SPRINGFIELD, Mo. - John Q. Hammons’ first business went bust, saddling him with debt. Yet the son of a poor Missouri dairy farmer paid it off within two years and turned his sights to hotels, the cornerstone of what would become a national real-estate empire.
Along the way, he opened his wallet to his home state, donating millions to hospitals, public television and colleges in Springfield. It’s a town where his name graces so many buildings and streets - from Missouri State University’s basketball arena, for which he pledged $30 million alone, to the city’s tallest building - that comedian Bob Hope once suggested it should rename itself “Hammonsville.”
Among the businessman’s secrets: He avoided big-city locations in favor of properties in college towns and state capitals.
“He would say, ‘The kids will always go to school, and you can’t fire the damn politicians,’” former company executive Scott Tarwater once said.
Hammons, who died Sunday at age 94 in a Springfield nursing home, built more than 200 hotels nationwide. He also developed an expansive real-estate portfolio of golf courses, restaurants, convention centers, a casino and riverboat gambling. And he actively led the company well into his 80s.
After Hammons’ first business - a company that sold mortarless bricks - went bust in the late 1940s, he recovered to build subdivisions in southwest Missouri over the next decade. He then purchased 10 Holiday Inn franchises with a partner in 1958 from the company’s founder.
Hammons eventually became a regular on Forbes magazine’s list of the wealthiest Americans, and his estimated personal wealth several years ago was $1 billion. He took his company public in 1994 before returning it to private ownership a decade later.
Hammons’ imprint in Arkansas, especially in the northwestern part of the state, is difficult to overestimate, according to a former associate and developer Bill Schwyhart.
In the early 2000s, Schwyhart and a few others wanted to develop a four-story, $16 million hotel in the Pinnacle Hills area of Rogers. When Hammons got involved, the project grew to a nine-story, $50 million project that would help jump start the development in the area.
In the mid 1990s, Hammons saw potential forgrowth in west Little Rock and brought the Embassy Suites to Financial Centre Parkway. Since then, growth west along Chenal Parkway has boomed.
Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, formerly the mayor of Rogers, called Hammons a “visionary” and a “genius.”
“I literally watched him walk out into a vacant field and put a stick in the ground where he believed his lobby would be,” Womack said. “Anyone in this [business] arena would tell you that the location of that convention center and that hotel was a game changer for our city.”
The hotel magnate was born James Quentin Hammons in 1919 in rural Fairview, about 60 miles southwest of Springfield, to a dairy farmer who lost the 200-acre family farm during the Depression. As a teen, he trapped rabbits and sold their pelts for a nickel apiece.
A graduate of Southwest Missouri State Teachers College, which is now Missouri State University, Hammons spent two years teaching science and history and coaching junior high basketball before going to work on the construction of the Alaska Highway.
He married the former Juanita Baxter, a Springfield elementary school teacher and also a Southwest Missouri graduate, in September 1949. The couple had no children.
Hammons’ legacy is on fulldisplay in Springfield. His office in the John Q. Hammons Building was across from the federal courthouse that his company built and the 22-story Hammons Tower, the city’s tallest building. Nearby are a 270-room hotel and convention center he developed, as well as the $32 million Hammons Field, which he built tolure the St. Louis Cardinals’ Double-A minor league team to town. All sit on John Q. Hammons Parkway.
Information for this article was contributed by Alan Scher Zagier and Erin Gartner of The Associated Press; and by Spencer Willems of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 05/28/2013