Tom Love, who became a billionaire by founding American truck-stop chain Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores, which has 600 locations in 42 states, has died. He was 85.
(Bloomberg) — Tom Love, who became a billionaire by founding American truck-stop chain Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores, which has 600 locations in 42 states, has died. He was 85.
He died on Tuesday in his hometown of Oklahoma City after an extended illness, the company announced.
With Judy, his wife of 62 years, Love founded his business in 1964 and grew it into one of the largest truck-stop chains in the US, with about $20 billion in annual revenue. As sole owners of the business, each had an estimated net worth of $4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Love’s sun-yellow signs featuring cartoonish hearts are a fixture of highways throughout the US, offering a spot to refuel, get food and even repair tires. The company originated with a single gas station, which Love grew to a chain of 40 before the oil embargoes of the 1970s forced him to seek ways to diversify his revenue stream.
That led to the idea for attaching small convenience stores to the fuel stations, and the creation of Love’s.
“We decided we had to be a more-than-one-commodity market,” Love told his hometown newspaper, the Daily Oklahoman, in 2002. “Later, we knew we’d done the right thing. The bottom line showed it.”
Love’s branched into restaurants in the 1990s with the opening of a Taco Bell Express at an Oklahoma City location. It later added tire-repair shops and hotels to the growing list of amenities offered at some of its pit stops.
Love’s is now the largest business of its kind still fully in family hands. The Haslam and Call families, founders of the Pilot Flying J truck stop chain, agreed in 2017 to sell 80% of the business to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. over a period of six years.
Marine Corps
Thomas Eugene Love was born on Oct. 10, 1937, in Oklahoma City, one of six children of F.C. Love, a lawyer and oil executive, and his wife, Margaret. He attended St. Gregory’s Preparatory School in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and St. John’s University in Minnesota, before enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1954, according to a company biography.
He and Judy got married after his return, choosing the day after Christmas to save on the cost of flowers, according to Judy’s profile on the website of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
The couple went into business together a few years later, leasing an abandoned filling station in Watonga, Oklahoma, with $5,000 borrowed from Judy’s parents. That station was the springboard for what became Love’s Travel Stops. Judy worked as a secretary for the company for more than a decade before returning to college to study interior design.
“It wouldn’t have happened without her,” Love told FleetOwner, a publication for commercial truck fleet executives, in 2018. “When we got married, I couldn’t even balance my own checkbook. She did all the books, all the payrolls, covered all the overdrafts. And it wasn’t just her confidence and trust in what I was doing or what we were doing. She really played a central role for a long time.”
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The couple loomed large in Oklahoma City through the philanthropy of the Tom and Judy Love Foundation and through local sponsorships, including of the Oklahoma City Thunder of the National Basketball Association. Judy Love had a fleeting moment of viral fame in 2016 when LeBron James posted a video of her yelling at him to “just suck it up” on Instagram.
In addition to Judy, survivors include four children. Sons Greg and Frank Love serve as co-chief executive officers of Love’s; daughter Jenny is chief culture officer.
–With assistance from Jack Witzig.
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