Mar. 28--BEAUMONT, Texas--Zella Fontenot has wanted a new car, but she and her husband Wilson didn't know where the money would come from. 

Wednesday, she got 5,000 possible answers when her employer, John Q. Hammons Hotel Inc., operator of the Holiday Inn Atrium, named Fontenot, a room attendant in the housekeeping department, its associate of the year. 

To win the honor, which came with a check for $5,000 net, the company paid the taxes and an extra week of paid vacation, Fontenot competed against nominees from 56 other company-owned and operated hotels and resorts representing Hammons' 10,000 employees. 

"This is like a dream," Fontenot said, tears flooding her eyes and emotion filling her voice. "I've never won anything ever before." 

Actually, she was the December employee of the month for the hotel, which is located at Interstate 10 and Walden Road. 

That December honor led her to be the hotel's nominee for all of 2001. 

Leonard Clifton, the hotel's general manager, used the monthly contest win as a pretext to get Fontenot to invite her family to the hotel's monthly employee meeting. 

In the Quentin Lounge, which takes its name from the middle name of the company's founder, Fontenot and about 60 fellow employees gathered for a buffet luncheon, door prizes and pep rally led by Clifton. 

After a mock game that resembled a cross between Hollywood Squares and Trivial Pursuit that focused on the hotel and the publicly traded company, Fontenot was lured forward to meet the game's winner, Thomas Harwell, a regional vice president for Hammons. 

It was then Fontenot was presented an oversized check and a smaller, real one and told she was the company's associate of the year. 

While conventioneers and other hotel guests went about their business, Clifton and Harwell sang the praises of a woman who has cleaned more than 106,000 rooms in her 18 years at the 253-room hotel. That is the equivalent of cleaning each room in the hotel more than 400 times. 

"You worked very hard to keep our hotel competitive in tough times," Harwell told Fontenot. 

Harwell, the former manager of the Beaumont Hilton, confessed he couldn't do the job of preparing a clean room for total strangers as well as Fontenot does despite how important it is to the company. 

"It is the No. 1 so-called quality standard that guest looks for in a hotel room," Harwell said. 

"We really can't say enough about this individual who brings that extra added service to the hotel," Clifton said. 

"The number of times I get compliments on her is amazing," Clifton said. 

He said her outgoing personality is a benefit to both guests and fellow workers, adding that he had experienced both sides in his tenure at the hotel. 

"She took care of me and my family when we stayed here for four months like we were her family." 

And that, Harwell said, is the entire goal of any well run hotel. 

-----To see more of The Beaumont Enterprise, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.southeasttexaslive.com 

(c) 2002, The Beaumont Enterprise. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. SXC,