Success in any business is more the result of energy, perseverance and natural aptitude than of connection, influence or social standing. The majority of the most prominent hotel men of this country are what may be termed self made-men. Among those who have achieved marked success in this field is the subject of this biography.
Mr. Sommers was born at Staunton, Virginia, June 22, 1854, and is the son of Henry William Sommers, who was born at Hanover in the same State. His mother was Miss Marie Laura D'Averill , a native of Philadelphia, and was born May 1, 1837.
About the time of the breaking out of the war the Sommers family removed to Philadelphia, and in that city Harry was brought up and educated. When about eighteen years old he visited Chicago, and his first experience in hotel life was as night clerk in the Everett House of that city, where he found the work was very much to his taste.
Mr. Sommers is by nature of a genial and sunny disposition and is peculiarly adapted for the business in which he is engaged. He has always had a cheery way of meeting strangers and making them feel at home while they are his guests, and has made numberless lasting friendships in this way.
His experience at the Everett House was the commencement of a career full of incident and marked by success throughout the years that have followed it. His advancement in the business was very rapid, and each passing year found him occupying a position of greater trust and responsibility than he had previously held.
He has been identified with many of the prominent hotels of the country, viz: Tremont Hotel, Chicago; Girard House, Philadelphia; Palmer House restaurant, Chicago; Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs, Arkansas; St. Charles, New Orleans; Grand Hotel, Leadville, Colorado; Virginia Hotel and Metropole, Chicago, and others.
In 1877-78 he was manager of the Hot Springs Hotel and was also proprietor of the “Daily Sentinel” during the year 1878. During the year 1892 he gave up the management of the Metropole in Chicago and assumed control, as proprietor, of the Kimball House in Davenport, and has been more than ordinarily successful in the management of the latter hotel. He has in every manner possible raised the standard of the house and by so doing has increased the patronage several fold in a remarkably short time. His experience in Chicago and in other cities enabled him to make that hotel a model place of entertainment, and under his management it has become more than ever famous as a hostelry.
He is the personal friend of more travelers, perhaps, than any other hotel man in the Northwest. It is a simple matter for him to call by name the great majority of the persons who stop at his hotel from time to time and his disposition naturally is to be affable with them all. Mr. Sommers speaks fluently several languages and converses with his French and German chefs as easily in their own tongue as in his own. He was married in March, 1879, to Miss Dora Sullivan, a native of West Bend, Wisconsin.
Personally Mr. Sommers is genial and courtly, combining with quiet dignity the pleasing sociability which seems to pervade the atmosphere of that portion of our country which is usually designated as the West.
He is a self-made man in the fullest sense of the term, and through his own unaided efforts has attained a conspicuous position in the calling in which he is employed.
BIOGRAPHIES