The whole lobby is marble!” To which Conrad responded, “And you knew I would pay it as soon as I had the money to do so.” The sheriff left, giving Conrad just a little more time to come up with the money, which he did, “but it wasn’t easy,” he later recalled. An even more mortifying moment occurred when Conrad owed just $178 to a furniture company and they took him to court for the debt. At that point, his attorneys strongly encouraged him to declare bankruptcy. Pounding his fists on his desk during more than a few meetings with those same lawyers, Hilton steadfastly refused. He insisted that the situation was just temporary, that he was going to wait it out.
    “I’ve seen numbers in my research that suggest that over 80 percent of the hotels in America went bankrupt during the Depression,” says Mark Young of the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management. “No one was traveling, no businesspeople especially, so the rooms were just sitting empty. All of the creditors, if they wanted to, could have called in all of their notes and totally wiped him out, but many of them realized that he was doing the best he could under horrible circumstances. They had faith in him, and plus he was a good barterer, like his dad. For instance, there was a dairy supplier in El Paso whose bill was due, and Conrad said, ‘Look, if you’ll just extend me more credit, as long as I’m operating a hotel here I’ll buy all my dairy products from you.’ And he did, for many years. He never forgot. We have so much correspondence from him to people saying, ‘You helped me when times were tough, now I would like to help you. Would you like a job? Or would you like to buy stock in the company? What can I do to repay you for helping me?’ ”
    Every day it seemed that Conrad was closer to complete financial collapse. “A very good story is that at one point he was $500 in debt and a bellman in Dallas gave him his life savings,” recalled Conrad’s granddaughter Linda Hilton (his son Eric’s daughter). “And the bellman said, ‘Mr. Hilton, this is my life savings, but I want you to have it because I know you’re going to make this into something.’ My grandfather said he would not take charity, but he would take it as an investment. He was such a visionary of where he was going and what he was doing. There was no doubt in his mind that he was going to get the next deal.” (Incidentally, the bellman Linda Hilton spoke of eventually had his money returned to him by Conrad many times over. He received dividends on Hilton stock for the rest of his life.)
    Soon, Conrad Hilton’s intuition about the strength and resolve of his beloved country began to pay off; ever so slowly, America got back on her feet. As she did, Hilton’s small empire also began to recover. Because he had so stubbornly refused to default