Like a lot of people, Lyle L. "Gus" Guslander got his start in the hotel business as a bellman. But he succeeded like few others, turning a little hotel on Kaua'i into a multimillion-dollar empire.
Guslander hailed from Minneapolis. He studied at Cornell University's hotel school. His stint as a bellman was at a hotel in Washington, D.C. Later, he was the assistant manager at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Guslander came to Hawai'i in 1947, working first at the Niumalu Hotel and then as manager of the Moana Hotel.
In 1953, he borrowed $25,000 so he could invest in his dream.
At the time, Guslander had often said — stabbing at the air with a cigar for punctuation — that the future of Hawai'i tourism included millions of visitors to the Neighbor Islands.
So Guslander bought a 24-room hotel on Kaua'i — the Coco Palms Hotel.
When he opened Coco Palms, he had only two guests.
But by 1969, Guslander had sold an empire — the biggest resort complex and hotel chain on the Neighbor Islands. His Island Holidays chain of hotels encompassed four islands — Kaua'i, O'ahu, Maui and the Big Island — and the sale to Amfac Inc. brought him $20 million.
Guslander briefly retired from resort operations in 1978, buying back the Holiday Isle Hotel in Waikiki that he had sold to Amfac in 1969.
When he died in Honolulu in 1984, after complications from sextuple coronary bypass surgery, friends remembered Guslander for his robust sense of humor, his boundless enthusiasm and his capacity to dream. He was 69.
