Wayne huizenga family
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H. Wayne Huizenga founded three highly profitable U.S. businesses: Waste Management, Blockbuster Video and AutoNation. Huizenga was also the first entrepreneur to launch three Fortune 500 businesses in his lifetime. His work with AutoNation and his vision for the company earned him an Automotive Hall of Fame induction in 2006.
Wayne Huizenga was born in Chicago in 1937, and moved with his family to Florida as a teenager. He worked most of his childhood, including jobs as a truck driver and gas station attendant. For a short-time he attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He dropped out to join the Army reserves before returning to Florida, where he found a job managing a small garbage hauling business. At age 25, he bought a single used Garbage Truck and started his own business and began buying up rival companies around him. He called his new business “Southern Sanitation Services.” Huizenga soon had 40 trucks and most of the business in Broward County, Florida. Then, persuaded by his cousin’s husband Dean Bruntrock and associate Larry Beck, he j
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Wayne H. Huizenga [1937]
Who has not heard of Blockbuster, Autonation and Waste Management? They are three major U.S. corporations, part of the Fortune 500, and all listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Each one of these corporations has also been built from scratch by the now billionaire Wayne Huizenga.
Wayne Huizenga is an American-born Dutchman with a Frisian name. But then the Frisians are also Dutch. His parents, Gerrit Harry and Jean Huizenga were both products of the Chicago Dutch community. Wayne was born in Evergreen Park, a Chicago suburb, on December 29, 1937. He has one sister, Jean, who is five years younger than Wayne. Wayne grew up in Evergreen Park until he was about 15, when the Huizenga family moved to Florida, and settled in the Fort Lauderdale area.
Wayne's parents were divorced in 1954, when Wayne was 17 and his sister was 12 years old, following an apparent series of marital discords over a period of time. Clearly such traumatic events leave their mark on younger minds, and probably explain why Wayne's developmental years were a bit rocky. Int
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Huizenga, H. Wayne
(1939-)
Huizenga Holdings
Overview
Harry Wayne Huizenga has a reputation in business like that of Midas, the king in Greek mythology who could turn objects into gold. In Huizenga's case, he was able to literally turn trash into money, and has built a number of successful businesses, starting with Waste Management in the 1970s. He followed this up with a struggling video chain called Blockbuster, which he turned into a conglomerate so huge that it is larger than the 99 smaller video chains put together. After selling Blockbuster to entertainment giant Viacom, Huizenga entered the rapidly growing automobile superstore market. Meanwhile he built an empire of sports franchises, including baseball's Florida Marlins; hockey's Florida Panthers; and football's Miami Dolphins, making him the only individual to own three professional sports teams.
Personal Life
Harry Wayne Huizenga was born at the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, a suburb of Chicago, on December 29, 1939, the first child of Gerrit Harry Huizenga, a cabinetmaker, and Jean (Riddering
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