Last month’s Midwest Lodging Investors Summit was a watershed event on several fronts. First a shameless plug: the Summit, which Lodging Hospitality sponsors in association with HVS Hotel Management and The School of Hospitality Business at Michigan State, was the best in its four-year history. The crowd was large and enthusiastic, the venue was impeccable and the speakers were top-notch, candid, informative and provocative. Beyond that, however, for the first time in several years, I observed true optimism among the crowd of 300-plus hotel owners, operators, lenders, brand executives and consultants.

Unlike what I’ve noticed at previous industry conferences since the economic meltdown in 2008, the optimism at MLIS was genuine. It wasn’t just wishful thinking but a sincere attitude among many attendees that the lodging industry has turned a corner and opportunities for acquisitions, repositionings and, hold your breath, even new hotel development are either here or right around the corner. On multiple occasions at MLIS, I overhead pairs or groups of attendees huddled together in deal discussions. I even saw some blueprints and schematics of potential projects.

Of course, one conference doesn’t make a turnaround, and our industry, while improving, still faces the formidable headwinds of a limp national economy and confidence-busting high levels of unemployment. The country has some serious ills and now that the Washington troupe of Kabuki theater players known as Congress is done with the debt-ceiling debate (for now, anyway), perhaps they and the President can tackle the hard work of getting the country back to work. Until that happens, the hotel business recovery will remain shallow and perhaps even stall.

As MLIS attendees seemed to agree, the sky is a little brighter and the air smells a little sweeter and with some luck and leadership in corporate America and in Washington, we may be on a straight line to recovery.

Now for some sad news from Miami, where two hotel industry pioneers died within days of each other late last month. Both Sherwood “Woody” Weiser and Fred Atlas cast large shadows on the South Florida hotel scene for decades, and they’ll be missed. Weiser, along with his business partner and boyhood chum from Cleveland Don Lefton, created The Continental Companies, which built and operated some 100 hotels from the 1970s through the ‘90s. Their crowning achievement was probably the ultra-hip Grand Bay Hotel in Miami’s Coconut Grove district. Weiser died at age 80 from cancer.

While Weiser was a dealmaker extraordinaire, Atlas was the consummate hotel man. During his decades-long run as the preeminent hotel GM in South Florida, Atlas presided over some of the region’s most iconic properties, including the original Diplomat, the Eden Roc, the Sheraton River House and the granddaddy of them all, the Fontainebleau. He even did a stint in New York City as GM of the Warwick Hotel. He died at age 86.