Personalities: Jan. 3, 1964

Chicago’s Continental Illinois National Bank, the Midwest’s biggest bank (assets: $4 billion) was once known as “The Sleeping Giant of LaSalle Street” because it conservatively plowed its rich deposits into low yield securities. Today, advertising itself as “The Big Bank with the Little Bank Inside,” Continental is wide awake to the potential of retail banking, allots 60% of its funds for loans, and stresses “family banking.” Continental’s Benzedrine was administered by Chairman David M. Kennedy, 58, who came to the bank as a bond officer in 1946, after 16 years as debt manager and economist with the Federal Reserve, and became Continental’s chief executive in 1959. Utah-born Kennedy has strongly pushed Continental into family banking for greater profits but also because as a Mormon he believes that “the strength of our country is in the family and the home, and that’s where the emphasis should be.” He has equally strong convictions about Chicago’s future as an international trade center; Continental has opened a London office, is expanding into Argentina, Colombia and Japan.

CHILDREN were the inspiration for the largest U.S. motel chain, Holiday Inns of America (442 inns), which last week announced that it will add 17 new motels in Canada to the 202 others it already has in the works. Driving twelve years ago with his wife and four of his five children, Memphis Realtor Kemmons Wilson was shocked to discover that motels charged $2 a night for each child. He decided to open a motel in which parents could enjoy some luxury at moderate prices and have their children put up free. The idea caught on—not only with families but with traveling businessmen and eager franchisers; today Wilson, 50, flies 150,000 miles annually to open new inns or pick additional locations. Although innkeeping has made him a millionaire, he still lives in a modest Memphis ranch house, still entertains with outdoor barbecues. He greets favored visitors with special business cards bearing their names, and below: “World traveler, international lover and last of the big spenders.”