Roger A. Saunders

“We’re no smarter than Hilton, but we try harder,” Mr. Saunders said in 1984 of the Statler, which his family had renamed Park Plaza and Towers. “We’re Bostonians. We love this city, have a lot of fun and make money.”

Mr. Saunders, a famous and lifelong hotelier who started operating an elevator as a boy and performed room inspections at the Lenox well into his 80s, died at his home in Boston on Friday morning. He was 93 and his health was declining.

“He loved life,” said his son Todd. “He lived each day with the wisdom of an elderly statesman and the curiosity of a child. He was so curious about new things and new adventures.”

The Lenox Hotel in Back Bay is still part of the Saunders Hotel Group, which Mr. Saunders helped found in the early 1960’s.

At various points in the past eight decades, he and other family members have owned and operated hotels and commercial properties in Boston, its suburbs and even Florida, although the Park Plaza and Copley Square hotels have since been sold.

Mr. Saunders was more interested in making sure his hotels were doing well than the praise he received, and developed amicable relationships with hotel guests and staff alike.

“He’s one of the nice guys in the world,” Bets Whitman told the Globe in 1984, when she was executive director of the Women’s Educational & Industrial Union, a not-for-profit charity.

“The Saunders family comes from a strong community background,” she said. “They really gambled their money on Boston. Roger is treated with great respect. When he speaks, people listen.”

Part of the third generation of his family to own and manage real estate in Boston, Mr. Saunders was a grandson of Jacob Saunders, a Lithuanian immigrant who started a residential real estate business.

Jacob’s son and Roger’s father, Irving M. Saunders, expanded the family holdings by purchasing and managing commercial properties. He also started the Saunders hotel empire during the Great Depression when he bought a small hotel in Boston’s Theater District, although Irving’s purchase of the Copley Square Hotel in 1949 is considered the family’s more significant entry into the hospitality industry.

Roger Saunders and his younger brother Donald Saunders, along with their children, directed and managed the family’s real estate and hotel holdings – a multi-generational enterprise that spanned more than a century.

Roger Saunders focused on the family’s hotels and became an industry leader locally, regionally and nationally, a job that was all-encompassing.

“He always said the one thing about running a hotel that was different is that on the day you open it you throw away the front door key because you’re always open,” said his son Gary, who is now chairman of Saunders Hotel Group. “There is no other business like this.”

Mr. Saunders is a former President and Chairman of the American Hotel and Motel Association (now the American Hotel and Lodging Association). He was also President of the Massachusetts Lodging Association and its predecessor organizations. In 2005, he was an inaugural inductee of the Massachusetts Association Hall of Fame.

In addition, Mr. Saunders endowed a school in hotel and restaurant management and scholarships to the now-defunct Newbury College in Brookline.

But for all his accomplishments, “Mr. Saunders never gave himself a pat on the back,” said Todd, who lives in Gloucester. “He had quite a determination and a real will to succeed. But he did it for the right reasons.”

Mr. Saunders was quick to point out that hundreds of people played a role in each of his successful ventures – hotel employees, guests, city employees who kept businesses clean, and government officials with whom he negotiated important matters like taxes.

When the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau presented him with the Outstanding Corporate Citizen Award in 1994, Mr. Saunders told the Globe that “in almost every success, victory truly has a thousand children.”

Roger Alfred Saunders was born in Boston on February 14, 1929, grew up in Brookline, attended Runkle School as a boy, and graduated from Brookline High School.

His mother, Shirley Brown Saunders, was an artist and as a youngster, Mr Saunders began working for his father after Irving bought them old hotel on Tremont Street near Boston’s theaters.

“When I was 10 or 12, I would drive the elevator and count the dirty laundry coming down the stairs,” Mr. Saunders told the Globe in 1984.

“I was a bellhop. I did everything you can do in a hotel,” he said. “Today, when I look at what a person is doing in one of my hotels, I see their problems. I instinctively know when they are doing a good job and I feel for them.”

He graduated from the University of Miami and married Nina Alexander in 1953. The couple had four sons, one of whom, Jeffrey, died in 2020.

A Polish immigrant, Nina was educated in Milan and New York City and was President of Interior Design Associates before dying of lung cancer in 1991 at the age of 57, although she was not a smoker. Much of their work has focused on renovations and improvements to the Saunders family’s hotels.

Mr. Saunders served on the advisory boards of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he donated a gallery.

His marriage to Norma Siskind Stilson ended in divorce in 1996.

In the mid-1990s, a business dispute between Mr. Saunders and his brother Donald, who lives in Boston and Florida, received considerable media coverage when they divided the family estate.

“They’ve patched up a lot of those differences over the last few years,” Gary said, “and lately they’ve reconciled and walked out together.”

Gary, who lives in Brookline, said his father “was so important to family, and not just blood family, corporate family.”

“Dad had an incredible, very natural ability to connect with people, whether they were people who worked at the hotel, or friends or family,” said Tedd Saunders, who lives in Boston and is Todd’s twin.

A service is announced for Mr. Saunders, who in addition to his three sons is survived by eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

“Roger Saunders is known around town as the dean of Boston hoteliers who wrote ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ who saved the Statler Hilton from sinking during Boston’s darkest days of recession in the mid-’70s,” wrote Steve Bailey, then Globe’s economics columnist, in 1995.

“Dad was so welcoming and so genuine in his ability to make people feel comfortable,” Tedd said. “I think that was one of the great hallmarks of his life.”

Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected]

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/02/03/metro/roger-saunders-storied-boston-hotelier-whose-empire-included-lenox-dies-93/