Billionaire Holding was Western entrepreneur

Published 5:00 am Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Robert Earl Holding, a Western entrepreneur who made his first fortune in the 1950s running a 24-hour service station in an otherwise desolate stretch of Wyoming and became a billionaire whose assets included oil refineries and ski slopes, among them Sun Valley Resort in Idaho, died last Friday in Salt Lake City. He was 86.

The cause was continuing complications of a stroke he suffered in 2002, said Clint Ensign, a senior vice president at Sinclair Cos.

Sinclair oversees Holding’s wide-ranging interests, which include Sinclair Oil, Snowbasin Resort in Utah, 30,000 head of beef cattle, several hundred thousand acres of land and the highway havens known as Little America.

Holding was an acquisitive man whose blend of businesses shared a distinctly Western dependence on natural resources and land.

The success of Little America, the Wyoming service station that he and his wife, Carol, took over in 1952 when its cafe had 12 seats and its motel had 12 rooms, stemmed in part from the fact that there was so much territory to cross and so few places to rest and refuel for a new generation of motorists and truckers.

“Old U.S. Highway 30, which ran in front of it, was not much more than a trail,” Holding recalled in a 2000 interview with Ski magazine. “You could stay for five dollars per night, hamburgers were 35 cents, ice cream cones were a nickel, gasoline was 16 cents a gallon.”

With the Holdings in charge, pumping gas and making beds, Little America expanded greatly and eventually became a chain of “travel plazas.” Little America Wyoming received its own ZIP code, and its growth provided capital for Holding to explore other businesses.