Muscogee County GaArchives Photo Place.....Ralston Hotel (Oscar L. Betts Jr.) ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 April 28, 2007, 8:01 pm Source: Special Sesquicentennial Supplement IV Ledger-Enquirer Photo can be seen at: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/muscogee/photos/ralstonh12683gph.jpg Image file size: 101.3 Kb Ralston Hotel Hosted Real Life Drama By William Rowe Ledger Staff Writer Everything happens in a hotel. Especially when it serves as the best of its kind for 60 years in Columbus. The Ralston Hotel so served between its construction in 1914 and its closing in 1975. lt's easy for Oscar L. Betts Jr., to recall real life dramas and famous guests, since he was its manager for 27 years. He recalls Eleanor (Mrs. Franklin D.) Roosevelt coming in for lunch, the late Winthrop RockefeIler. a multi-millionaire, checking in for weekends to study when he was an Officer Candidate at Fort Benning, guest Gordon Gray, also at Fort Benning for OCS and later Secretary of the Army. The Ralston housed University of Georgia football teams when they to came play Auburn in Columbus most other Auburn opponents, and when Columbus was a farm club of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, the major league squads stayed in the Ralston: sometimes two or three different teams at a time, in town for exhibition games. “We have had newlywed couples on honeymoon. We had deaths - I remember a man who died in my arms of a heart attack, while a doctor was unable to save him. We had a soldier who checked in and was placed on the fourth floor. He came downstairs and said it was too noisy and he asked for a room on a higher floor. A few minutes later he jumped out the window and plunged to his death." President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited many Central and South American and Caribbean government representatives to visit the United States, including Fort Benning. They stayed at the Ralston. We provided two interpreters on each floor," Betts recalled.' "We fed them in private dining rooms, we did their laundry and polished their boots during the night. We tried to meet all their demands. I remember one of them called me at two o'clock in the morning and wanted some white shirts. I call the owner of one of our Columbus stores and we got them for him." Betts is a 1924 graduate of Georgia Tech in Civil Engineering. He never thought of going into hotel management. "I have worked for only three firms in my life," he said. "The first was a general contractor in Atlanta. Then for Charles Loridans of Atlanta, who owned the Ralston Hotel - I came to Columbus to manage the hotel for one year, but stayed for 27 years." Betts joined The Jordan Co. after leaving hotel management and he is active today as vice president and secretary with the firm. At 75 he walks two miles each morning and gardens in his spare time. Keeping a hotel full of people happy required constant P.R. (personal reconnaissance), checking everything particularly cleanliness of the building, Betts found. The heartbeat of a hotel is not just one, but many and Betts operated over the years with an average staff of 175. At the end of its hotel life, the Ralston was serving 32 civic clubs and other groups at regular luncheon and dinner meetings, plus many other at special gatherings. Betts himself lived in the Ralston and made it his home. Mr. and Mrs. Betts have one son who also attended Georgia Tech, majoring in industrial management and is an executive with Tom's Foods Ltd. in Columbus. Groundbreaking for the original Ralston Hotel building came in 1914. It was named for Ralston Cargill, who was a president of the Board of Trade and of the organization which began operating in 1914 as the Chamber of, Commerce. Closing the Ralston meant a change for 25 or 30 business and professional men informally called "Knights of the Round Table." Miss Lottie Gregory served them every day except Sunday for 24 years. Newspaper publisher Maynard R. Ashworth is one of those, as were the late attorney Theo McGee and Jim Woodruff of WRBL- TV 3. "They just gather around and have a good time and solve the world's problems," Lottie said. The old hotel's name lives on in Ralston Towers, the renovated hotel building, with an addition just as tall, which Lawler Wood Associates of Knoxville, Tenn., developed into an apartment complex for senior citizens. Many of the Towers' residents will know what Betts means in mentioning other highlight hurdles in hoteling. "During World War II we had food rationing. I remember when we had to vary the time we could serve bacon with breakfasts. Some days we would begin serving it at 7 a.m. other days at 8 a.m. We tried to keep everybody reasonably happy." “Nearly everything happens at some time in a hotel," he said. "There’s only one thing I remember that never happened. We never had a baby born in the Ralston. but there were some close calls before the mother got to the hospital. " Special Sesquicentennial Supplement II Ledger- Enquirer, Sunday, May 7, 1978. S-20. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/muscogee/photos/ralstonh12683gph.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/gafiles/ File size: 5.6 Kb