Holiday Inn employees had a week to prepare for Obama’s stay in Lawrence

Will Kimble said he knew President Barack Obama would be staying at Lawrence’s Holiday Inn, 200 McDonald Drive, about a week before the presidential motorcade arrived at the hotel’s doors Wednesday evening, but he wasn’t allowed to tell anybody.

Kimble, who has worked for the past two years as the hotel’s banquet supervisor, said the secret wasn’t difficult to keep, but the amount of work hotel staff put in during Obama’s stay was another matter.

“There was Secret Service and I had to go through a metal detector to make sure there weren’t any bombs and stuff,” he said. “Everyone just kept moving around quick. We had to keep everything looking nice. It was a lot more work than usual.”

The presidential visit culminated for Kimble on Thursday morning, he said, when he caught a 30-second glimpse of Obama heading out the hotel’s doors.

“He didn’t eat at the banquet,” Kimble said. “But Secret Service did.”

Heather Shull, the hotel’s assistant director of sales, said the hotel didn’t have much time to prepare for Obama’s visit and the logistics were mostly decided by Obama’s security detail.

“They have plans of how they like things to go,” she said. “And they tell the hotel what they’d like to do and we try to make it happen. It was a lot of work, but we were happy to do it.”

As crews hauled off concrete blocks that had been placed around the hotel grounds, Shull said many security details were set up by Obama’s staff, rather than left up to the hotel.

Shull wouldn’t speak further on Obama’s visit in relation to the Holiday Inn, but added for herself, “personally, it was a very cool experience.”

More reports from President Obama’s visit to Lawrence