Business View Magazine | June 2020

63 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JUNE 2020 HOSP I TAL I TY AMER I CA COO David Berger is now helping to build upon. Cargen began his career in the hotel business as a teenager. He reflects, “All I’ve done in my whole life is hotels. I started as a dishwasher on the New Jersey shore when I was 15 years old, and then I did a number of successive hotel jobs in the hotel industry, applied to Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, got accepted, graduated from there, and continued to pursue my career. In the early 1990s, from relationships I had forged over time as an employee for other hotel developers, I founded Hospitality America in my attic with a cell phone, a fax machine, and 25 credit cards in rotation. I put three mortgages on my house, built a company, dug out, and now I’m debt-free.” David Berger has nothing but praise for his mentor. He relates, “I was a young guy of 22 years old when I met Chris Cargen, a career hotelier from Cornell grad school who took a chance on me. I started out as a General Manager, left the company for a while to spread President & CEO, Christopher Cargen