- Blockbuster Entertainment Corporation
H. Wayne Huizenga was born in Evergreen Park, Illinois in 1939. At the age of 15 he moved to Florida with his family, in the area near Fort Lauderdale. He spent six months in the army after enlisting in 1959, and in 1960 he married Joyce VanderWagon. They divorced in 1966. Huizenga remarried in 1972 to Marti Goldsby.
Beginning with one garbage truck in 1968 Huizenga grew Waste Management, Inc until it eventually became a Fortune 500 company. In 1972 he took the company public after acquiring no less than 133 small garbage hauling companies. By 1983 Waste Management was the largest disposal company in the United States.
In 1986 H. Wayne Huizenga bought one-year-old Blockbuster from its founder, David Cook. In 1987 he had already opened several branch stores, and by 1994 Blockbuster was the leading chain of movie rentals in the country.
Huizenga repeated this scenario with auto dealerships. In 1996 he created AutoNation, which since that time has become the nation’s largest auto dealer and also a Fortune 500 company.
Huizenga has been recognized five times by Financial World magazine as the “CEO of the Year,” and was honored by Ernst & Young as the “2005 World Entrepreneur of the Year.”
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