Wednesday, Oct. 29, 1997 | 10:09 a.m.
Phil Ruffin developed a taste for business when he bought a hamburger stand while still a teenager in Wichita, Kan., in the early 1950s.
Today, the man who came up with the idea to sell self-service gasoline at a convenience store has financial holdings that stretch from the Bahamas to the Las Vegas Strip.
"We put in our first self-service gas station in 1960 when all the others were still full-service," Ruffin recalled Tuesday from his executive offices at the Nassau Marriott Resort in the Bahamas.
He bought his first casino, the Nassau Crystal Palace, in 1993.
On Tuesday Ruffin bought his second, the Frontier hotel-casino in Las Vegas, for $165 million.
Between the hamburger stand and the Frontier, Ruffin has been involved in such diverse business ventures as oil, hotels, real estate, shopping centers, office complexes and manufacturing.
"I've done a lot of things," said Ruffin, 62. "There were a few setbacks, but we always kept good cash flows. That's the key to what we've done. If we made mistakes we could recover and overcome them."
One of his most memorable setbacks came in 1986 when he bought an oil trading company in Tulsa, Okla.
"It had been a huge success for 20 years," Ruffin said.
But soon after he bought it the price of oil plummeted from $37 a barrel to $10.
"I lost $11 million," he said. "We rode that out for a while, but we couldn't control our own destiny."
Eventually he got out of the oil trading business, but held onto the producing wells.
Ruffin was born in Amarillo, Texas, but grew up in Wichita.
Most of his businesses are in Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, though he does have hotels in Maryland and California.
When he was growing up Ruffin thought he was going to be a lawyer. But to help pay his way through college, at age 18 he and two other students at Washburn University in Topeka started a hamburger stand.
The stand made so much money that Ruffin decided to forget about going to law school.
Eventually he sold his interest in the hamburger stand and promptly lost the money in two oil deals.
He began his business career in earnest at age 24 in 1959 when he borrowed $500 and started a convenience store, which grew into a chain of 65 stores in four states.
In 1981 he bought Harper Trucks Inc. in Wichita, the largest manufacturer of two-wheel hand trucks in the world.
He began investing in hotels, shopping centers and other real estate.
Today, the privately owned Ruffin Cos. has 4 million square feet of commercial real estate, a dozen Marriott Hotels and a long list of other businesses, all of which employ about 5,300 people.
"We don't have a five-year plan," Ruffin said. "We just go where the good deals are. The more money you make, the more deals come to you."
Ruffin sold his Town & Country convenience store chain for $45 million in 1993 to Total Petroleum, but gave Total a 20-year lease on the real estate. He anticipates the land will be worth $40 million when the lease expires.
The same year he sold his convenience stores, which pioneered the concept of self-service gasoline, he bought the Crystal Palace Hotel in Nassau from Carnival Cruise Lines and converted it into the Nassau Marriott Resort and Crystal Palace Casino.
In 1996 he bought a 16-acre marine park in the Bahamas, not to mention a company that makes cargo equipment in Wichita.
The park, now called Crystal Cay, has gardens, an aquarium, shops and 20 villas, each with its own swimming pool.
Several years ago he bought an upscale mall -- the Kensington Galleria -- in Tulsa and converted exclusive shops into commercial offices.
"It went from 10 percent occupancy to 100 percent," Ruffin said.
There are about 1 million square feet in the Galleria, which also has a Marriott Hotel.
Ruffin paid $4 million for the Crystal Cay property, which cost about $15 million to build.
The hotel he bought from Carnival for $80 million was losing money at the time of the purchase, but now routinely has occupancy rates of 70 to 80 percent.
Though he doesn't specialize in taking failing properties and turning them into successful ventures, he has done just that on a number of occasions.
In June he bought the Wichita Greyhound Park for a reported $10 million.
The dog track cost $14 million to build in 1989. Last year it lost $760,000.
Ruffin's latest venture, the Frontier, may be one of his most daring moves.
He said he wanted to get on the Strip and his purchase of the Frontier has allowed him to do that.
By agreeing to unionize, he will begin his new business without the conflict that plagued the former owner, Margaret Elardi and her two sons, Tom and John Elardi, for six years.
"We will do something unusual there," he said, declining to reveal his plans.
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