Huntington Hartford

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George Huntington Hartford II (born April 18, 1911) is an heir to the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company fortune. His grandfather George Huntington Hartford and his uncles John Hartford and George L. Hartford privately owned the A&P Supermarket, which at one point had 16,000 stores in the US. and was the largest retail empire in the world. When his uncles died they had no heirs so he inherited their fortune. The money also went to the John Hartford Foundation which had $597 million as of 2004. In the 1950s the A&P was the world's largest grocer and, next to General Motors, A&P sold more goods than any other company in the world.

Huntington was the original owner and developer of Paradise Island in the Bahamas, which was originally called Hog Island. He got the Gambling License for Paradise Island but was told by the Minister of Tourism Sir Stafford Sands that to get it he would have to give up control of the island. He built the Ocean Club on the island from the unassembled stones of a monastery that William Randolph Hearst had in a warehouse in Florida.

He published a magazine called Show from 1961 to 1964 and is well known for building the unique Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle. He thought of a idea to get oil from rock (mainly in Western Colorado) so he founded Oil Shale corporation with Herbert Linden and set up the Denver Research Institute at the University of Denver to research it as a alternate way to get oil. He made deals with Standard Oil and Atlantic Richfield for Oil Shale. He was largest stockholder of Oil Shale corporation. Oil Shale became Tosco which is owned by ConocoPhillips and is worth billions today.

In the 1960s, the International Herald Tribune wrote that he was one of the world's richest men.

Hartford currently lives in the Bahamas with his daughter Juliet Hartford.