Mr. McKinley, General Manager

Charles McKinley was the General Manager of the hotel where I did the night audit when I was twenty-one years old in 1974. The shift was 11 to 7 and my job was to balance all the guests' accounts, post room and tax to each and bring the hotel's "Net Outstanding" into balance. Bud was the bellman so I wasn't alone most nights. We had just upgraded the phone system from an old time cord board shortly after I started but the machine we used for posting charges and credits to guest portfolios was an NCR4200. It was like 20 cash registers, one atop the other. Since it was mechanical, there was a crank you could stick in the side in case the electricity went out so you could still do the audit, (pre-uninterrupted power source). I could start the room and tax on that monstrosity and literally keep up with it as fast as it could go through the whole guest ledger. There was a rhythm to it that was almost musical....$23.50 credit balance...$22.40 room...$1.10 tax...zero balance. I loved zero balances! Hard to have an error on any of the zero balance folios.


Errors were my mortal enemies. Did you know that a transposition error is divisible by nine? If you post $42.00 when you only collected $24.00, the difference is $18.00. Many times at 4 AM the error I had to find was a multiple of nine so that at least gave me something to look for. It was always somewhere. I caught on to the logic of charges and credits being opposites so the whole business made sense to me. Once you ran the trial balance and everything added up, it was time to Z out the machine and change over to tomorrow's business.

Mr. McKinley called me from his home one night, shortly after my shift had started. I did not expect a call from the General Manager. In fact, he had never called before. Nervously, I heard him say succinctly, "David, I want you to wait for me after you get off tomorrow morning."  "Just go over to the restaurant and have a coffee until I get there at eight." The night went by slowly. I went over to the restaurant and waited. I was relieved when Mr. McKinley finally came in, smiled and sat across the table from me. Seems Mr. McKinley's Assistant Manager had dove into a swimming pool the day before and broke his neck! Would I like a shot at the job? Yes sir! Well, that was how I got into hotel management. What a great manager to learn from. Charles, (no one ever would dare call him Charles), was well into his sixties. He had started his career at the Albert Pick in Chicago fifty years ago "hopping bell" as he called it. There was nothing about hotels he didn't know.  Everyone in town knew him or at least who he was. Sometimes a friend of his would drop by for lunch or just a visit. "Tell Mack that Walter is here." he'd say.

One day, after I had my new job under control and was feeling real comfortable, I tried the "Mack stuff" with him. Our desks faced each other and we had become close in a short time but I had always addressed him as Mr. McKinley. He lept to his feet and stuck his finger straight out about six inches from my nose, "Don't you ever Mack me young man!" I promised that I never again would.

When I was offered a chance to relocate to learn the Food and Beverage part of the Hotel business, (we leased ours out to an operator), he told me not to go.  "There isn't that much to know", he said.  He had taught me everything about the rooms and now gave me the wisdom of Food and Beverage in one little poem.

"Cold food cold,
Hot food hot.
Front door open,
Back door locked!"

Truer words were never spoken.