working in earnest to put plans together to restore and reopen the old hotel. Over the decade that followed Chalos' threat, redevelopment plans were advanced and then withdrawn, in what seemed to be a perpetual cycle of hopes raised and then dashed. Perhaps the most serious proposal was offered in the mid-1990s. At Chalos' urging, the Walden Group, led by Texas developer Don Daseke, who had developed an attractive hotel on the campus of Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, put together what was, by most accounts, a very attractive package that would have returned the Terre Haute House to its original use as a luxury hotel, making it a convention destination under the Radisson banner. Daseke managed to sign a purchase agreement with the Hulman family for the hotel in the summer of 1995, and Radisson signed on early the next year. All of his plans were contingent upon financing, however. Despite the fact local banks in Terre Haute were not and could not be convinced that it would work, they had reached the point where they had essentially decided to give a green light to the project, fully expecting that Daske would end up filing bankruptcy and, perhaps, the subsequent operator before the operation would stabilize. One board member of one of the biggest banks involved, however, insisted that underwriting requirements be imposed that Daseke would later call “onerous.” Daseke pulled out of the project in January 1997, citing the banks' intractability. The board member who changed the course of the Daseke project was Greg Gibson, whose family, at the time, owned the only full-service hotel in the downtown area, the Larry Bird's "Boston Connection" (which is now a Days Inn with no connection to Bird). Terre Haute First National Bank had decided, despite some reservations, to fund the Daseke project. When bank board member Gibson learned of the bank's intention, he successfully blocked it to protect his interest in the Boston Connection. Another group of potential investors, with Daseke on board, then turned to a proposal that would have converted the hotel into senior citizen housing. This, too, fell by the wayside. Later that year, in an interview with the Tribune-Star for a special series of articles on the Hulman family, Tony George, Tony Hulman's grandson and the face of today's Hulman family empire, damned the Terre Haute House with faint praise while basically reiterating the family's indifference