Jerry Gold: Sound Engineer, Hotel Key Collector

Key Travel Advisors is named in honor of Marc’s grandfather: Jerry Gold.

Jerry was a sound engineer for NBC News. For work he travelled the world, bearing witness to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, political conventions and inaugurations, and countless Thanksgiving Day parades.

Jerry stayed at some of the finest hotels in the world. This was when in an age when physical hotel keys came attached to key fobs. When guests left their rooms, the keys were meant to be dropped off at the front desk. But when Jerry checked out he always took the key with him.

The keys – around 700 in total – ended up on hooks in Jerry’s garage. When Marc was young, he loved going through the collection, locating the hotels and their cities on a globe, and imagining the faraway places his grandpa traveled to: Los Angeles, Louisville, Tulsa, Dallas, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Rome, Moscow, Frankfurt, Hanoi, Tokyo, Sydney, and so on.

The keys you see on this web site are part of Jerry’s collection, from hotels he stayed at 50+ years ago. While many of these hotels are no longer around, some of them are still operating at the highest levels of hospitality. We get a special kick out of booking clients where Jerry stayed, and have found that both clients and managers at these hotels delight in this story.