He Knew What They Wanted

"Get a hotel. Go down and stand in the lobby. Soon people will come to you and tell you how to run your business. Then do what they tell you to."

That was his formula, though it took Poughkeepsie-born Lucius Messenger Boomer a while to get the hotel to prove it. He was a stenographer, a bookkeeper and a part-time law student until his eyes failed. He got a job as a roustabout, pushing barrels around the basement of the old Oriental Hotel at Manhattan Beach, and then he decided on the hotel business as a career. By the time he was 27, he was managing his first hotel (the Royal Muskoka Hotel, Muskoka Lakes, Canada). Before long he had hotel interests in half a dozen big cities and was part owner of Manhattan's old Waldorf-Astoria. By 1929, harddriving, handsome Innkeeper Boomer thought he knew just what people wanted in a hotel.

It was a 2,200-room, 46-story, $40 million super-palace on Park Avenue, with five ballrooms, a railway siding for private cars, luxury suites with a special entrance, and 2,600 employees. But the new Waldorf opened in 1931, in darkest depression, and it lost from $1 to $3 million a year. Boomer staved off bankruptcy by getting the New York Central to forgive much of the unpaid rent. He taught patrons to eat jellied madrilene in cantaloupe, and devised the now universal card-credit system that enabled the guest to get his bill in two minutes.

Weekends at the Waldorf. "There will always be fastidious people," he said, and refused to cut his staff. He kept tabs on his waiters, studied food (he could tell many blends of coffee by taste), and traveled widely in search of new ideas. Once a year he assembled hotel men and other friends for a gourmet's dinner of California wines, lettuce from irrigated Arizona gardens, and sole flown from the English channel. The Waldorf became an international institution. Princes, ambassadors and Elsa Maxwell filled the suites in its socially topless Towers.

War did the rest. The last of the grand hotels grossed $16,500,000 last year, more than any hotel ever took in anywhere, and in spite of stiff costs it began to make a little profit. Service began to slip a bit, but terrapin and Irish golden plover was still on the menu. Anyway, Boomer had found that guests now paid more attention to who was in the floor show than to what was on the menu.

Two years ago, at 66, Boomer retired as president, became board chairman. Last winter he relinquished his lordly 37th-floor suite for a time to the deliberating Big Four foreign ministers. This spring he sailed for a summer's holiday in Norway, his wife's old home. There last week the nation's No. 1 innkeeper died of a heart attack, as he sat in the lobby of Hamar's Astoria Hotel.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.