Day 180 of 365 Days of Boulderado Photos ~ Managers Part Two

Here is the other side of the Front Desk with the rest of the managers portrait collection, continued from yesterday. This part of the collection features Bill & Winnie Hutson, Ralph Hume, Ed Howard, and Louis Winterberger.

Frank Day

My blogging series about the different Boulderado owners and managers had to come to an end eventually, I guess. And perhaps this is the blog post I've been pointing towards ever since I first started sharing the history of these people. Beginning with William Beattie and Hugh Mark, then moving on to the Hutsons, Ralph Hume, and the Howards, and continuing with Louis Winterberger, William Brantmeyer, and Bart Bortles.

Bortles and Dick Dorman sold the hotel to Boulderado Hotel Ltd. in 1980 after just two years of ownership. Sid Anderson stayed on as the general manager. Frank Day became the new managing general partner of the hotel. At the time, Day described the rooms as "threadbare and tatty, but clean and comfortable." He decided to renovate the building from top to bottom.

First to be done were the fourth and fifth floor guest rooms on the west side of the building. Rooms that connected to share a bathroom were converted into large suites. Rooms without bathrooms had them installed in what used to be the closets. Each room received a makeover in time, and the tradition of each Hotel Boulderado room having a different decorating scheme was born. (Each of our guest rooms are individually decorated with their own carpet, drape, and wallpaper.) At the time, the hotel was also full of original antique furniture, but most of them had lost their luster over the years. Every piece of furniture was refinished on the fourth-floor porch, cataloged, and photographed.

Amazingly enough, the Hotel Boulderado remained open during this entire process. While seven or eight rooms were taken out of the rental inventory, the rest remained open to guests. By the time the renovation had been completed, it brought the hotel's room count to 42. With an occupancy averaging 92% almost every night, Day felt confident in expanding the guest rooms at the Hotel Boulderado. First one expansion in 1985 and then another in 1989 increased the hotel's inventory to the current 160 and also added the Events Center in the North Wing.

Without the initial renovation and the subsequent expansion, the Hotel Boulderado may never have recovered the grandeur it exudes today. When you walk into the lobby, the cherrywood staircase gleams, the stained-glass ceiling glitters, and friendly faces greet you at the door and the front desk. This is the Boulderado that I've come to love and treasure, made possible by the people who contributed over the years not only to the hotel, but the hotel's history as well. Boulderado employees are also caretakers of a landmark, and we make sure to hold that duty in as high a regard as we do for our daily tasks.

Ralph Hume

Ralph Hume is an interesting figure in the Hotel Boulderado's history. He started out as a bellman in the mid-1930s and then moved up to desk clerk, making friends with Bill Mark, Hugh Mark's son along the way. In the late 1940s, when owner Bill Hutson was losing interest in running the hotel, he turned to Ralph, who took over the managerial duties until 1961.

The times, they were a changing during Hume's era. More and more people were able to afford purchasing a family car, and many travelers bypassed downtown Boulder in favor of the new, modern motels that had spring up on the outskirts of town. The motels offered amenities that the Boulderado couldn't compete with, like swimming pools. Even after adding a new parking lot, the only travelers who seemed to want to stay at the Boulderado were lawyers who wished to be near the courthouse. To compensate for the drop-off in occupancy, Hume decided to open up the Boulderado's rooms to more permanent guests who paid by the week or the month.

It was during Hume's tenure that a few panels fell from the stained-glass ceiling. The hotel in general was in need of freshening up, so Hume decided to remove the remainder of the ceiling and start over. He hired local contractor Moss Miles to install red, white, and blue Plexiglas in its place. A young Bill Hutson III (the Hutson's son) helped Miles with the installation, and admitted years later, "Even then I knew it was tacky."

Stay tuned to learn about the next couple that owned and managed the Hotel Boulderado during the 1960s, Ed and June Howard. For a sneak peek, you can read our transcript of an oral history from Ed on our website.

Bill and Winnie Hutson

A bit more Boulderado history for you on this chilly but sunny October day, this time concerning the Hutsons, Bill and Winnie (seen left ~ photo from the Hutson family collection).

William (Bill) Hutson, Jr. came from a family that was very familiar with the hotel business. His father, William Sr., owned and operated three hotels throughout the Midwest in Kansas and Missouri, and when it was time to select a gift for Bill and his new beauty queen bride, Winnie, William decided to continue the tradition. He bought the Hotel Boulderado for the young couple in 1940, the year after they were married, for $40,000. William Sr. added the Boulderado to his chain of Hutson Hotels, but turned the day-to-day operations and management over to his son, Bill. This marked the first time in Boulderado history that the hotel was privately owned. A Daily Camera article rejoiced at the news: "The sale is heralded by citizens of Boulder for it will put in possession of the hotel a company with sufficient capital to make the hotel what all Boulder wants it to be."

War, however, interrupted plans for modernization. Bill Hutson became a civilian flight instructor and then joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. He was stationed in a variety of locations, including Arizona, Texas, and California. Wherever he went, Winnie Hutson followed him. Hotel management during this time fell on a few Hutson Hotel employees, and occupancy became so high that they had to limit guest stays to three days in order to accommodate the demand.

When World War II came to a close in August of 1945, Bill and Winnie returned to Boulder to start improvements on the Boulderado. The coal furnace was converted over to natural gas. Electric lights were installed in each rooms, replacing the original gas and electric light fixtures. Carpet was laid in the halls, lobby, and in fifteen rooms. Fluorescent light took over the illumination of the lobby, and on the rooftop a large neon sign replaced the wooden one.

Winnie gave birth to a son, William (Bill) Hutson III, in 1946. While the family wasn't living in the hotel, like Hugh Mark did years earlier, Bill still grew up knowing every inch of the Hotel Boulderado, and would spend every Halloween trick-or-treating among the rooms of the permanent residents.

Bill Jr. turned the managerial duties of the Boulderado over to his friend, Ralph Hume, who had already been working at the hotel since the 1930s, first as a bellman and then as a front desk clerk. The Hutsons continued to manage the dining room, which was the Boulderado Coffee Shop in the late 1950s. Entrees could be had for under $2, and all dinners included potato, salad, fruit, and a beverage. Winnie's mother, Rosa May, worked for a time as the head of the housekeeping department, and lived in room 505 until she died.

It was during the Hutsons tenure at the Hotel Boulderado that the stained-glass ceiling in the lobby caved in after a heavy Halloween snowstorm. Less than two months later, William Hutson Sr. died, and Bill Jr. followed just four months later. Bill Hutson III was 14 years old. Ralph Hume continued to operate the hotel, but in 1961 Winnie decided to finally cut the ties and leased the Boulderado to another couple, the Howards. Stay tuned to learn about their adventures running the Hotel Boulderado in the 1960s!