Robert L. Brock (December 27, 1924Obituary from Kansas Historical Society June 7, 1998) was an American businessman. He was born in

Pawnee Rock, Kansas Pawnee Rock is a city in Barton County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 193. History Pawnee Rock was founded in 1874. It was named from the historic landmark Pawnee Rock nearby. Pawnee Rock was inc ...

, and graduated from Sterling High School and Kansas University. He started "Inn Operations" with a friend and sold it to Holiday Inns, Inc., to manage "Topeka Inn Management". As chairman of TIM (later renamed Brock Hotel Corporation), the first and at the time largest

franchisee Franchising is based on a marketing concept which can be adopted by an organization as a strategy for business expansion. Where implemented, a franchisor licenses some or all of its know-how, procedures, intellectual property, use of its busine ...

Holiday Inn Holiday Inn is an American chain of hotels based in Atlanta, Georgia. and a brand of IHG Hotels & Resorts. The chain was founded in 1952 by Kemmons Wilson, who opened the first location in Memphis, Tennessee that year. The chain was a division ...

s, he founded

ShowBiz Pizza Place ShowBiz Pizza Place, often shortened to ShowBiz Pizza or ShowBiz, was an American family entertainment center and restaurant pizza chain founded in 1980 by Robert L. Brock and Creative Engineering. It emerged after a separation between Brock an ...

in 1980 in

Topeka, Kansas Topeka ( ; Kansa: ; iow, Dópikˀe, script=Latn or ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the seat of Shawnee County. It is along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, in northeast Kansas, in the Central U ...

after becoming a

Pizza Time Theatre Chuck E. Cheese (formerly known as Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre, Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza and simply Chuck E. Cheese's) is an American family entertainment center and pizza restaurant chain founded in 1977 by Atari's co-founder Nolan Bu ...

franchisee. He also started The Residence Inn line of hotels with Jack DeBoer. Marriott later bought the brand and renamed all locations "

Residence Inn by Marriott Residence Inn by Marriott is a brand of extended stay hotels. , there were 874 Residence Inn hotels in the United States, Canada and Mexico with 107,680 rooms, plus an additional 243 hotels with 30,417 rooms in the development pipeline. The brand ...

".Now and then: The history of Residence Inn
/ref> ShowBiz Pizza Place Inc. later superseded Pizza Time Theatre Inc. after SPP bought the PTT assets and intellectual property in 1984. All SPP stores were renamed Chuck E. Cheese's in 1992. In 1998 ShowBiz Pizza Place Inc. was renamed CEC Entertainment Inc., and continues to do business under this name. He died on June 7, 1998, in Dallas, Texas.

References

External links

CJ Online's T-Town News
(Dead) {{DEFAULTSORT:Brock, Robert L. 1998 deaths 1924 births People from Barton County, Kansas University of Kansas alumni American hoteliers Deaths from cancer in Kansas

See also

References

External links