GEORGE HUNTINGTON HARTFORD Biography - Bussiness people and enterpreneurs

 
 

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GEORGE HUNTINGTON HARTFORD

George Huntington Hartford II                                                     
Born|April 18 1911 (1911-04-18) (age 96)                                           
United States                                                                     
                                                                                   
George Huntington Hartford II (born April 18, 1911) is an heir to the Great       
Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company fortune. His grandfather George Huntington       
Hartford and his uncles John Hartford and George L. Hartford privately owned the   
A&P Supermarket, which at one point had 16,000 stores in the US. and was the       
largest retail empire in the world. When his uncles died they had no heirs so he   
inherited their fortune. The money also went to the John A. Hartford Foundation,   
which had $597 million as of 2004. In the 1950s the A&P was the world's largest   
grocer and, next to General Motors, A&P sold more goods than any other company     
in the world.                                                                     
                                                                                   
Huntington was the original owner and developer of Paradise Island in the         
Bahamas, which was originally called Hog Island. He got the Gambling License for   
Paradise Island but was told by the Minister of Tourism Sir Stafford Sands that   
to get it he would have to give up control of the island. He built the Ocean       
Club on the island from the unassembled stones of a monastery that William         
Randolph Hearst had in a warehouse in Florida.                                     
                                                                                   
He published a magazine called Show from 1961 to 1972 and is well known for       
building the unique Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle. He thought of an   
idea to get oil from rock (mainly in Western Colorado) so he founded Oil Shale     
corporation with Herbert Linden and set up the Denver Research Institute at the   
University of Denver to research it as an alternate way to get oil. He made       
deals with Standard Oil and Atlantic Richfield for Oil Shale. He was largest       
stockholder of Oil Shale corporation. Oil Shale became Tosco which is owned by     
ConocoPhillips and is worth billions today.