Curtis Carlson; Owner of Radisson Hotels
Curtis Carlson, who started the Gold Bond Stamp Co. with a $55 loan during the Great Depression and built it into the giant Carlson Cos. Inc. that included Radisson Hotels Worldwide, has died. He was 84.
Carlson died Friday at a suburban Minneapolis hospital after a stroke on Feb. 10.
The company, with 147,000 employees, also includes Carlson Marketing Group, Carlson Wagonlit Travel franchises, A.T. Mays travel agencies, Country Inns and Suites, Radisson Seven Seas Cruises and TGI Friday restaurants.
Carlson Cos. had $7.8 billion in annual revenue in 1998. The Carlson name was worth another $14.2 billion in annual revenue to franchises and other businesses licensed by the company.
Carlson began his career with a $110-a-month job as a soap salesman for Procter & Gamble, earning a gold watch and a $330 bonus the first year. He started his trading stamp business at night with a $55 loan from his landlord, and within six months said goodbye to selling soap.
From 1938 to 1978, Gold Bond grew at a rate of 30% a year, never failing to meet sales goals set by the founder. During the post-World War II era when trading stamps were in their heyday, Gold Bond broke new ground by signing up such nontraditional accounts as rural movie theaters, feed mills, turkey hatcheries and mortuaries.
The hotel chain that Carlson launched in 1962 when he bought Minneapolis’ Radisson Hotel now has 375 properties.
Until stricken, Carlson had remained active in the business. But he had relinquished control last year to his daughter, Marilyn Carlson Nelson.
He had trained her with what some might call tough love. Forbes magazine once quoted Carlson as dressing down his then 50-something daughter: “You don’t know anything about business! You’re a goddamn fool! You shut up and listen to me.”
He was tough on other executives too, with Forbes noting that the average executive tenure in 1993 was “about two years.”
Carlson’s approach usually worked. He made his first $1 million by age 39. Even foreign nations, from Cuba to Russia, begged him to set up hotels or refurbish their own.
“We were really quite distressed by the slowness of putting a package together,” he told The Times a year after opening the first American-run hotel in Moscow, the Radisson Slavjanskaya, in 1991. “But once the hotel was open and started making money, it was a whole new atmosphere.”
He was quickly asked to improve service operations at a dozen other Moscow hotels.
Carlson was the third child of Swedish immigrants in a family of five children. His mother worked as a maid in her early years and his father drove a sprinkler wagon for the city of Minneapolis and was a grocery salesman before opening his own grocery store.
“Everybody, including us kids, always worked as though the wolf were at the door,” Carlson recalled in his 1994 autobiography, “Good as Gold: The Story of the Carlson Companies.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1937.
Carlson is survived by his wife of 60 years, Arleen; two daughters, Marilyn Carlson Nelson and Barbara Carlson Gage; eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
