Al Stovall visited Disneyland in 1959.
He co-owned some Best Westerns in Arizona and was Bill O’Connell’s boss there.
“He came back and said, ‘I love Disneyland,’” O’Connell recalls. Hotel rooms rented briskly at $16 per night, and Stovall decided to open one near the new attraction in Orange County.
Stovall was involved in politics—he backed Arizona Sen. Stuart Symington, a competitor to John F. Kennedy for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination; was appointed by JFK to a business exporting group; then started building hotels near Disney.
Pop culture reflected the space race between the U.S. and the Soviets, and O’Connell came to OC to run Al’s new Space Age Lodge on West Katella at age 21 in 1964; the property is now Best Western Plus Pavilions.
“We turned away 120 to 150 cars” daily, he remembers. “Families in stations wagons.”
But “what [Stovall] didn’t realize is he’d come during the summer.” Off-peak, “we’d rent six or seven rooms a night.” Stovall “didn’t think [downturns] would be that drastic.”
Disneyland Hotel opened a few months after the park in 1955, designed by midcentury modernist William Pereira for owner Jack Wrather as a place for park guests traveling in their Woodies.
“It was always full.” O’Connell said.
“I went and talked to the bellman” and got to know employees, he said. He made friends with hotel General Manager Frank Bret.
As a result, while Wrather’s property got first dibs on Disney patrons, Stovall’s got the overflow.
“That saved us,” O’Connell said.
In those early days before deals could pencil out for the Hiltons and Marriotts of the world, lodging around Disney was “40-, 50-, 60-unit hotels,” he said. “Families owned them, and you did all the work.”
Wrather, who at one time also owned the rights to “The Lone Ranger” and “Lassie,” never sold to Disney. After Wrather and his widow died, Disney and a Hong Kong joint venture partner paid $152 million in 1988 for the hotel, surrounding land and stakes in Long Beach’s Spruce Goose and Queen Mary attractions.
Stovall built two more hotels, Cosmic Age and Galaxy, before dying in 1974 and leaving them to his four kids, and 5% of one hotel to O’Connell, who continued to run the company and has since increased his stake. It developed five more hotels through the 1980s, several of them sold as Disneyland Resort expanded; four remain in the fold.
— Paul Hughes
